It was three years ago to the date that marked the epic debate between the “Domain King” Rick Schwartz and arguably the most successful domainer in history , Frank Schilling on the New gTLD’s.
The debate went on for almost 80 Minutes at a session held at the old TRAFFIC conference held back in October 2013 on basically “will the new gTLD’s be a game changer”.
So the question now becomes in retrospect was one side the clear winner or loser or is it too early to call?
As of today .Com has about 128 million registrations
All new gTLD’s have under 25 million domain registrations
Rick Schwartz opened the debate with this:
“.Com is the biggest franchise in the history of mankind.”
“Advertising for .com domain names in the billions of dollars a day, in every corner of the world.”
.Com will do more registrations than all the other new gTLD all together.”
.Com isn’t going anywhere the prices are only going to skyrocket”
Rick went on to say there is infinite inventory on existing strings .
Frank repeated his remark that .Com will be like AM radio in years to come that we first reported about in September 2013 and argued that Mr. Schwartz prediction didn’t see the future of domains.
Frank said the new G’s will allow you though his registry/registrar Uniregistry to buy a new gTLD active your email, put up a website and get online instantly.
Monte Cahn, Jeff Sass from .Club and Tim Johnson, CEO Of .Kiwi joined Frank Schilling on team Schilling.
Monte mentioned all the .Brand extensions to come, the 1 and 1 commercials that were running at the time to market the new G’s.
Monte went on to say “We are not even in the first inning and we are not going to be stuck on .com since there are a 1,000 new gTLD’s coming.”
This is the expansion of the internet not for those people in this room, it’s for the people who are not online yet
Lonnie Borck joined Rick Schwartz on team Schwartz, who bought and sold e.co at a profit buying it at $81K+ “never having heard of the extension before”.
Lonnie went on to say “I think there is going to be a lot of blood-letting”, I sure would not go out (as a registry) and go for 30 of them” There is so much inventory, it’s over development.
Tim Johnson from .Kiwi pointed out that in New Zealand .com is not trusted in his country but .nz the ccTLD (country code) is.
Tim said 600K .NZ domains are registered, and went on to project 120,000 .kiwi domain names would be registered (20% of .nz domains) in the first year
Mr. Schilling said the price point of .kiwi at $35 was too high and would have to be around $8 to be competitive and would have trouble getting to 60K registrations at $8.
As of publication there are only 10,554 registered .kiwi domain names
Monte went on to defend .irish pointing out there are 110 million Irish people in the world.
However as of today there are only 2,140 .Irish domains or about several hundreds of a faction of all Irish people.
Mr. Schilling went on to argue against Geo or community new gTLD popularity.
Anyway it is a epic throw-down and must see .TV for those in the domain name space.
You can watch the 1st part of the debate here and the 2nd part of the debate here and make your call who was right 3 years ago.
