Mike Kugler is the gentleman that purchased Vacation.Rentals for $500,300. Currently the highest reported new gtld sale. Yes Gay.app has been touted as being sold for $1million. No confirmation by any source that industry participants rely on.
A website by the name of AMAfeed.com did a Reddit style ask me anything with Mike.
Some of the questions were about the website, others about vacation rental properties, some were about domain names.
The one below was the most interesting answer in my opinion. A commenter asked the question, What do you think is the future of dot-com era? Is it coming to an end?
Mike’s reply is below Mike KuglerHi TAE123,
Good morning and thank you for the great question.
I honestly and truly do not know what the “powers” will ultimately decide when it comes to the future of the internet. One thing I can assure you of though is that dot-com will never go away as long as there is an internet. It is too well established and has firmly entrenched itself into the way we live.
Having said that, I am willing to wager the days of obscene dot-com sales are coming to an end now that the gTLDs are available and gaining ground even moreso. People are no longer forced to dot-com everything and can start to break their addiction to dot-com’ing everything.
One of the ways this can be accelerated is for end users to start utilizing sites that are gTLD related, forcing the search engines to give relevance (even if the search engines don’t want to) to the new domains. In my case it is Vacation Rentals. So instead of a person just AirBNB’ing it, they could look at our site (And save money in the process.)
Right now, it is a wild stretch to even write something like that, but in a years time – if we are sitting on 10,000 listings – not so much. My job between now and then is to get as many listings as possible to accelerate this possibility for both sides and give the community a new way of searching the internet.
Thank you again for the question, Mike
You can read the full AMA here