Michael Gilmour of Parklogic.com, just published a post on his DomainNameLogic.com blog, saying that New gTLD’s are Pathetic even compared to a ccTLD, in this case Net.Au.
I understand the point Michael is making which is that new gTLD’s are a bad investment from a domain investor point of view and that they would be better off registering .Net.Au domains
“”This post is purely for investors, but mostly for newer investors who quite frankly don’t know what they’re doing.””
“Seasoned investors know better. ”
“They have seen .info and .biz get abused by spammers, .travel and .xxx fall in a heap, .mobi become obsolete, .tel fail altogether, .asia lie desolate and even the promising (privately-owned) .co.nl fail to get off the ground.
Don’t be fooled, ICANN’s latest ‘release’ of more than 1,900 new gTLDs is nothing more than a money-grab, and a very good one at that.
After all, if the business case for these ‘tulips’ was so strong, ICANN itself would be retaining the rights to administer them, not selling them off as fast as it can. (See ‘Myth #3′ in ‘Three myths debunked’ for more).
Anyway, I thought it’d be fun to knock up a little bar-chart* to show just how pathetic these new gTLDs are, and by contrast, why “.net.au” is a much sounder investment.
The chart speaks for itself, but the main thing to remember is that more than 98% of all new gTLDs are have been registered speculatively or by ‘investors’.
By contrast, most “.net.au” registrants are in fact ‘end users’.
Most savvy investors agree that the health of a domain name extension depends greatly on the number of ‘end users’ actually using it. This is because actual use in the real world equals ‘familiarity’ and thus engenders trust, which results in greater click-through rates and hence higher search engine rankings.
Therefore the “.net.au” extension is more than a decade ahead of each and every one of these new gTLDs.
Michael goes on to compare .travel to net.au:
“.Travel” has fewer domains registered than “.net.au”, believe it or not.
While much of this may have to do with pricing (“.travel” domains are expensive compared to other extensions), it does highlight the difficulty that each and every one of these new gTLDs will face.
They are plankton in a pond, compared to “.com”.
In Australia, with a popualtion of just over 23 million, “.net.au” by contrast has enjoyed great success with nearly 300,000 domains registered -more than the Top 8 new gTLDs (to date) combined! Moreover, “.net.au” has strict Australian presence requirements, which none of these new gTLDs are subject to.
This, more than anything, should highlight the value of “.net.au” from an investment standpoint.””
Of course in my opinion Michael is too concentrated on numbers of registrations which doesn’t matter unless you own the registrar.
What domain investors care about is whether they will be able to sell the domains they register for more than they pay for them.
Using dnpric.es which tracks the historic sales of domain names there have only been 6 .net.au domain names in the history of time that has sold for more than $10,000 and only 10 more that sold for over 5,000 and less than $10K and 13 more sales between $2K- $4,999.
So out of the 350,000 .net.au registrations less than 30 have sold for more than $2,000 and the top price ever paid was $35K
.info on the other hand which Michael bashes along with the new gTLD’s have had 2 six figure sales, 9 domains selling for between $35,000- $99,999, 30 domains selling for $20K – $35K, well you get the idea.
.Info say what you will have a lot higher ceiling that .net.au just like the new gTLD’s do and a lot more meaningful sales.
We will check back in a year Michael, but I predict we will see resale numbers of new gTLD that will great exceed in just the 1st year what .net.au sold for in all the previous years.
If your going to invest money in a domain why invest in one that has such a limited upside?
