Thread: $200K Domain Suffixes

Wow, this could be interesting!

Apparently just to the two of us...

haha!

I personally hate to see the domain name space junked up even more, but from a business perspective this looks like a once in a lifetime opportunity.

One opportunity is registering .awesome (or whatever you think would be in high demand) and then selling domains under .awesome (like JohnIs.awesome).

Another big opportunity that ICANN may or may not block is typos. Imagine if you controlled *.con or *.vom and could redirect all mistyped .com queries to a page full of ads. It's already being done with .cm (the country extension for Cameroon) and they must be making a killing!

Personally, I think that people who do things like this are junking up the internet and I don't' like it. However, you can't argue with the business case for it.

I totally agree with your argument about web-clutter. I read about a term for unwanted or abandoned stuff online -- it's called "dotsam and netsam." Clever, eh?

the more junk, the more valuable .coms will be.

Seeing these new extensions makes me all that more certain that buying quality .coms is the way to go.

Originally Posted by Jonleehacker

the more junk, the more valuable .coms will be...

Why is that a reasonable assumption? .Com is the standard, only because it was first. There is no reason some other suffix can't zoom past .com with the right marketing and timing.

Wasn't there talk of a mandatory .xxx for porn a while back? What ever happened to that?

Originally Posted by PEERless

Why is that a reasonable assumption? .Com is the standard, only because it was first.

Branding is about owning the real estate inside people's heads. Being first is often a very strong determining factor. McDonald's owned a lion's share of "fast food" because they were first.

.com domains own the brand "website" inside the vast majority of people's heads. The more of these crappy .blah domains there are, the more and more people get confused and retreat back to .com.

.net and .org are much less prominent these days than they were 3 or 4 years ago precisely because of the dilution of the market in extensions. The more dilution, the more flight to safety or stability, which will be .coms.

Originally Posted by PEERless

There is no reason some other suffix can't zoom past .com with the right marketing and timing.

Of course that's true, but so is saying that another search engine could take over Google's market share. Once a brand becomes synonymous to it's market or service (Google = search), it takes a massive effort to displace it.