closed End of .US Speculative Regs?

[DryHeat]

Wondering if we've reached a point where further regs in .US (and even more so in .INFO & .BIZ) from a purely speculative standpoint are more likely to be a mistake? There always are and will be exceptions but in general can it be said with confidence that all/vast majority of prime 1-2 keyword(s) names (that would have a better than 50% chance of selling at 10 X or more of the reg price) are gone by the time the reg #s in any tld hit beyond say 200-300K mark? If so, would it be wise to exercise great caution in engaging in speculative regging in these tlds from now on? Obviously, it'd be an all together different scenario if one is planning to develop or has other specific ideas in mind. I think an informed discussion on this important subject may save many here much time & $$. Care to comment?


P.S. Mod. may move this thread to another section if deemed appropriate.

 

[Duke]

I think you're right Heat. Though there must be a few undiscovered gems still out there nearly all of what's left will require development to be of much value. .US is closing in on half a million regs, so the cupboard is getting pretty bare. Though I still keep an eye out for names, I haven't found any to reg in awhile and am changing my focus to developing some of the names I have. I expect that name acquisition for me from this point on will come much more through drop services and the aftermarket than new registrations.

 

[buddy]

Like Duke said, there are still some good names left, but they are decreasing every day. It's just a matter of finding them. I picked up a name the other week that had more than 250,000 searches on Overture last month. Sorry I can't disclose what is was, since I'm chasing another extension for it

 

[mastmnds]

lol I think .us industry is going to be a big hit in the years to come.

 

[Frontline]

There are still some pretty good .us domains left, but yes they seem to be getting less every day as you said. I registered 25 this week mostly in the common slang and adult oriented field that their .com and .net's have very high rankings in alexa. Basically I figure I can afford to waste a a couple hundred on prospects that if .us turns out to be a hit will be goldmine, but I would be kicking myself if I didn't reg them now and in the future the .us market blew up.

 

[TopNames.com]

I have almost 200 .us domains that I bought back at the launch...Sold a few...so far so good

 

[bidawinner]

Point Of Saturation...

http://dnforum.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=10321&highlight=saturation+point

Doberry,

I have meant for sometime to bring this up..now seems appropriate.

Lets say 5% of all .coms are developed out of 20 million registered.

so 1 million sites are actually developed.

We know that there are probably ..what..maybe 100,000 .coms that are held by speculators with ranging from extremely valuable to medium valuable... $500 and up .

Yes, we understand many more are held by speculators..I'm simply discarding the junk ..

So out of 21 million .coms ..we realize that "really" only 1.1 million or so have any monetary value at all.


At 1.1 domains we have reached a saturation point .. everything else is "junk" for lack of a better word.


Can we then take those numbers and translate that potential for value over to any extension?

.Info is nearing it's point of "value" saturation.. for the most part all the "good" names are gone...Info is near that point..?

http://www.whoisreport.com/domain-counts/


The reason we will never see any of the other extensions reach the level of registrations of .com has less to do with whether or not the new extensions are deemed "valuable" by speculators but more to the point that by history we now know where that saturation for value is..1.1 million ..give or take a bit.

A) .com was the only game in town ten years ago..and "we" the market had not yet discovered what makes a domain valuable , type-ins, marketablility, and the limited depth of a dictionary we not fully recognized at that time.

B) A is history and in the domain business we HAVE learned from A....the registrations in the new extensions are more "quality" registrations based on our education of A. "We" dont regisiter myfavoritenonse.com(.info,.biz,.US, etc..) any more ..(well ..fore the most part)

This is my response to .comers who take off on this .com will always be king no other extension will ever come close to the number of .com registrations.

I agree..they never will and that proves nothing more than the fact the we are wiser today than the .comers of yesterday.

Most any of the top TLD extensions will retain an inherent monetary value as we move forward..but ONLY those top generic words, common phrase easily marketed etc..

That brings us to this...

OK.. so we have roughly 1.1 million domains in EACH extension with any value.. of those 1.1 million .coms how many actually are TRUE type-ins.. none of this "quasi" type-in nonsense.. I mean real type-ins .. 10% ..100,000 domains ? overly liberal on that ..but lets start with that number .

I will use my arbitrary number of $500 ... well thats where the variables expand.. is a domain with 3 type-ins a day =$500 .. could a domain that only gets 3 natural hits a day be worth 10k ? could a domain that gets 100 naturals only be worth $500 ?

As the web grows, as the new extensions take hold ..as they are all over the world..it is becoming very clear .com will have literally MILLIONs of drops as it falls to it's true value stauration of around 1.1 million domain..you'll see wls fail when this begins in an attempt to shore up the "flood" of expirations.

You'll also see (already happening) most webmasters and their business partners savy enough to realize the web is coming of age and that any extension is fine as long as it is one of the top 1.1 million words/phrases of whatever extension.. AND domain speculators are also learning that many of those 1.1 million domains ..can bring returns of 100%,200%, 1000 percent returns; and that 100,000 or so of those 1.1 million have the potential to translate into returns of 1000%, 5000% and a select few even higher, and thats what this dance is all about ....

Just my opinion of course ..yours may vary

 

[Duke]

Hey Bid, I thought you said you couldn't write!

Well said and very insightful.

 

[DryHeat]

Bid, one evidence supporting what you've noted is that in recent days/weeks during my digging for decent un-regged .US names whenever I mistyped a name I found it alomst always regged in .com extension and none other. So at least there's this one category (typos) that no tld other than .com has claimed; wonder how long folks would continue to renew such typo names in .com?

 

[ToBad]

Personal I tink .US is wortless as tld.
I think it's most domain speculators that type .us domain.

 

[ctn]

I got to reading this post and got to thinking.I have been on the internet for over 4 years and played the stock market fulltime for almost 4 years and i have spent endless amount of hours on here researching and stuff,and after thinking about it .

It is kinda of sicking,but anyways i can about count on both hands how many times i have been to a website that was not a .com.Meaning very few times.I have never been to a .info .biz. or .us .site.I have been to a few .net and .org.

been on searh engines alot, just seems like .coms come up when searching

Is it just me

 

[Duke]

Originally posted by ToBad
Personal I tink .US is wortless as tld.

You had some mis-spellings there ToBad, but I figured out what you meant and I TOTALLY agree - Yes, .US is wartless - no warts or other flaws whatsoever - the perfect TLD.

 

[Duke]

Originally posted by ctn
i can about count on both hands how many times i have been to a website that was not a .com.Meaning very few times.I have never been to a .info .biz. or .us .site.I have been to a few .net and .org.

been on searh engines alot, just seems like .coms come up when searching

Is it just me

I'll take a wild stab at this one ctn. Do you think it might possibly have to do with the fact that .com has been around for many years and millions of sites were built when that (and net and org) were the only things to build on? .us isn't even a year old while info and biz are just slightly older. Do you think that might have any bearing on how many sites would be online and appearing in search engines in those TLD's, especially given the fact that it takes several months at least to build a good search engine ranking? Might sound like crazy questions but I'm just wondering if you see any correlation there at all?

 

[DryHeat]

Originally posted by ToBad
Personal I tink .US is wortless as tld.
I think it's most domain speculators that type .us domain.

On the other hand, I personally think that since most of the existing sites in .US are government-related, many more are "reserved" by the registry to be used for that purpose, and kids.us has been approved and will be promoted by the US government therefore this tld (.US) has a unique built-in ability to impart a sense of confidence/authority for the users as compared to anyother tld; at the same time, it doesn't have the limitation associated with .org/.net. Its possible that its just me but the more I think about it the more confident I feel about the future of .US even though personally I've many more and lot stronger names in .INFO & .BIZ.



P.S.

It might be beneficial to leave the "all mighty" .com out while discussing/arguing prospects of new tlds since in a way its not really that relevant....I mean who's arguing that .com needs to prove itself?

 

[ctn]

Originally posted by Duke of Earl


I'll take a wild stab at this one ctn. Do you think it might possibly have to do with the fact that .com has been around for many years and millions of sites were built when that (and net and org) were the only things to build on? .us isn't even a year old while info and biz are just slightly older. Do you think that might have any bearing on how many sites would be online and appearing in search engines in those TLD's, especially given the fact that it takes several months at least to build a good search engine ranking? Might sound like crazy questions but I'm just wondering if you see any correlation there at all?

Sorry.I had a brain fart.I told you i have been online to long,Im getting where i can't even figure out my own simple questions.
thanks

 

[izopod]

Excellent work Professor Bid!! Very keen insight. I would just add one thing. Network Solutions KNEW there were new TLDs coming so what did they do....about three years ago they opened registrations up for 10 years!! note: this was also done because other registars were going to be allowed to take registrations.

My guess is a small percentage of the dot com owners paid the full 10 years. A greater portion probably did 5 years. That means in about about two years a lot of dot com owners are going to be flushing those reg's down the whois-toilet!!

Enter a new domain....

izopod

 

[DryHeat]

Originally posted by izopod
My guess is a small percentage of the dot com owners paid the full 10 years. A greater portion probably did 5 years. That means in about about two years a lot of dot com owners are going to be flushing those reg's down the whois-toilet!!

Enter a new domain....

izopod

I personally attest to that. Call it naive or stupid but when I first got into this during the early to mid 2000 some registrars (Bulkregister.com for sure) began offering deep discounts for multi-year regs. I still carry more than a few hundred (.com) domains from that era since many of these are regged till 2005; every time I look at my Bullkregister portfolio (which is very seldom) I feel kind of ashamed of what I did back then but I guess for some thats part of the learning curve.

 

[Manic]

Originally posted by DryHeat


I personally attest to that. Call it naive or stupid but when I first got into this during the early to mid 2000 some registrars (Bulkregister.com for sure) began offering deep discounts for multi-year regs. I still carry more than a few hundred (.com) domains from that era since many of these are regged till 2005; every time I look at my Bullkregister portfolio (which is very seldom) I feel kind of ashamed of what I did back then but I guess for some thats part of the learning curve.

Unfortunately, it does seem to be a part of the learning curve, and I feel for you, as I have been there.

I think I must be very fortunate in that I wasn't too extravagant during my time on that curve! Whew!

 

[StockDoctor]

Hey, I've heard the skepticism before. In fact, I decided NOT to reg Wallstreet.com, Stocks.com and Bonds.com way back when they were free. We thought all this "new" web graphics stuff would just slow down the Internet. At the start, few people believed in the .coms and couldn't for the life of them see into the future. Hindsight is 20 x 20.

I told myself that I wouldn't make that mistake again. I'm working on three networks right now, two of which are anchored by .us addresses and one by a .biz. Not just another .com.

 

[mole]

Originally posted by stocdoctor
Hey, I've heard the skepticism before. In fact, I decided NOT to reg Wallstreet.com, Stocks.com and Bonds.com way back when they were free. We thought all this "new" web graphics stuff would just slow down the Internet. At the start, few people believed in the .coms and couldn't for the life of them see into the future. Hindsight is 20 x 20.

I told myself that I wouldn't make that mistake again. I'm working on three networks right now, two of which are anchored by .us addresses and one by a .biz. Not just another .com.

:yes: :yes: :yes:

The early bird catches the worm.
Fools who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.