My prediction is that few domainers will make money out of it (as usual).
Domainers for the most part are not creative, not forward thinkers, not entrepreneurs. Most are simply that...flippers.
I have to look no further than this forum to see those who are still intent on making a living flipping or parking without having to do any work or put any effort at all into domaining. For the most part, domainers are a lazy lot. They do not want to market their names, they do not want to have to look for a buyer - they want the name to make a killing while parked and want the buyers to seek them out. I saw a thread the other day (and I believe you did as well) of someone looking for a broker that was not "too picky".
Honestly, look around and that pretty much sums up the majority of people in domaindom...
I would say that less than 10% of domainers are anything beyond a domainer; meaning that domainers are, as stated, only in for the here and now (the quick flip) or making money from parking.
We all have personally seen the domaining business take a huge nose dive in terms of parking revenue and de-emphasis on domain names and parked pages in the search engines. Why? because things are changing. Because consumerism is changing. Because the search engines are listening to their customers. The search engines are not listening to domainers as domainer make up a small ort of their customers and therefore have little influence.
Meanwhile, domainers are not changing in their mindset or changing their methodology in terms of how they do the business of domaining. Meanwhile, the consumer habits are changing and the domainer is still expecting same revenues month in and month out without ever having to change a thing (especially their mindset or business savvy). And, meanwhile...while the search engines are steadily and constantly changing their algorithms and competing to keep up with the ever changing consumer habit and trends, the domainer has yet to figure out that the search engines do not work for the domainer, the search engines do not exist for the benefit of the domainers, and the search engines hardly see domainers as a viable measuring stick of consumerism, internet trends, and the ever changing consumer buying habits.
Fortunately, many businesses have never consulted a domainer to get their opinion on products or services prior to release. Entrepreneurs and start ups never once said, to my knowledge, that they need to get a domainer on our executive board. If a domainer was ever asked their opinion on something prior to release it would have been, in the off chance, that the domainer was part of a focus group or usability study.
I am not a big proponent of the .xxx space. But I am not also a big proponent of thinking and seeing the world and commerce through domainers eyes. Once more, I will state that domainers do not control the internet - they just wish they did. If I were to go out on a limb and say there are 50,000 domainers world wide, that is perhaps a generous estimate which would put domainers making up less than 0.0007 of 1% of the global population.
I am amazed at the people who insist a domain has to be what domainers want it to be or else the site or enterprise is destined to fail. If everyone was to take out there smart phone right now, I am willing to bet that the user knows less than 5% (perhaps 1%) of where the app comes from. Yet they know what the app is and what it does. But they have no idea of what the physical web address is. All they know is what that icon represents in terms of recognition and where that icon will take them.
That is what the consumer of today and the consumer of tomorrow sees. And domainers in general should be concerned about this. Teenagers today and today's college class aged students are perhaps the biggest users of the internet but not in terms as we know it and see it. They do not search for stuff like we do. They search for the apps and icons that can take them places, share and connect with friends, and so on. Want to look something up? just tap the Opera browser icon, or the Safari icon, or the Google icon. Hell, they probably do not even know that Opera browser resides at Opera.com. And they get Safari from iTunes, a totally closed system. Even if the system says it is "open source", it is still a functionally closed system. I have to download Android apps from Android Market. Perhaps I can download it directly from the site itself. But it will still be Android compatible and android approved.
Site developers and programmers and engineers are perhaps more apt to be building apps than sites. Yes, they have to build a site, somewhere, on some extension, in order to promote the app. But the real promotion comes from the apps users and how quickly it gets 5 stars on the iTunes site or the Android Marketplace.
Just this morning I downloaded a medical reference Android app. I have absolutely no idea where the app originates from or where it resides before downloading. Since the start of this post, I have gone back and looked into my history to find that the site where the app resides is AppBrain.com. I have never heard of that site and I would have never visited that site if I had not been curious.
So the future of domains and all extensions is up in the air and a big question mark in the long run, being 10-15 years max. In 15 years consumers will not know that amazon is at amazon.com or google is at google.com. The consumer will recognize an element (icon) or simply speak and get results for what they want and need.
This morning I saw a commercial for iPhone Siri. A kid asks if it is going to snow today. The phone already knows the location of the child and somehow looks up a forecast of that immediate area and returns to say
It sure looks like snow today. What site did that kid visit? Where did Siri get that information? was it Weather.com? WeatherBug.com? WeatherUnderground.com? When computers (yes, a phone is a computer and just getting more powerful) and tablets can interface with other systems and programs that quickly and come up with the response that quickly with the consumer never knowing where siri resides or where the weather report came from, that (to me) speaks volumes about the future of computing, the future of the internet, and the future of domains. The consumer wants instant gratification and wants to have to do as little as possible to get that gratification. The consumer does not want to have to work at all to find something or to, figuratively and literally, lift a finger to get information or a response.
