It’s easy to just say dot com is king. But the reality is that there is money in many of the other tlds. It may not be as safe as dot com but with risk comes reward. But there are a few types of domains that I won’t touch right now. Not because it’s impossible to make money with them. I won’t touch them because I can find much better risk reward elsewhere.
1. Hyphen keywords. Google targeted/reduced the value of exact match domains back in September. According to website owners (read comments in above article) some of the worst hit domains were the hyphenated. It makes sense as hyphenated domains tend to have lesser quality content vs non-hypenated. (I realize that is not always the case and their are still high ranking hyphen domains).
2. Dot co.uk You’d be crazy to not be worried about .uk if you owned one of these. Typing out .uk is much easier and obviously would be the preferred of the two. I don’t know how they are going to help the owners of the .co.uk domain owners but I do know that if I’m not in I certainly don’t want to get in now.
3. Brandable anything non dot com. It’s hard enough promoting a business using dot com but using something other dot com is about to become very expensive. It’s not to say you can’t do great with dot me or dot tv, I’m saying that it is hard now and will be even harder in the future to sell this type of name
4. Domain Hacks. I like le.af visually but putting it on a billboard or giving it out verbally would be a nightmare.
5. High PR Domains. A high PR domain can be very expensive and very valuable. It can also be flushed down the shitter quickly by Google a month after purchase. While it’s fairly easy to find fake PRs, I personally hate the thought of paying $2K and then rolling the Google dice
6. Dot SX. While there may be some resale value in some of the keywords this one makes no sense to me. Too many other tlds coming out and this one has no traction. At least .cc is easy to type
7. Numeric dot orgs. Another that is not a bad type of name just a tough one to make money with. The Chinese don’t like dot org and that’s a big part of the market