These are the words from an article from ITWorld on April 10th, 2001. I enjoy going back in time and reading articles about domains because everything is so clear in hindsight. In this case it tells more than stories of the past, it may also tell of the future. The introductions of new tlds may temporarily stagnate the market but just like .cc and other tlds of the past, the dot coms will rule. The original article was headlined Sale of Domain Names Flounder in Depressed Market. And these are the three reasons given
1. The expectation that new suffixes, such as .biz and .info, will become available this year has undercut the demand for .com names.
2. New rules make it difficult for third parties to register names that are trademarked in hopes of selling them at a higher price to the companies that own those trademarks.
3. Several countries have recently started allowing anyone in the world to register names that end in the suffixes for those countries. “There’s no longer a rush to buy Pets.com,” Wood notes, “because you can get Pets.cc” using a suffix marketed by a Seattle company.
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And just think how much money you could have made if you would have loaded up on generic dot coms back in 2001
Nice Article Shane,
And let me tell you, Wood was so so wrong, I wish he wasn’t as I am still deciding what to do with skis.cc
Spot on, Shane. And I remember that article.
…and what makes anyone think that the new TLDs will be any different whatsoever? Same chip, different dip.
I think they will all be a giant .Failure
Failure needs to be defined, and a failure for who ? At the end of the day its all dilution.
If someone wanted a .com and the asking price was $10,000 and they could get the keyword in .shop if that made sense for them for $100, then its not a failure for the registrant. Not a failure for the registry or the registrars.
If .xxx is a failure, then I know a lot of people who want to fail like that.
So the new tlds could be a failure for domain speculation and investing, that is just one part of the equation.
The .cc example is not comparing apples to apples, there is not one extension that will be coming online but hundreds.
Is the value of PalmSprings.com hurt ? Imo NO, is the value of what most domainers own diluted ? Imo Yes.
.com is just so deeply entrenched as the most credible, most desirable extension that I cannot see small or medium sized enterprises making the shift in our lifetimes. The wild-card is what happens if larger enterprises- with fat marketing budgets- start to adopt .(vanity) and use that for their primary web presence. Will that establish an ego-driven paradigm, where your company isn’t swimming in the deep-end unless your web presence is .you? Because if that happens, the same phenomenon that makes .com more desirable than .net will, over time, make .vanity more desirable than .com.
Still, how long does that take to move the .com mountain? Tech moves at lightning speed but peoples perceptions don’t and .com very much ‘is what it is. ‘
Domainers love to tell multi-billion dollar enterprises that they ‘don’t get it’ on domain names- and there are definitely some examples of that being totally true- but a lot of it is domainer bubble-logic that’s doesn’t apply anywhere else in the world of business.
I seriously think the best thing any ‘domainer’ can ever do for themselves is to step away from the domainer kool-aid, break out of the domainer bubble and start involving themselves a bit more in tech. See if there are any lean-startup groups in your area. Get to know the entrepreneurial side of the internet better, rather than listening to the same tired dogmas continually chanted by people whose only badge of achievement is having registered some domain names. Get to know the basics of the development and startup side, the marketing side… If for nothing else, it will help you to avoid knowledge-gap traps in domains like .mobi but more importantly, it will help you understand the domains you do own a whole lot better.
Nice find Shane.
The article is actually quoting Doug Wood, who was then with Hall Dickler Kent Goldstein & Wood.
Now he’s with Reed Smith, and he acts as general counsel for the Association of National Advertisers.
The ANA will be a familiar name if you’ve been following the new gTLDs debate.
🙂
Thanks Kevin,
He certainly has an agenda now I’d ge didn’t then.
If Frank Schilling followed the advice in that article…