What New gTLDs Did You Buy?

As I reported earlier this week, I do not currently own any of the new domain names. I am involved in an auction for one new domain name (.Ventures), but I don’t know if I am going to bid competitively to win it. I am just not sure about whether it’s worth the price, but we’ll see what happens.

At the time of my writing this article, somewhere around 30% of the people who voted have already registered a domain name in one of the new extensions. Some of the people who replied via comment shared the domain name(s) that they purchased. If you are interested, I would like to invite you to share some of the new gTLD domain names that you purchased.

On a separate but related note, I can see the value in certain new domain names. Geo.Plumbing names or some Keyword.Ventures/.Holdings names make sense to me. There are other extensions that are not available to register yet that also make sense to me. However, there are also plenty of domain names that have been registered that do not make sense to me. Boston.Singles seems like it would be a marketable and a buildable domain name. Random keyword domain names like Insurance.Singles doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

I think sharing new TLD domain name registrations will help facilitate some discussion and learning to see what drives registrations. I am interested in seeing what you’ve registered and if you are willing, I would be interested in knowing why you chose a particular domain name.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

62 COMMENTS

  1. I did not buy, but I use my GOD’s given creativity to brain reg usedtohaves and usedtohave.com for 99cent each

    I love hand reg for 99cents.

    Dot com is the NEW GTLD!!!

    already got offers and google search is 10millions.

  2. x.ventures – I am figuring that many one letter domains will be held up by registries or very hard to get due to pre-registration. I am not sure how all these New G’s will play out, but I did not want to hold an empty bag if they work out.

  3. From the investors point of view the risk it’s to big.

    If .co does not have a second market after 4years with 1.6 mil names being sold ,what makes you think that this limited extensions will ???
    I know it’s very tempting to buy a “L” .whatever name but that’s why it’s there because it has no value.

    To answer the title question, I DID NOT BUY ANY.

    I will only be interested in .WEB

  4. Honestly have not registered any, no plans to tbh.

    One thing about these that I see is they are extremely targeted or should I say specific. Boston.singles yikes, how many end users for that and on top of it, that will pay dearly for it.

    It isn’t like a dot com where any good domainer would be happy to own a geo targeted name .com because of the ease of targeting the natural traffic.

    In this new .whatever world, no such thing will ever exist imo. You buyer is either are a huge backed start up who wants to be different and use a .singles in that specific local or you don’t have jack.

    My bet is jack will win out most times.

    • Acro, I may not have gotten either one. First enom says I did, and took my money. I checked whois, and says available. I recheck enom, money still gone. I check again, and money is refunded. WTF? Did it again, same thing. Recheck to try again, and now shows one name regged to someone else. &%!$#-enom!!

    • My ears were ringing. I looked at Enom and Dynadot a few hours ago and saw v.ventures was the last letter available, it was $113 at Dyna and more at Enom so I got it at Dynadot. I wasn’t going to do this but Elliot got a few and I always wanted a single letter domain and my company uses the V and it was the only letter left so like a sheep I got it. It’s the only new g I got.

      A friend just told me Enom is having glitches and issues so if I got this after you did Kevin that might be the problem. I see k.bike available at Dynadot for $230 still?

    • I just got things worked out at enom, and I now have k.bike. Got it for $230 at enom. An FYI, ‘all’ your contact info must be filled out, or the new registry’s may reject it. That is why I had issues this a.m., my fax number wasn’t filled out.

  5. Good luck to all who taking risks.

    On the side note I bought many 1 letter . Cctld and it didn’t work out very well I ended up selling for 100 to 200 a piece anyway so not huge upside if u ask me from my experience and u guys are actually starting with 200 reg fee so good luck to you guys.

    Btw nice catch Aaron

  6. none. donuts should be paying me a million or two in thanks for not applying for a bunch of tlds, not collecting from me at $400 a pop.

  7. At only $119 I didn’t see this as much of a gamble. Seriously, I either buy myself a new pair of Nike’s or get a name that has the potential to get me a truck full of Nike’s. No brainer.

    Thanks Aaron for the tip.

    • Precisely my thinking.

      I lost more money playing blackjack during Namescon than I spent on the 3 domain names I bought. Maybe they will appreciate in value and sell profitably, and maybe they won’t. It’s a gamble.

      Incidentally, I spent more money on EmployeeIncentives.com today at NameJet than on these 3 names together.

  8. At this point I have no intention to acquire domains in any new TLD. However, one possible benefit of the new TLDs is that it will distract attention and capital from .COM auctions at Namejet / Godaddy. .COM continues to comprise the largest portion of weekly DNJ sales reports…

    • ” .COM continues to comprise the largest portion of weekly DNJ sales reports…”

      Of course it does now but fast forward 5 years will this still be the case. If the answer is you don’t know than you should invest something just in case. The answer “I don’t know” means it’s possible and it’s possible is enough to roll the dice some. Not a lot but some.

  9. i must admit i bought a single letter .ventures domain just for the hell of it. i was going to buy the same letter in .holdings as well but didn’t and an hour later it was gone. holdings seems more limited than ventures but who knows.

  10. welcome to the club elliot.

    so ive registered 14 .gurus, 4 .clothings and then after todays one letter revelation, 5 more 1 letters. and i dont even like the new tlds (except my well known affinity for .tv and .la), but its about the action baby. weve down well with coaching domains so the guru was a natural.

    i will say the best way to cement in your mind that the new tlds have an uphill battle is to own one, and feel the illiquidity, the newness, the “island” the registry operator leaves you on, and then see the next batch coming and all of a sudden, .com with 160,000,000 registrations, 90% of the alex 1000 and a less than $10 fee looks pretty good. Buyers remorse kicks in pretty soon.

    i did a piece for our website about things to learn about the donuts processes, one is if your at enom better make sure your ducks are in a row, nameservers valid for new tlds, and a wierd bug thats puts the country code on your fax number as 11, and thus is rejected and the money comes out of your account, and is in limbo since registration didnt take. so if you havent been to your default contact information in awhile (like me) worth it to check or you get the “shutout”.(ever see the move The Sting) its a combo of the new RAA and the new tlds. but now im happy happy happy. thanks to the enom team last saturday for investigating and fixing.

    as Sergeant Osterhaus said in Hill Street Blues (my second reference only those 50+ will get)……”Lets be careful out there”

    page

    • Why would you register a .guru knowing that .pro is a) more PROfessional, b) has a larger base c) is more credible d) is 1/3 of the cost e) is shorter and, most importantly, f) is generally considered to be a failure.

      Yeah, that makes me wanna go out and get a bunch of .guru’s too.

      I think you are totally wasting your time, effort and money. May as well go out and buy a bunch of .Mobi’s. I bet you can get some good keywords there too.

  11. @Page – That enom issue is what tied me up this morning and I wasn’t awarded the two 1 letter names I regged, and then someone else got one of them! grrr.. Once I got thru the 25 minute on-hold wait, the cs rep got me straight on things, and I was able to get the other one. It was that 11 number in my fax line. So yeah check one’s profile at enom to make sure all is good.

  12. I would probably buy some new .whatever if there were numbers. ie. 888.888, 88.88, 8.8. Those would be VALUABLE imho. The shorter the better. With more and more people using mobile phones to access the internet all I see these huge .whatevers causing is more traffic accidents. The internet needs shorter domains not “short stories” to access new sites.
    Cheers!!

  13. As a small portfolio investor, I won’t buy any for the time being.

    However, I am looking forward to buy one or two later this year where I will be the enduser.

  14. I decided to break my total apathy for this round and consider a .singles if the price was ok. Price was acceptable at only $3X at various registrars but the one I would have regged was taken last week. I already publish a site for the examplesingles.com version of this example.singles. In fact, if it weren’t for that, to me even $3X would have been unacceptable and not enough to break my total apathy and lack of interest. Okay, so someone got it already – I still don’t care and doubt it will ever matter much if anything. Wouldn’t surprise me if it’s available again next year too.

  15. SEO is not my expertise, but although traffic stats could drop a lot by having a more specific category of focus, wouldn’t ad buyers in some cases be willing to pay more per click because they have more confidence in reaching the right audience? In turn, to me it seems like they could offset each other a bit. Obviously, the general population would need to adopt to the new TLDs, which will be difficult, but if they do, projecting ROI for keyword searches could dramatically change based on the TLD assigned. I believe many TLDs will flop, but some will be huge winners. Picked up a few new domains this week that I plan to develop. Time will tell how the general population respond to all the new TLDs. Cheers

  16. Hi Elliot,

    I registered a few .guru names. I got y.guru. I have no idea what I could use it for. I also bought a few other .guru names like Pornos.guru, Webcams.guru, Baskets.guru. I am not sure how the new tlds will do but it seems fun and a new way of thinking online.

  17. Elliot,

    Thanks for the mention in your postmortem report. Although I must say, there will lot of fun buying these names for Email purposes.

    For example .college

    You can register PHD.College, and then you can register a email Elliot@PHD.college

    then give the email out to your friends, now that will look amazing. These may not be a great investment for aftermarket purposes, but I must say, these gtld can be used for great email creating purposes.

  18. I just registered bio.singles because I felt is was worth a punt. Even if I have to hold onto it for five years. Two other gTLD’s I could have registered yesterday for the same reason were:

    playlist.singles
    infant.bike

    But I chose not to register these two so if anyone else wants to snap them up, they are still available. Feel free.

    However, this is where I think the problem lies with these gTLD domains… there is just far too many of them. Maybe 20 years from now, some of the gTLD’s that are still around might increase in value but it’s a long way away.

    I agree, anyone investing in gTLD domains right now should be prepared to lose their money because it is pure speculation. A long shot. It’s only wise to spend money you can afford to lose.

  19. In this new world of TLDs, sites must be be developed and tailored towards to the strong keyword search combinations in the URL or build a unique brand name. Otherwise they will rarely be worth the investment. The winners this time around will be those willing to spend the extra time to build out sites on strong keyword URLs to gain in search rankings. Enormous opportunity lies ahead for those building out micro sites that could then be sold off to investors or businesses wanting to take it over. There might be a time when registrars go thru each domain to see if it’s just being parked, and if so it could potentially have the right to release the domain name from your ownership to allow someone else use the domain to build a legitimate site with content, which in turn helps build more credibility for the TLD extension. At least that’s what I believe could happen. If they start to urge domain parkers to develop or release the domain then it could add more value long term to the TLD.

  20. So far I think the real winner of new TLDs is .PHOTOGRAPHY. I’ve been looking thru search results on Google and many of the sites have already been developed and look great. Regardless of .PHOTOS coming out soon, I believe .PHOTOGRAPHY will survive and turn out to be a successful new top level domain.

    • And in the long run I also believe .photos will turn out to be successful too. To me it’s not confusing to have both .photos and .photography as separate TLDs. If you want to find a photographer you use .photographer, if you want to look for photos, check out .photos. Content results on Google Search for .photography is now over 44k. The only new TLD higher in terms of results is .GURU, which is coming in at 84k. Results to me show that people are adopting to .PHOTOGRAPHY pretty quickly and I’m not in that particular field of work.

  21. Already receiving offers – snagged Investing.Tips, Investment.Tips, Operations.Guru, Product.Guru, Strategic.Guru, Auction.Gallery, Garden.Gallery, Vineyard.Estate, Vineyards.Estate, Mall.Directory & Malls.Directory

  22. Hi

    I enjoyed reading, and i want to ask you experts about how much 2 letters .ME domain worth in your opinion?
    Im look into a shortcut for my company, u think it worth 8,000 USD ?
    xx.me ?

    Thanks

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