Rick Schwartz Rails Against New Extensions

Rick “Domain King” Schwartz has never been a proponent of the new gTLD extensions. Rick has invested in quite a few non .com domain names, but I think he has been fairly outspoken against the new extensions for quite some time. I recall a panel at the 2013 TRAFFIC conference in which Rick and Lonnie Borck debated the new gTLD domain names against leaders of companies in that space.

During the last several days, Rick has taken to Twitter to share his strong feelings about the current state of the new domain name extensions. Although Rick has over 1,000 tweets on Twitter, he had taken a long hiatus from posting until February 25th. In the past few days, he has unleashed a fury of tweets about the new domain extensions, the new gTLD aftermarket, companies that sell domain names, and more. Here are just a handful of the tweets Rick posted during the past several days:

I emailed Rick to ask him why he is posting via Twitter rather than sharing his thoughts on his blog, and here’s what he told me:

I think Twitter may be more powerful and meaningful than a blog at this juncture.

It is a modern form of communication and tho the company may not be profitable, Twitter is the absolute winner for getting your message out as you even see world leaders tweeting. Many of them if not most, don’t have a blog. Not sure if it will last. People do get burned by Twitter when they say something off the rails. But right now, it’s the hottest place on the planet!

I find this to be interesting because it is essentially keeping people on his Twitter page rather than driving traffic to a website he controls. He could have published one blog post or a series of blog posts and promoted them on Twitter instead.

In any event, Rick built a great business in the domain space, and whether or not you agree with his opinion about the new domain name extensions, it is definitely worth reading his tweets.

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

20 COMMENTS

  1. I think many gtld operators prey on newbies, and offer very little in terms of credibility in their extensions, and pricing of premiums. They turn on a time to offer $1 registrations that are done by spammers, and then those domains drop forever like info.

    These people price gtlds as they are proven assets, they need to work backwards

  2. I doubled down the last few years on one-word dotcom’s while the gtld and “chip” madness was going on. I thought the Namescon 2016 auction was easy pickings but this year’s was even better. Galoshes.com for $1250 was a steal and there were a few others.

    As for blogging vs twitter. Twitter was made for stream of thought publishing. Why spend a couple of hours to expand a passing thought for a blog when you can just do it in a 30 second tweet. It gives people like Trump who can’t form paragraphs a great way to communicate their nonsense.

  3. Rick has earned the right to say whatever he wants about domain names. Rick is the Warren Buffett of the domain name Industry. I am glad Rick is back posting about domains.

    Like it or not, he is right about .com and new gTLD’s.
    I am in the “like” camp! .Com is only going to get bigger and more valuable. New gTLD’s will continue to fizzle out.

  4. There’s no mystery about it.

    Some are the cream of the crop while most are not.

    And it’s not about whole extensions, but about specific domain names within specific extensions.

    A new TLD can be relatively worthless or undesirable itself overall compared to .com for *most* keywords, while specific keyword + TLD combinations can be “sui generis” and priceless to the end user market.

    It’s not all or nothing, or either/or, as in .com is king while the others except brands are worthless.

    It’s what I just wrote over at TheDomains:

    https://www.thedomains.com/2017/02/28/sedo-weekly-sales-led-new-gtld-bitcoin-casino/#comment-218709

    “So the bottom line is that some keywords in some of the new gTLDs are definitely among the gold, silver, diamonds, and gems. Some of the keyword + TLD combinations are in a class by themselves in fact, and worth a fortune.”

    • I know the online gambling industry beyond domain investing, but it sounds like perhaps you don’t. In terms of real world value to an end user there is no comparison to a “flowers.mobi.” A more accurate comparison would be more like “Buy.Flowers” or similar.

    • P.S. “Bitcoin.Casino” is not even among the best examples of what I’m talking about overall at all, though it’s still a good one.

    • Look at you, Mark Thorpe, “Ditto!” LOL. Please. Anyone who first uses the analogy “flowers.mobi” may at best and at worst simply be misguided or mistaken. Anyone who embraces such a comparison after having it pointed out how flawed and invalid it is, is at best delusional and at worst disingenuous with an agenda. Honestly now, who does anyone think they are fooling with that unless themselves? I wouldn’t even spend time shoveling garbage on the likes of “flowers.mobi.”

    • Congrats, John, on “knowing the online gambling industry beyond domain investing”, but that is irrelevant and doesn’t make your opinion any more valuable than mine or Mark Thorpe’s. Fact is bitcoin may or may not be a passing fancy and the .casino extension may or may not succeed. This is uncertainty on top of uncertainty. I brought up flowers.mobi because even the great Rick Schwartz spent $200K on it. Just because someone pays a lot for a gtld does not make a valuable now or in the future is the point of that analogy.

    • “knowing the online gambling industry beyond domain investing”

      “but that is irrelevant”

      It’s amazing you don’t see the sheer ridiculousness of a statement like that.

      That’s exactly what is relevant. But the problem may simply be that you are being intellectually dishonest because of bias to the point of fooling even yourself. Otherwise if you can’t see how that is not just relevant but supremely relevant and how ridiculous a statement otherwise is then you have a serious problem.

      “and doesn’t make your opinion any more valuable than mine or Mark Thorpe’s.”

      Uh, yes, it does, just as if you knew more about sports than me would make your opinion about sports domains likely much better than mine.

      “Fact is bitcoin may or may not be a passing fancy”

      That merely demonstrates extreme ignorance on your part about Bitcoin, otherwise you would know that it is hardly that, and especially the technology it’s based on.

      The rest of what you wrote doesn’t hold any water either, you’re simply disregarding and evading everything else I wrote, and you are engaging in the usual straw man tactic by misrepresenting my statement as having anything to do with claiming a high price is what makes the domain valuable. I put the value before the price. Strange anomalies like “flowers.mobi” that amount to sheer speculation by someone who could easily afford such a gamble have nothing to do with it.

  5. One thing I want to reemphasize is the idea that it’s about individual “keyword + TLD” combos, not about whole TLDs.

    You can have a whole TLD that is almost entirely undesirable and considered practically worthless, while a few specific domains within the TLD are in such a “class by themselves” that they are worth a fortune and have “legs.”

    Let’s take .horse, for instance. It’s good for laughs, and maybe it will even catch on for something like that, but essentially it’s just a laughing stock, at least that’s how I see it. But a domain like “Race.Horse” is one of the exceptions. And of course there are far more and far better examples from some of the other new TLDs.

  6. “You can have a whole TLD that is almost entirely undesirable and considered practically worthless, while a few specific domains within the TLD are in such a “class by themselves” that they are worth a fortune and have “legs.””

    Understood, and maybe worth a shot. But you are missing a very important key point that is never factored in. The key is CIRCULATION. They have to circulate. They are not. Nobody knows these extensions exist, and they may never know. The cost to educate is unfathomable and you can’t be there to explain it to everyone.

    Better not to reinvent the wheel 500 different ways and figure out how to get RaceHorse.com. It’s cheaper and you’ll make more.

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