Why The New gTLDs Matter to Me

As someone who runs a website in the domain investing space, the new gTLD domain names will likely lead to advertising revenue opportunities. I don’t have any open banner spots nor do I have plans to add banner space, but at some point in the future, I  assume there will be new gTLD advertising inquiries. That aside, new gTLDs matter to me as a domain investor, and I want to discuss why that’s the case.

In the next year or two, we are going to see most major domain registrars marketing new gTLDs to customers. I think we will see registrars try to upsell and cross-sell customers, scare them into buying them for brand protection, and use other tactics to create awareness of them and drive sales revenue. As much as these new gTLDs are going to make money for registries, I think registrars will seize this opportunity to increase customer LTV.

My opinion is that the marketing efforts will become mainstream, and there are going to be people who see lots of opportunity for this “new gold rush.” Whether we like it or not, tens of millions of dollars (or more) will enter the market from people looking to invest in these new gTLD domain names. This is going to not only make the registries and registrars wealthy, but I anticipate it will find its way into the pockets of other domain investors in many ways. For instance, people who make money from selling these domain names will likely re-invest it in good .com domain names.

I have no idea if these new gTLDs are going to be successful en masse. My gut says a number of them will be big successes and many will fail. I don’t think all will fail as some people seem to believe. I think there’s going to be too much smart money backing them for a large failure rate. I also think some will be loss leaders to sell other products and services, so a “failure” may not actually be a failure.

A wild card is what a company like Google does with its gTLD domain names as well as how the search giant treats the new gTLDs. I don’t think many people outside of Mountain View know exactly what Google’s plans are, and I don’t think we will be able to gauge the impact until quite some time.

New gTLD domain names have brought and will continue to bring considerable mainstream press onto domain names. No matter what happens, I think the business of investing in domain names is going to change, and it may change how we do business.

I can’t say for certain how things will change. I’ve built my business in a way that allows me to be flexible with my investments. Should I see non-.com opportunities arise, I am ready and I will be able to capitalize on them. My portfolio continues to be 99%+ .com domain names, and I am excited to see how things develop with respect to the new gTLDs.

Our business has changed over the last few years, and it’s going to be exciting to see how it continues to evolve.

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

22 COMMENTS

  1. Great article. I am looking forward to all the roll outs too but newbies and seasoned pros should not confuse domain investing with domain speculating.

    Two COMPLETELY different things.

    Former is buy and hold. Latter is buy and sell quick otherwise you’ll find yourself “invested” in something that you should have sold.

    Any .mobi investors out there today? 🙂

  2. I disagree with you in that I think that each of the gtld’s will fail. If people wanted .mobi, .travel, .museum, .name, .pro, .tel, .aero and .coop they would have taken off already. They didn’t. So, why do you expect people to believe that .engineer will be widely accepted when both .jobs and .pro failed? Why do you expect people to believe that .dog will work when .cat already did not? You are the expert, but I just don’t see it happening.

    Instead, I see more tumbleweed.

    • The disconnect I have with your comment is that some of the registries that you mentioned above make millions of dollars a year in revenue with little overhead. Commercially, they may not be all that successful when you look to see how many websites are developed on them. As businesses, some of them are very profitable and would be considered success stories.

  3. They refer to .XYZ as global, international, worldwide. Nothing is further from the truth.

    1) Less than 35% of the global population use the Roman / Latin alphabet..

    2) In many of the national alphabets there are no X, Y or Z. e.g.
    There is no X in the Polish or Turkish alphabets
    There is no Y in the Romanian alphabet
    There is no Z in the Icelandic or Swedish alphabets
    There are no X or Y in the Slovenian or Italian alphabets
    There are no X,Y,Z in the Irish, Scott Gaelic or Hawaiian alphabets.

    3) In EVERY non English language XYZ are pronounced differently and with a different accent.
    .
    To summarize: Less than 10% does not make it “global, international, worldwide”

  4. The good

    Good for bloggers to earn more revenue
    Good for registration places and owners of .cluster
    Good For 3 percent I am assuming .cluster will take off
    Good .com prices will continue to rise and type in traffic continues to add more value

    The bad

    Remember the .co?
    Trend domainers will look like bill gates after the fallout
    Domainer pool will be shrinking after the collapse

    The ugly

    Big domainers and domainers in general sensing concerns
    What are renewals going be
    Cheap shots will be the norm IMO and all ready seeing it with Donuts. .co founder remember his smirky remarks as well? Thankfully hes hired a bright lady (hope her marketing isnt as cheap as owner of .co)
    Let the games begin and agendas. Opps its just business remember LOL

    • What happened with the .CO in the bad column? I heard there were going to be lots of UDRPs and lawsuits, but that never materialized. I also don’t believe there was as much hype as .mobi or any type of bubble. How was .CO bad for domain investors?

  5. I agree on the comparison Elliot, nothing was like .mobi hype.

    Should be interesting to watch next 5 years.. Going get ugly IMO.. Things look great now.

  6. Whatever marketing we see, as always it will be targeted to the average domainer/speculator and NOT the general public, Domainers who for the most part are dreamers with limited capital, And after a year of zero offers and zero hits, they come to the realization that what they registered is not what they though it would be, that it’s worthless or near worthless, and the only way to sell them is to market them to resellers on domain forums and brokers.

    New TLD”s have become nothing but a money grab, making the registries rich, that’s what it’s ALL about.

  7. I don’t understand a business model that aims mostly to sell at other sellers, as in buying domain names to sell to other domainers, in the hopes of making millions. I do understand buy-and-hold to sell to end-users, which I define as businesses of whatever size in domaining.

    @Elliot: $50M may not make a dent against years of .com, at least not in the beginning. It may be a good start, but what the buyers of these new gTLDs do from there is really what will make a difference. I don’t think every new extension will be a failure, and obviously which brand puts money behind a particular extension will also impact the popularity of at least that extension.

    Success can’t really be measured by the sendoff in anything, which is short-term; but mostly by the long-term effect (or success, if any), IMO.

    P.S. I don’t know at what point I stop being a “domain newbie” but I’ve been a business owner and consumer for quite a long time, lol. And that is the context in which I offer the above observations.

    • I agree with you about not making a dent for a while, but I was contradicting Raider who said “Whatever marketing we see, as always it will be targeted to the average domainer/speculator and NOT the general public.”

  8. Elliot,

    When considering income opportunities, Don’t overlook the aftermarket resellers domain brokers and others that are likely to also profit long term from a ground swell of domain buying selling activity as new GTLDs begin launching.

    BTW folks, Elliot exists, I met him at TRAFFIC 😉

  9. A couple of questions:

    1. Have people noticed a decline in offers and sales over the last few months as we get closer to the introduction of GTLD’s early next year.

    2. And if not, do domain investors reading this expect there to be a drop in offers/sales over the next couple of years on their EXISTING .com’s/net’s/org’s etc?

  10. You didn’t contradict anything Elliot, we have 100’s of GTLD’s rolling out and your citing 1, ONE that chose to invest $50M in advertising? and during NFL football? LOL.. Tell me the GTLD registries are promoting their TLD’s at business conventions and other direct marketing toward business and I’ll change my opinion. Fact is new GTLD’s overall will be targeted to resellers just like they’ve been in the past, you even alluded to that when you wrote the registries would be advertising on reseller web sites like yours, that’s not a contradiction?

    I look at history and patterns before I invest, I look at the industry’s efforts to displace dot com with new GTLD’s, ALL of which have FAILED and the upcoming GTLD’s will be NO different, But domainers don’t learn from the past, they continue to make the same mistakes in hopes of striking it big, ultimately selling to others resellers.

  11. With so many new gTLD it is difficult to predict which ones will be good investments. Looking at the pre-registration prices GoDaddy is offering on .uno, .luxury, .build and .menu, its hard to see any of these great investments.. It is interesting to see so many strong keywords not available for pre-registration.. re.build, home.build etc..

  12. Considering that everything ICANN does is strategic, it’s not surprising we don’t see stronger keywords here, Once the crappy GTLD’s have been exhausted, that’s when well see the strong keywords roll out.

    @ Elliot, My mistake for confusing 1&1 for a Registry, the fact that a web host is dishing out $50M to promote GTLD’s reinforces my point that it wont be the registeries promoting it themselves, mainly because they know domainers will be the primary registrants, no advertising necessary.

    It’s my belief that when when domainers stop investing in these worthless extensions well see a lot LESS of them.

  13. Regardless of what happens with the new gTLDs, three things are clear.

    1) .COMs will continue to be king.
    2) The domain market will grow.
    3) There will be more money poured into advertising.

  14. Can anyone clear up for me the law surround these new gTLD’s lots of the good key words have sold up it seems, but what is the law around buying new domains that are related to or contain a companies name?

    I read that everyone has been given their opportunity to place a copyright on the new domains, and if they havent, then it is fair game.

    This has been shown when I looked to purchase plentyof.singles which is available but comes with a copyright infringement warning. Other I have tried, clearly are similar or even name a company, but do not have the copyright warning.

    If my sole purpose is to buy these to sell for profit, is that the bit that is illegal? Are there any work around of this?

    I don’t understand why snapping up domain names and setting up a parked for sale page is illegal, or how it is any different to companies who legitimately sell “premium domains”… some insight from thoes in the know would be greatly appreciated and my internet searches have left me confused.

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