8 New gTLDs Launched This Week – What Domains Did You Buy?

8 New gTLDs launched this past week. Donuts had 4 (.Capital, .Engineering, .Exchange and .Gripe.) that did pretty bad. And the other 3 Punto 2012’s (CentralNic) .bar and .rest,  and Rightside Registry’s .moda didn’t do much better. .Wien did ok.

I bought 3 domains this week. That has become the usual weekly number for me lately. I bought Reverse.Engineering and Credit.Capital. The 3rd domain I have to keep for myself. Both domains have premium renewals. I had on my list maybe 10-15 other .Engineering and .Capital domains that were available but I decided that the premiums were too high for those domains.

All 8 New gTLDs were heavily reserved or had high premium renewals. Most of the good Engineering terms like civil, electrical, mechanical were reserved by the registry.

.Engineering was my favorite of the 8 but that might be because most of my family and friends are engineers… .Exchange got some limited interest but I don’t see a lot of resale potential. .Gripe I didn’t like at all. There are much better alternatives coming soon.

I also liked .bar but all good domains were reserved. I try to stay away from markets I know very little about so I didn’t register any .wien. Austria speaks German and Wien is Vienna in English so I stayed out.

What domains did you buy this week?

Sold.Domains

About Konstantinos Zournas

I studied Computer Engineering and Computer Science in London, UK and I am now living in Athens, Greece. I went online in 1995, started coding in 1996 and began buying domain names and creating websites in 2000. I started the OnlineDomain.com blog in 2012.

14 comments

  1. i bought 6 .wien domains

    http://studio.wien/
    http://finance.wien/

    i dont have fun with the donuts anymore .. the good ones are all premiums
    for example the word swiss as well .. come on

    • They are getting smarter as we buy domains. They pick up patterns and make all of them premiums.

      • exactly what i thought too

      • I agree that they are watching the current sales and adjusting SLD premiums accordingly. Nor do I think that it is a coincidence that the strongest of this round of gTLDs, are going at the end of the list of delegated strings. Part of that is due to the contended names having yet to be auctioned. But even in the list of the domains in the auction schedule, that the strongest ones will be determined later.

        And many words that were free of premium SLD domain fees for early gTLDs are now regularly priced with a premium. There have been non-donuts TLDs since the ones you pointed out, such as .cheap, that have continued to ask for ludicrous annual fees, such as .dance, .reviews, and .ceo. Some, such as .rodeo, seem to have been more successful at demanding a premium. I have also been pitched premium domains directly by enom, who asked for five figures for a .rocks and some .ninja domains, one of which I had just purchased for a few hundred from another company on a premium price drop the daybof general availability.

  2. I picked a couple up:

    structural.engineering
    travelmoney.exchange
    foreigncurrency.exchange

    Whilst the latter two are three-word terms, the keywords are strong here in the UK and I think they stand up reasonably well.

  3. I really like reverse.engineering, good pick up. I reg’d stop.rest, I see these domains more than just a category. Imagine a billboard that says stop.rest while you are driving at 2am cross country 🙂 Oh and renovate.bar was available last time I checked.

  4. Calling.Wien is available but not as fun as Vienna calling 😀

  5. I am done buying gTLDs. I’ve already spent over $5k on gTLDs, and the prospect for making a decent ROI is nothing more than pure speculation. I’ve had zero interest on many premium .la domains that I have held for almost a year now.

    I believe it is safe to say that most of the registrations have been made by domain name investors, and the Internet expansion is being financed on the backs of domain investors. There is very little marketing to end users for the new gTLDs, and no aftermarket is developing. In my opinion it looks like domain investors could be taking a cold walk in the rain.

    Domain name investors are going to get UDRP’d to death. And then you have to decide if you want to spend a few thousand dollars or more to successfully defend a domain name that gets no traffic, and that you may not be able to sell for several years.

    One panelist decisions are not going to be favorable to domain name investors, not even for LLL domains or generic terms. In UDRP “law”, the specific extension is immaterial in establishing legitimate interest or good faith. The extension is not a distinguishing factor.

    As a heads up, in my recent UDRP for a LLL gTLD, the one panel judge held that “Respondent did not submit sufficient evidence to show that respondent is commonly known by the disputed domain name.” That means if you do not have an ongoing business on the domain name and the Complainant does then you will most likely not be able to demonstrate legitimate interest.
    Additionally, the judge also stated that the parked page “resolved to websites belonging to Complainant’s competitors”. The Complainant never showed any evidence that the links on the parked page resolved to its competitors’ websites.

    ICANN wants to expand the Internet, which I am all for, but the cost of doing so will be on the backs of domain name investors. And we will not be treated fairly in the deal. We will be the ones taking a cold walk in the rain, so bring a heavy rain coat.

    • You are wrong about the aftermarket part. It seems that more and more sales appear each week.
      It is going a lot better than what .info, .biz and .us did 10+ years ago.

      Big mistake:
      “Respondent temporarily parked the domain name with until the layout for the disputed domain name was complete. Respondent thus has no control over any of the advertisements on the parked website.”

    • I am with you on this one. I did have lots of premium .la and i am dumping 80% of eem as I can’t justify paying the money with a flood of alternatives coming up everyday and low end user adoption. But to be fair, I did not buy them for a quick flip but rather as SPV’s.

      I did however go premium on .berlin for the same purpose way before premium became the stuff of paying recurring boats of money….infact all my .berlin had been pre-reserved for $30 something in both english and german and I got them except Bankwesen.berlin and banking.berlin and bank.berlin and i am hoping to go to .london and .nyc the same way but for everything else no me interesa!!!

  6. Hi Konstantinos. I only saw 3 gTLD sales on DNJournal.com for June, 30 through July 13. To me that isn’t an aftermarket.

    I did park the domain, but there was no likelihood of confusion or actual consumer confusion caused by the parked paged with the Complainant’s mark. In a United States federal court they would not have met their showing of a prima facia case. However, current UDRP decisions do not adequately take into account the legal standard of likelihood of confusion.

    All of the generic domain names in gTLDs that are parked are fish in a barrel for large companies that would rather UDRP you than pay your asking price for the domain. And if you ask too much for the domain name a WIPO panelist may say you registered the domain name in bad faith, because you are asking too much for it.

    It places a lot of risk on domain investors, and yet we are the ones registering the vast majority of the gTLD domain names. Without domain investors this Internet expansion would be DOA. We need to be given much more favorable terms in the deal.

    • I have 10+ sales on my database for that same period.
      And keep in mind that Go Daddy/Afternic is not reporting any sales.
      And of course most of the sales are never reported.
      What aftermarket do you expect for a 1 or 4 month old domains?
      This is huge for this small time period.

      And we disagree that the vast majority of the new gTLD domains are registered by domain investors.
      The zone files I see don’t say that. Most are registered by end users.
      I have 750+ 4-figure sales in the paid members section and maybe 100 are from domain investors.

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