OnlineDomain.com Domain Name News & Opinions
Mike Mann wrote a Facebook post expressing his views on the .com Vs New gTLDs issue:
The new gTLD domains can sound very good and their industry can grow a bit for a while, but in the long run the sites launched with these extensions will confuse consumers and make the site owners look like scammers or weak unintelligent companies that cant afford a .com. .Com will keep going up in value as the Internet expands and marketers get smarter, as they are perpetually a value added flight to quality away from the confusing gTLD situation.
He then continued to make several other comments:
Dont fool yourself, they all keep diluting each other, the only buyers are speculators, hardly any long term sites yet
Here is an objective metric for you, all the Fortune 500 companies with the worlds best marketing people use .Com and still will a year from now and the year following.
If a company uses .Com the prospective customer only has to remember the branding on the left of the dot but if they use a gTLD they have to remember both sides, inferior branding, inferior recollection ability.
a long .Com is better than a short gTLD, and less expensive, more memorable, less confusion, etc
And I also probably have the best .Co collection which are better than any gTLD and they are very hard to sell too, even com is hard to sell.
Many people made comments including Donuts’s Paul Stahura:
“Com is full up. When was the last time you hand-registered a new .com? Lol “People” (trump voters or not) are used to progress. They want it, need it. As much as you might want to preserve the value of your decade old coms, good luck trying to stop that.”
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“Here is an objective metric for you, all the Fortune 500 companies with the worlds best marketing people use .Com and still will a year from now and the year following.”…………..Isn’t the parent company of Google, the largest public company in the world, using a New G(ABC.XYZ)?
If you can make money selling new TLDs, congratulations. However, given the low turnover rate in this industry I do not see any evidence that adding hundreds of new TLDs in a very short timeframe and some twelve million new TLD registrations is going to benefit aftermarket sales of domain names. Has aftermarket demand mushroomed in two years? On the other hand, it is possible that low-budget buyers – developers and mom and pop businesses have new options within their budget. That does not mean they will gladly pay $XXXX for a .XYZ.
Agree with Mike on all his points here.
Sorry Mr Stahura, but “progress” has nothing to do with newGtlds … that’s just a wishful thinking and an ex post justification of those who are heavily invested in new Gs … conflicts of interests a go-go, as usual …
Plus sometimes “progress” become “regression” in the society, if it’s not really useful to it … greed and speculation have nothing to do with progress …
As regards Alphabet, it’s just a (wrong) marketing stunt, which I think they will remove/change in the near future … plus it’s just a holding company, all main operative companies own a .com.
IMHO, as Rick Schwartz said, many of the new Gs will “die on the vine” soon …
Generally speaking, outside the domain world, I see a lot of failures, bankruptcies among Unicorns, startups with no or poor business model, no competitive advantages, low barriers to entry, etc as soon as the current asset bubble will burst …
Andrea – I respect your thoughts, and respectfully disagree….Alphabet could have used/purchased any domain in the world. They have access to the best marketing minds in the world. They chose a New G because it represents “progress” as it shows innovation in the rawest form… I clearly disagree with the sentiment that New G’s are bad for marketing, and Alphabet agrees with me. In Alphabet’s own words, drawing a parallel to our discussion, I leave you with this:
“We’ve long believed that over time companies tend to get comfortable doing the same thing, just making incremental changes. But in the technology industry, where revolutionary ideas drive the next big growth areas, you need to be a bit uncomfortable to stay relevant.”
everyone has their biases. aaron, we all know you have invested a good sum into the new gtlds so its natural to defend them.
as for the comment, when was the last time you hand regged a .com…every damn day!!
JZ – You can call it ‘bias’, but I call it, “putting my money where my mouth is.”… Usually that is a good indicator of true sentiment……As far as registering a new dot com, I stopped when the Godaddy 99 cent codes stopped working. 🙂
when new gltds first came out i had interest in investing in them. spent hours researching domains to come to the conclusion that the program is highly skewed in favor of the registries and decided it wasn’t worth the time or money when the domains have been picked over and over priced before they are even released.
Time will tell …
As regards “Alphabet could have used/purchased any domain in the world.”, sorry but I disagree. Not all domains are for sale, as you can’t buy all people with money (sorry Google cheerleaders … lol), even if you have a lot of money, as Google which is exploiting a natural monopoly position to accumulate cash at the expense of the average people. And yes, I’m for breaking up the company, search separated from online advertising to provide equal conditions access to all players. Unlike some people, I don’t have an idolatry for anyone, including big companies with huge cash piles (who think they can buy anyone/anything) …
About “They have access to the best marketing minds in the world.”, same idolatry as above … I’m not surprised … but big money does not necessarily mean big marketing ideas …
Plus, FYI, BMW is big enough to say no to Google about Alphabet.com, and, unlike Google, they are not a monopoly/oligopoly.
As concerns the new Gs and the asset bubble I mentioned before, as J.K. Galbraith said many years ago “Fools, as it has long been said, are indeed separated, soon or eventually, from their money. So, alas, are those who, responding to a general mood of optimism, are captured by a sense of their own financial acumen. Thus it has been for centuries; thus in the long future it will also be.”
Andrea – As a faithful person, I feel you are using the word ‘idolatry’ in the wrong context, but do as you will…As you mentioned, I will leave off with…..TIME WILL TELL…. 🙂
The context of my use of the term “idolatry” is absolutely correct, nothing to do with God here. Go checking the meaning of the term 🙂
Yes, time will tell …
Andrea I don’t know you, but you are Italian, you live in a country that created the law, where democracy was born togheter with the country of Kostantinos. Absolutely no patriotism here really, no snobbish feeling, just the sad realization that unfortunately US citizens do not understand anymore what Freedom, monopolies, fair competition, human rights, etc, are.
I don’t know when they lost their love for humans, but most of them seems not to be humans anymore.
I loves US because they seemed to have a particular ability to treat their own tumors, tumors in their society (I know, this is not a beautiful metaphor, but certain society’s problems are really tumors), by themselves, something that you hardly find in other countries, but I think they have completely lost that ability.
I want to add a smile 🙂 to this comment, but to be sincere this is unfortunately a serious comment, something I never wanted to write…
“Com is full up?” hahaha
Many great .com’s can be had for a few grand and renewed for only $10/year!! Compared to the HUGE renewal fees on many of the decent new gtld’s. And almost everyone adds .com to every domain anyway. I have had many customers tell me that. Mann is BANG ON.
Many of the xyz’s were pushed out at 1.99. Hahah.
I respect Mike Mann but disagree, these dot brands were not cheap, the brand themselves
will ensure that “funny extensions” will penetrate and eventually will be harmonized to everyone’s eye.
dot Brand will drive away traffic from dot com, it is already.
Online Advertising money will start going toward .brands – open .gtld will tag along.
is this such a crazy prediction ?
These are the same arguments that are being repeated over and over from both sides. With all due respect to mike and the others, no one can predict the future and time will tell. With respect to branding on the left or right side of the dot, memorable and good advertising will capitalize on both sides of the dot. As for long term websites with GTLDs, I see more and more going up everyday. As for hand registering .coms myself and many others do it all the time. When the branded domains come out like .Google, .Amazon, etc. people will start to use these addresses and become more familiar with the new domains. The “marketplace/end user” as always will decide if and how it wants to use the new domains, not domain investors.
Didn’t Mann make a shit load of cash selling .co domains that he’d registered via an exploit in sunrise?
He had those grandfathered, first right of refusal, and he quickly turned around and sold them at the right time.
It doesn’t take much to see the .cloud launch every good keyword was in the 5 figure range.
.shop will be the same thing, radix will not throw you a bone.
All your domainer profits are being fleeced by premium renewals, if you are to stupid to see it, well that is your problem.
Ask AARON above how much money he has made in PROFIT in new GTLD’s, it will be in the RED.
One question i had if you pick a name up via drop say dropcatch and the name was owned from 1999-2015 and you aquire it and now the new rego shows via whois.com now from 2015 to 2016 is it still a vintage domain name or say a udrp comes up do these previous years still count
It doesn’t matter. The clock starts ticking after the ownership change.
If I were to start a new business now, I would choose an easy-to-remember shortest domain whatever its extension may be. Everything will change with the passage of time as the old Greek philosopher said.
Mike Mann is right on this one! Why in the world did we need new tlds? We all know we had .info, .biz, .euro, and .us which have been around a long time. They are still having a hard time making it.
Out of all them I personally thought .us for the United States would work since it is the ccTLD for the United States and it is still having a hard time. The public only remembers .com.
I thought if a US based company, or party could not get a .com, they would go for .us, but often times on good names, I see every extension taken except .us, it is a miserable fail.
GTLD’s are great for the registry, there are many industry insiders sucking you in, they are getting rich, while you are holding the bag. Sure buy them cheap, sell them quick, and get out of the space.
Mike Mann doesn’t need our pat on the back, guy owns seo.com and many other great names, I am sure he is set for life in a single domain sale if he desires to do that.
Consider what he gave you a gift.
I believe going from .coms to new gTLDs is a difficult change but a future necessity.
2 extreme opposite positions – Mike Mann’s and Paul Stahura’s – that are both patently absurd.
Yes, it’s true that the new TLDs can confuse consumers. That’s not my private theory. It’s what clients tell me about their customers. It’s why they ask for help securing a matching .COM at considerable cost.
But it isn’t true that the nTLDs necessarily look cheap, as Mann says. Some suffixes do look 2nd rate. Some look just fine.
As for Paul Stahura’s claim, well, people hand-register .COMs all the time. Frequently very good names, which either get put to use directly by the registrants or sell in the aftermarket.
we started this 2 years ago .. and there is still nothing wrong with a trade.domains or newyork.cab (ok, the renewal sucks)
most domainers are not able to think out of box. still thinking and comparing with com. but 99% on earth do not care and dont know what com, de or me means. most people will rate and trust in the pagedesign.
Mike Mann brings up solid points in this article. I agree with a lot of them.
Thanks for sharing.
-Omar
He himself confused what to do with his expensive dotcom portfolio because of no sales effected due to hundreds of new gTLDs released in the market giving plenty options to end user buying domains as per their requirement and leaving no room to Mike Mann to sell his domains.
HugeDomains are far better than Mike Mann comparing pricing and keywords
GTLDS = Good To Lose Dollars, Seriously!