Love him or hate him, it’s fair to say that Rick Schwartz has been one of the most successful domain investors of all times. He is known to those in the domain world as “The Domain King”.
This Sydney Morning Herald article about him was published in 2008 – “Domain King’s Rivers of Gold”.
He used to write Rick’s Blog – and he was never shy about making his opinion known! One of his favourite sayings was that most domains that domainers bought were “pigeon shit”!
The Rick retired in 2015 – but just recently, he’s come back into the market. And whilst he’s no longer a blogger, he has discovered Twitter! He is now a prolific poster on that medium, and as usual, he doesn’t hold back! His handle is @DomainKing . It’s worth a daily read imho – he also has many people responding to him on their (either agreeing or disagreeing).
Rick Hates The New GTLD’s
Since I took these screenshot of his recent posts about the new gTLD’s, he has posted a lot more. I love the first one in particular!
Frank Schilling from UniRegistry Replied!
One of Rick’s tweets above was a not so subtle dig back at Frank.
Not that my opinion matters one iota, but I am absolutely not a fan of the new gTLD’s either. The only ones that possibly work are those that “span the dot”.
What do you think?
Ned O’Meara – 24th May 2017
Totally agree Ned. Span the dot only.
The whole scheme has been undermined by the confusion between names like .car, .cars and .auto, crazy inconsistent ‘premium’ pricing and lack of transparency around renewal costs.
In my view Frank wouldn’t be a fan either but for the fact he is selling them. He used to slam ntld’s relentlessly on his blog.
Even Ausregistry seems to be gradually admitting the ntlds haven’t done so well,
2015 vs 2017
2015
“No matter how you spin it, the introduction of new Top-Level Domains has created increased competition.”
https://www.ausregistry.com.au/product-innovation-will-produce-the-next-3-million-au-domains/
2017
“In terms of gTLDs, early indications in global trends suggest new gTLDs, although still with very small market shares are not impacting the ccTLDs greatly (at least in terms of volume).”
https://www.ausregistry.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/BTD_Issue_11.pdf
That is indeed a turn around Paul.
He has lost on “new” extensions before, flowers.mobi comes to mind, handy to have enough cash to have a flutter though!
These new domains are like pandora charms and as useful.
That is an absolute classic Joel. Thanks for sharing that. 🙂
Cheers Joel, are you getting confusion issues with hail.us?
Hi Snoopy, the .us does seem fairly well received. With that said we do have the individuals .com email pointing to the .us. I have not monitored the amount of emails that land to the .com first.
Definitely a lot less confusion with the .us than the new gTLD
ccTLD’s all the way. I never bought a single gTLD and never offered to sell them when my phone was hot with people trying to get me to sell them last year.
As I have always said, the new gtlds will only do 3 things (1) Confuse the public as to where a specific company’s website is (2) Cause a lot of lost emails and traffic (3) Cause a lot more UDRP’s and Court Cases as then new gtld users believe they have worldwide monopoly rights on “a” Name (as WIPO caused in regard to .com) .