Successful Domain Investor Hates New GTLD Domains!

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

12 thoughts on “Successful Domain Investor Hates New GTLD Domains!

  • May 24, 2017 at 1:23 pm
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    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.

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  • May 24, 2017 at 1:48 pm
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    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.

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  • May 24, 2017 at 2:21 pm
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    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

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    • May 24, 2017 at 5:28 pm
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      That is indeed a turn around Paul.

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  • May 24, 2017 at 5:28 pm
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    He has lost on “new” extensions before, flowers.mobi comes to mind, handy to have enough cash to have a flutter though!

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  • May 24, 2017 at 7:48 pm
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    These new domains are like pandora charms and as useful.

     

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  • May 24, 2017 at 9:44 pm
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    I agree with you 100% Ned. I have first hand experience to the confusion the new gTLD’s can bring to a company.

    Our Automotive Hail Repair company works under the banner of Hail.com. When the company was smaller, we simply stuck with firstname@hail.com email addresses.

    Locally (in Australia) this caused a lot of confusion, because you would continually be asked “is that .com.au, or just .com?” – fair question.

    As we owned all the necessary hail ccTLD’s, we made the decision to (of course) keep our .com email, but begin to move towards using our country code domains for the respective offices.

    Following this theme, the USA office, who also wanted to use their own personal domain extension, decided to be a little “edgy” and went with a new gTLD that we owned – hail.repair.

    I can not tell you how many times I have heard our staff quoting their email as firstname@hailrepair.com (a domain a competitor owns), or worse yet firstname@hail.repair.com!

    They now use firstname@hail.us.

    The argument can be had with “more awareness” and “more support” of the new gTLD program will bring more understanding from the public. But how many lost emails can we afford until that may or may not happen?

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    • May 25, 2017 at 6:01 am
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      That is an absolute classic Joel. Thanks for sharing that. 🙂

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    • May 25, 2017 at 8:38 am
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      Cheers Joel, are you getting confusion issues with hail.us?

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      • May 25, 2017 at 8:45 am
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        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

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  • May 24, 2017 at 10:19 pm
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    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.

  • May 25, 2017 at 6:12 pm
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    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)  .

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