I was having a three way conversation with two other domain investors about esports.
The conversation was about esports but it turned to domain names when the prospect of finding a project name came up.
I had mentioned that esports names were pretty well mined, with either outrageous premiums in new gtlds or taken in .com.
How about esportsetc.com for $11,500.00 or maybe esportsbbs.com for $11,500? Perhaps highesports.com for $23,000.00?
esports.net did sell for $50,000 months back. I mentioned that I picked up esports.video for $8.99 on a handreg and thought for the price that it was worth the speculation. They are playing videogames so I think it’s better suited than say esports.shop for $6,250 a year or esports.ooo for $12,498.75 and a renewal of $124.99.
Let me make clear I was not offering anyone on the call the domain name. The conversation was more about development and after I mentioned the esports.video name, the conversation got lively. One gentleman liked esports.video and the other immediately shouted it down saying he could not trust a business run on anything but a .com. “I am sorry but I would think esports.anything is running malware or some other scam.” So I asked if it was just about esports.video or any business on any new gtld? They went on to say they would not trust any business on any extension other than .com period, that they were not picking on esports.video.
The call wrapped up after the other person on the call, who liked the name, called him an idiot.
I laughed and hung up, but it is something that those developing new gtlds have to think about. How many people who know nothing about your business, dismiss you right away because of no .com?
So leave your opinion
How old were these people you were speaking with?
Both late 20’s.
A lot of people would see domain.ntld as a site trying to pretend to be something else in my view. It is missing the .com part and has a dot in the wrong spot.
Will they type their credit card into that site? Would they even click on a link?
Idiot sounds about right.
Coming from gaming I can relate to trusting issues with new gTLDs. Especially, just as one example out of quite a few, so-called “Skin trading websites” for Counter-Strike:Global Offensive are a current thing people are talking about.
If a scammer has the chance to get a .whatever for less money than a .com , he will likely choose the .whatever. Yes, we see a lot of .com scam domains in that skin trading scam scheme as well, but new gTLDs are new, very new for the common user/gamer. And if new gTLDs start off with scam sites then the trust is gone.
What I am trying to say is: People got contact with their first .com or .net or .org when they started using the internet and all was fine, like your first email address provider or the first search engine etc. Over the years they may have stumbled upon a few scam / malware sites, but that wraps the common internet user experience up pretty much. Nevertheless for new gTLDs a lot of “first contacts” for common users are malware / scam sites right away. There was no chance of building some trust towards a .whatever. Also, we do perceive .whatever and .com as something different than the common internet user. We know how it works, we know what it is. They don’t. People would complain about spam, now they accept .com spam but complain specifically about .xyz email spam because they noticed a peak and they noticed it is something new, something they’ve never seen before. So the instant association is: .xyz is bad because the first interaction with it was 10 spam mails a day.
So yeah, maybe the guy is an idiot because he’s not open to learn something new and try to understand why things are like they are, but he’s not an idiot because of his perception of things, which is just an echo from how the majority of internet users perceive new gTLDs.
esports.webcam
Depends Raymond.
Lots of extensions I have no idea about, so yeah, I probably would if it was a new gTLD that came out in the last few years.
This week I received a $100 offer on a two-word .COM from a web design / internet marketing agency. They operate on a two-word .Net. I suspect they were trying to obtain the domain for a project. An end user is the registrant of the .Net equivalent of my .COM even though they use a different domain name (a brandable .COM) for their main site.
That’s called a low ball offer. I’ve asked why they do it when I receive them. Usually the answer is “sometimes people accept and sell them”.
New extensions are bad. Too many cowboys, too little ethics, and a terrifyingly poor market penetration for link recognition as they are primarily sold to gold seekers in the domaining sector. To use one is to knowingly and willfully compartmentalize market access, grossly increase marketing and advertising costs, reduce communication effectiveness, enhance traffic loss, and create a legion of secondary issues regarding email, security, form use, hosting options, country propagation, and more. A good 99% of the population does not even intuitively or instinctively recognize most of the new TLDS within text and marketing as links, let alone operable web addresses. And I’m not even factoring 12 month sustainability issues and mass platform loss in an industry so poorly regulated and avoided by thought leaders, that major new GTLD groups can literally raise prices from $250 to $5000 overnight, to ensure lifestyle continuation as they live the life in places like the Grand Caymans.
Way to go ICANN! In your efforts to “free up new domain names from past cyber squatters who restrict new innovation”, you succeeded in creating thousands of new confusing, non-adopted, non-marketed, non-regulated creations of chaos. And then you GAVE these to the same past cyber squatters allowing them to pick out millions of their favorite names pre market launch and sit on them as future premiums. The first thing most of them did was to falsely register a ton of unusable domain names at no internal cost, to give their public (largely buyers/sellers in the domaining sector) the illustration of market adoption.
There is no integrity in this false market being created so a handful of idiots can eat caviar seven days a week on licensing and auction fees.