events It's bad. No worse. It's sad.

[betthelot]

OK imagine you run a domain business and you sell $7.9 million dollars a year worth of domains but it costs you $18 million dollars to operate the business.
What would you do?
Well MMX owners of such names as .work .beer .london .boston decided to pay the CEO $1.1 million and stop outbound sales.
Did you hear that guys, the main stream bloggers will not pick that up THEY STOPPED OUTBOUND SALES OF PREMIUM NAMES.
They had 13 sales people whose only job was selling premium names in 2015 and it didn't work. These sales people could negotiate the price given they own them and had millions to choose from, a big advantage but it was not financially viable; endusers were not interested.
So a $10million operating loss. They are one of the biggest pure play new gTLDs company and they are hurting like many of them. Will be sold for cents on the dollar within 2 years. Their only hope is .vip launches next month in China.
Invested? Strong sell.
Announced today by the CFO reporting 2015 audited accounts to the London Stock Exchange

 

[dordomai]

Why do you think .VIP might rescue them? .VIP, short for "DOT 'Very Important Person'" or pronounced as "DOT 'Vee-Ai-Pee'" or "DOT 'Whip'"? I don't see value in this extension. And Chinese words don't really start with a 'V' sound, so I don't see the significance of this extension launching in China as well.

Am I missing something?

My guess....VIP will be very successul for 1 registration term... Speculators greed and Hype always works well for a while.

 

[D Haynes]

I dont know much about this subject but Im going to have a guess at what I think will happen...

90% of new gtld registries will go bust and there will be lots of angry people.

I wouldnt go puting money on the ravings of a mad man though...

 

[garptrader]

From the release, $6.3 million in 2015 revenue and $12.2 million in operating expenses. With their shift in focus to being a pure play registry they hope to bring "fixed" operating expenses down to $6 million post-restructuring. While premium domain sales might trickle in, there will also likely be many domains which are not renewed. The release mentions 292k domains under management. Many newbies rushed in to new TLDs and it is natural for a large percentage of newbie registrations in year 1 to get dropped over the following two to three years. I would suspect M&M will have a difficult time increasing revenues merely on registrations alone without either adding new strings (which increases administrative costs). The likely scenario is that to boost operating results they will look to increase renewals enough to boost revenue but not so much to accelerate an expected decline in the registration base. That will be a challenging undertaking as domain investors are price sensitive.

So let's take a new TLD investor who holds 100 M&M domains. I checked pricing on several M&M strings and it appears at Godaddy their strings generally run $25-$40 though .London was $59. Wow! I thought $30 .TV renewals were expensive. Anyway, we'll use $32 as an average and say the domainer is currently paying $3200 in renewals. If M&M increases the average renewal to $40 or $50 each, how many domains does the investor renew?

 

[garptrader]

I will also add one other point about renewals which are $25+ - they make profitability challenging for an investor. Industry turn has historically been around 1%. We now have close to 16 million new TLDs probably 90% held by investors yet most DNJ sales reports of new TLDs are registry sales not investor sales. With 1% turn you would expect a much higher number of reported sales so it is likely new TLD turn is well below 1%. With $25-$40 renewals on most M&M strings, you need to sell one domain of your 100 M&M domain portfolio at $4000 (less 20% commission at many marketplaces) to cover renewals. As I said, we aren't seeing a lot of $4000 aftermarket new TLD sales. If the renewals are increased, registrations will drop.

 

[HotKey]

This is not surprising, considering 99.9% of traditional endusers have invested all time and resources into their precious dot-com. Most all their business cards, emails, websites, marketing and storfront names have been customized to reflect BobsBeerLocatedInPennsylvaniaSweetIOnlyPaid15kForThisLoserName.com, so why should they be swayed to Bobs.Beer?

At this point, the only thing keeping most new namespaces alive are aspiring domainers and savvy endusers. But these are also the people who will reap the benefits of the keyword-rich new gTLDs.

 

[Rick Ace]

At this point, the only thing keeping most new namespaces alive are aspiring domainers and savvy endusers. But these are also the people who will reap the benefits of the keyword-rich new gTLDs.

At the end, you admit that there is an undeniable market for these domains. It may be smaller or larger than what is expected, but the point is that there already is a market for these new gTLDs. It's safe to say that many won't last. But the more popular new gTLDs are not only here to stay, but are also starting to pick up on developed sites.

Just searching through Google for a certain topic now leads me to a few sites based on .xyz. And Google has stated it wouldn't discriminate search results based on TLD.

 

[MasterOfMyDomains]

Since you couldnt afford travel.agency or pc.guru we have been waiting for your next 2 .adventures
I see travel.agency is just a blank page with for sale in the whois.
So it was sold to another investor
Someone has a nice landing for sale page at pc.guru
After all the pumping you did, arent you glad you didnt buy those.?

88% of these new extensions will fail
.info is still a flop .horse will be no different.
Any idea what your gonna bid on next ?
Hopefully .drama comes out soon sounds like the perfect ext for a few people here at np

 

[betthelot]

Why do you think .VIP might rescue them? .VIP, short for "DOT 'Very Important Person'" or pronounced as "DOT 'Vee-Ai-Pee'" or "DOT 'Whip'"? I don't see value in this extension. And Chinese words don't really start with a 'V' sound, so I don't see the significance of this extension launching in China as well.

Am I missing something?

Yep you are missing something but don't feel bad because the registry MMX also missed it and they have just been very fortunate.
VIP meaning Very Important Person has been adopted in Chinese to mean the same, as they have no character or word for it. BOOM you see it everywhere if you go to china and every Chinese person knows its meaning, to the old man of 80 who doesn't speak a word of English to the 21 year old man who loves the VIP massages' he gets once a month as a treat to himself for working so hard.
MMX didnt know china would be a big new gTLD player or that VIP resonates so well in China when they applied for the string; so fortune is shining on them but no doubt they will mess it up as they have no one on the board who has any experience in selling domains.

 

[betthelot]

i cant understand what you are talking about...

Pretty hard to break it down any further but I note you are a new member, so if you want PM me and I will give you my mobile and I can then talk it through. Its hard to know where to start without speaking to you as I don't know your knowledge on all things domaining

 

[Casey L]

This is one of the most common failures amongst businesses throughout history. They think that making a dozen new extensions will equate to a dozen times revenue, while being obtuse to supply and demand. They think if another registrar sells 100 .coms for $10 each, we only need to sell 1 .hotgarbage for $1000 to be just as successful.

It's not impossible for these new extension companies to be successful but they have to realize the current state of the domain industry first and work with that in mind.

 

[DNScholar]

I think after 50 years i.e. around 2065 AD when the present population of 7.5 billion reaches around 12-15 billion people and I assume out of that around 8-10 billion will be online at that time than all these extensions will be hugely popular because sheer volume of people browsing the Internet. But presently with Internet population of around 2 billion I doubt success of so many extensions.

 

[Arca]

Yep you are missing something but don't feel bad because the registry MMX also missed it and they have just been very fortunate.
VIP meaning Very Important Person has been adopted in Chinese to mean the same, as they have no character or word for it. BOOM you see it everywhere if you go to china and every Chinese person knows its meaning, to the old man of 80 who doesn't speak a word of English to the 21 year old man who loves the VIP massages' he gets once a month as a treat to himself for working so hard.
MMX didnt know china would be a big new gTLD player or that VIP resonates so well in China when they applied for the string; so fortune is shining on them but no doubt they will mess it up as they have no one on the board who has any experience in selling domains.

Personally, I can't recall having seen the 'VIP' term being used much in China (at least not in a way that stood out to me enough to take notice).

I don't see a particularly strong correlation between a term seeing some popularity in China, and it doing well as a ngtld there. This extension will not succeed in terms of actual end-user adoption in China, its not generic enough for broad usage, and the word itself is too foreign. At best there will be speculators trying some pump/dump scheme with it.

 

[DomainVP]

I think most domainers that kept the pulse on what was going on with gTLD's knew that the eventual end is a bust.

The whole program served two purposes;

1.) Generate income for ICANN via applications for new extensions.
- Literally pulling money from thin air in the multi-millions.
- Expanding profit sources from renewals. Win-Win for ICANN.

2.) Increasing the value of the .COM namespace.
- Don't think for a second that gTLDs were designed to replace .COM. If you thought that, you just weren't following the money.
- Oversaturate the extensions advancing .COM dominance.

Yes, there are valuable gTLD domains, but we all know by now that they are sold off at a premium price. So I can acknowledge that there are some good gTLDs but the majority of them are just poorly marketed crap sold by registries looking to make a buck on the possibility that the world would want these extensions.

There was never a need for them, and it was just a win-win money game for ICANN and every major player with influence that hinges their business on .COM.

 

[Wannabean]

I don't see the reason to ignore you - just state clearly your agenda.
People who defend new extension either invested a lot of money in them or work for registries.
People who post 10+ threads to bash them... ??
If you have good reason - I would love to hear it.
"I don't like them" doesn't sound like a sufficient explanation for such a dedication.

My guess is verisign agent. I don't particularly agree or disagree with the OP but they do seem determined to make a lot of noise about the shortcomings of ngtld's, whilst ignoring the successes.

 

[DomainVP]

whilst ignoring the successes.

Please list a few.

 

[dordomai]

.) Increasing the value of the .COM namespace.
- Don't think for a second that gTLDs were designed to replace .COM. If you thought that, you just weren't following the money.
- Oversaturate the extensions advancing .COM dominance.

In my opinion they were designed to replace .com. At least that what some of the major players hoped when they entered the nGTLD game. They hoped that flooding the market with hundreds or thousands of extensions would make .com disappear.

It didn't work of course. 15 years too late.

 

[bobbarato]

I don't get how they are spending $12-18 million a year? Advertising? Hookers and blow?

What's the annual recurring license cost for a tld? The server/network cost can't be very much. ( I used to work IT - I know dev cost <=> backups and maintenance.)

 

[Ram G.]

Hookers and blow?

Are you talking about ICANN?

 

[bobbarato]

The 3 Rules of TLD Club:

1. Don't talk smack about ICANN.
2. see rule 1
3. see rule 2

And if your sales staff are costing you more than they bring in, they aren't sales staff, they are cost staff.

If I owned a tld I'd hire a small group of witty social media posters that used very attractive female avatars and listed my tld in their profiles.

 

[DNScholar]

The 3 Rules of TLD Club:

1. Don't talk smack about ICANN.
2. see rule 1
3. see rule 2

And if your sales staff are costing you more than they bring in, they aren't sales staff, they are cost staff.

If I owned a tld I'd hire a small group of witty social media posters that used very attractive female avatars and listed my tld in their profiles.

I like social media thing, evolutive thought.

 

[Wannabean]

Please list a few.

Oh come on there's been loads and loads of big sales and you know it.

 

[dordomai]

Oh come on there's been loads and loads of big sales and you know it.

I think he was speaking about extensions not individual domain sales.

 

[Wannabean]

I think he was speaking about extensions not individual domain sales.

In that case it's early days really but .club has done well and so has .xyz

 

[garptrader]

.XYZ has a lot of registrations and registry sales. How many new TLD portfolios are generating positive cash flow (net sales after commissions exceed renewal costs)? I am sure there are a few but I am sure there are far more that will be dropping domains in 2016 and 2017 and 2018.

 

[betthelot]

Personally, I can't recall having seen the 'VIP' term being used much in China (at least not in a way that stood out to me enough to take notice).

I don't see a particularly strong correlation between a term seeing some popularity in China, and it doing well as a ngtld there. This extension will not succeed in terms of actual end-user adoption in China, its not generic enough for broad usage, and the word itself is too foreign. At best there will be speculators trying some pump/dump scheme with it.

This is what globaltimes.cn Chinese publication says......
Three decades into China's opening up to the outside world, a growing number of loan words have been absorbed into daily use, ranging from WiFi to GDP, NBA and V.I.P.