Just a thought on gtld's

[Bailey]

Isn't about time for 'us' the members of Acorn started to widen our discussions/sales on the gtld market. Sure I appreciate there is a section (sub-heading dedicated) to other/.com etc. But lets face it apart from the occasional 'Very decent' .co.uk sale they're (the UK's) are very few and far apart. Years ago there was a rough 'guessimate' that .uk's were roughly worth about 10% of the .com ( how I wish) Now today we've come to accept there really is only one real market out there. It would be nice to see Acorn Step-up as what was ('safesys/Pauls)' old UK discussion board (for those that remember) I can't think of any place better than Acorn, with its membership, to start a real GTLD understanding from the UK perspective.

I'm sure many of us (realistically) value our .com's 100 fold over our uks in todays market. And of course the 'dot Others' market is also doing far better these days - certainly far better, and active than the uk market.

From 'theDom 'dot' com Yep another unused

Of course It depends, How many members of Acorn are into the World-Wide Market But, I'm guessing it's probably around 70 to 80 percent.(if not more) Just needs given a bit more of Provenance as a heading. It doesn't need to take over - just a worthwhile equal footing

 

[DomainManage]

I suppose it depends on what is in ones portfolio. I'd rather have one exceptional .uk than 100 mediocre .com's - I guess 10% of six million is ok enough reason to stick with .uk

It's probably more practically viable financially to acquire a few amazing .uk's than 100 amazing .com's too.

I just think that this is a very hardcore .uk domain forum and I'd be surprised if .com's/ngtld make up more than 25% of many portfolios here, thus lack of interest.

 

[Bailey]

suppose it depends on what is in ones portfolio. I'd rather have one exceptional .uk than 100 mediocre .com's - I guess 10% of six million is ok enough reason to stick with .uk
I just think that this is a very hardcore .uk domain forum and I'd be surprised if .com's/ngtld make up more than 25% of many portfolios here, thus lack of interest.

Cheers for the above comment DM, (Given its Blind/newbie steer)I accept I could be totally wrong but I can't recall making a dot com sale less than x,xxx - just love to see an active market discussed here on acorn. rather than read all the bread-and-butter stuff (particularly my own).

I've never listed my Gtlds for sale, apart from 1 or 3 (wouldn't know what to do with the Money - parked and played around a lot with them though.

love the 10% of £6 million as representative of your awareness (if only your dream market existed). Obviously you didn't read my initial comments on the 10% old School

 

[Bailey]

PS I do value my .coms, around 200 I still hold (and some new extensions) based on seeing all the other Gtld's later taken net, org. info , biz etc etc . (And active - not by one user at later dates) Bit late for Some I accept - but still a Market for the UK minded to explore - just from the UK perspective.

PS Never knew what to do with 'Knitting.tv' either but, got it at standard renewal rates and my mum loves it.

 

[Bailey]

eyes.so (Yes I know it's Somalia) And thank you Somalia for adding two years free why your Country assets were frozen. (And now domains are free to transfer)

I'm Just trying to introduce Peeps here on Acorn to the wider domain Market, Sure there's bad bets to be had. But there is also a decent 'Perception market' to be had. Some you'll win - Most you'll lose. But the Wins more than make-up than the renewal fees (plus a healthy profit) if you've got the time'

Only the UK market (i'm sorry to say) has proven to be a long term bad bet.in general terms. I do wish it were different - but it's a fact, the release of all the unspoken for uk domains (as an alternative to .co.uk) will totally destroy the UK extension market as a identity, is my belief. the UK market is too small to cope with Competitive 'authorised commercial' (officially promoted) identities, and that will destroy trust. Even those playing safe and having both (.co.uk and .uk) wont escape the fall-out

This is not like a 'perception' thing (as with .org.uk, even the private .uk.com) those that have built on .co.uk will learn that the release of UK (as a simple 'promoted' alternative) will cause massive damage all-around.

Could you imagine having exactly the same 'TradeMarks' in exactly the same classes on the UK IPO just 'officially' (on paper) calling them 1 and 2 - is what's about to happen. Can you imagine the (admit short lived) rip-offs to come.

IP lawyers are gonna have a field day ( Lets make that a year or two)

 

[ian]

I spent most of my reading time on this wondering why you've put capitals in strange places, rather than the content

I must be one of the 20-30% that haven't ventured into .com's or gtld's, but then I'm still relatively new to domains, and still feel most opportunities have been missed.

Hard to discuss market value and perception when/if you've held reasonable .com's since a time when they had little value; today the buy in is very different.

 

[aZooZa]

There's bugger-all left to register in the .com zone. I'd guess that 50% of registrations are speculative and don't resolve, or resolve to parking etc. Your only chance to find a FTR .com is to grab the latest zone file; awk and grep out the domain names, and then use grep with regex on the sorted file to look for keywords/combos that may have been missed. Otherwise you're faced with secondary market prices which I'd agree even now, are .co.uk tenfold; more or less - certainly for prime keyword generics. Now that Nominet have released the zone files, you can apply the same tactics, rather than sticking a wet forefinger in the air hoping that a registry has a good enough 'suggestion tool' to offer you up a FTR winner.

I agree with @Bailey that the Nominet .uk exercise was/is a disaster, but that's been done to death in other threads.

For me, there are only two investment extensions; .co.uk (with .uk rights of/or registration to hedge the bet, or .com. If I spoke German, I'd probably include .de.

I'm thus happy with the forum's format as it is.

 

[Edwin]

Plenty of other places to discuss other extensions, but Acorn's THE place for the UK namespace domains. Start diluting that too much, and you lose the only thing that makes Acorn unique. Not to mention that the new GTLD are an opportunity for newbies to lose their shirts a thousand times over, so the less said about them the better.

I'm not saying "never mention a non-*.uk domain", I'm saying that the current balance is fine.

 

[Bailey]

Points taken Guys - and honestly I not even aware of my Capitalisation on words - I do not know where it comes from (I think it has a lot to do with my public speaking - and my old game of word emphasis) I've been shocked myself when I've revisited some recent posts. I've even tried reediting my posts before clicking 'post reply'

I'm thankful I don't do it at all in regular correspondence.

 

[Bailey]

Agree with you on the .de (German market) azooza. And it's amazing how many words do cross the international boundaries. I love to see the (dot) .US taken by a corporate identity as a secondary poor choice to the .com.
You can bet if those two are taken then then there's a pretty good chance the world-wide market loves/likes the word/term

 

[Admin]

@Bailey Thanks for floating this idea. I often struggle to get the clear meaning of your posts but I think I've got the jist of this one. My personal opinion is Acorn has to remain UK focused. HOWEVER (capitals for emphasis ), I do think we should have more .com action here, I'm really not at all a fan of the new gtlds. There was not even a .com section when I took over here at Acorn, I created that. It's now up to the .com holders to use it. I can't do an awful lot more but welcome your ideas. I am working on a couple of rankings on Google.com for this site which should attract some .com domainers. I'm tetering on the border of page 1/2 of Google.com so shouldn't be too long.