So yesterday was a busy day for the selection of Registrars selling the new GTLD – .club. Godaddy was leading the pack with a major email campaign to their existing customer base and TV commercials were running continuously during Prime Time promoting the very catchy .CLUB GTLD but the question still remains in a market that has traditionally been very reticent to change – yes we still all remember how well the .TV GTLD went down a couple of years ago.. Is all the hype and mass marketing working this time – are we really entering a new era on the web with these domain extensions and if the answer is yes how will this impact the very busy and yes profitable expired domains market..?

Well when you look at the statistics on the face of it you may say yes the launch has been successful. These new GTLDs have certainly garnished more interest in the last few weeks than anything that has really come before it. With all the investment though that Registrars such as Godaddy and Donuts have ploughed into the marketing you wouldn’t expect any less – would you?

In the first day over 25,000 domains with the GTLD .club was registered which tips the total of new registrations to over 700,000 since their launch back in March 2014. .Guru is still leading the pack though with .photography and .chinese following close behind on 35,000 and 30,000 registrations respectively.

All the while as interest in these new GTLD’s seems to be growing, the Expired Domains market has been going from strength to strength – only last week Medicare.com was bought for 4.1 million dolllars – you have to ask yourself why would someone be willing to pay so much for this so called premium .com domain if only they could wait a little longer and pre register the .health version of it for a fraction of the price – the answer is the buyer still felt the .com version was more desirable and would hold its value where as there is still  much uncertaintity around the future of the new GTLD’s…

With many prominent Domain investors openly questioning the long term validity and staying power of the new GTLDs and even I am interested to see how the infamous Google algorithms will treat these new domain names, it seems that Registrars like GoDaddy are focusing their marketing efforts on the mainstream public rather than the more concentrated Domain trading community – a .club or a .photography domain purchased for a low figure I am sure is very appealing at this time to a small business owner who is less interested in PageRank and SEO than someone looking for an investment to add to their portfolio…

Therefore at this time it appears the new GTLDs will not in the near future be impacting the Expired Domains marketplace – the target audiences are a little different but in the long term this may all change depending on how they hold their value and if these can perform on a parr on Google with the highly desired .com TLD..

Clare Coggins

Clare@Expired-Domains.co