The market is quickly becoming flooded with acceptable alternatives to .info (and .biz) domains.
Sedo is trying to sell some of its own .info domain names in an auction right now, and takers are few and far between.
The auction is called the “Premium .info Auction”, and I’ll agree that some of the second level terms are decent: inbox, carwash, slogan, grooming, etc.
But why would anyone pay much for these domains? Five years ago I might pay somewhere in the reserve range (100-499 EUR) for these domains. But now, in 2014?
Why would I pay that much for a .info domain when the market will soon be flooded with plenty of comparable, if not better, options such as .web, .site and .website. Or even existing domains like .link and .xyz?
I can pick up Carwash.link for $9.88 right now.
You might like .info more than link, but this is just one example. A year or two from now you’ll have plenty of generic options, and many of the domains will come with affordable annual registration prices.
I write this as someone who owns a handful of .info domains. But I realize that might .info and .biz domains aren’t worth what they once were. I’m letting most of them drop.
And I also realize the good .link and .xyz domains I registered aren’t worth much either. It’s simple supply and demand.
[Update: several of the domain names sold for 1,000+ EUR, including creditor.info, creditors.info and departure.info.]
Are you talking about premium domains or not?
Because neither carwash.info or Carwash.link is a premium domain.
RealEstate.Info is a premium domain. RealEstate.Agency has a $3,600 renewal and not an “affordable annual registration price”.
And what are the plenty of generic options? You mentioned 3 and all these are more or less linked together. And comparing .info with garbage (.xyz) is not right.
All premium domains in these very few generic options are going to either be reserved or marked as extreme premiums.
Do you think that buy.info is a premium .info or not?
I label carwash.info a decent domain.
You’re right that some of the key terms will be reserved across many of the TLDs. But eventually registries will realize the domains won’t sell at super high prices.
There will be around 20 generic domains coming out. Add that to the niche domains that will correlate to some topics and you have an even wider pool of available domains for consumers. That will necessarily push down prices, even if some of the domains are held back (or priced higher) by the registry.
Decent domain but not premium domain.
20 if you count .xyz and .link?
How many of these 20 are as good as .info? 1?
For many keywords there is actually no niche TLD because the TLD is the niche.
What niche domain can compete with gold.info and gold.web?
Prices are going up not down and new gtlds are actually helping with that.
When the bottom is placed so high up then everything above will go up as well.
People thought that they could get realestate.agency for $10 and renew it at that. Well people should guess again.
I don’t think .info is particularly good. The giveaways it did hurt its image.
Supply and demand will hurt .biz and .info. I understand what you’re saying about premium pricing. But I disagree that prices are or will go up on .info and .biz. Over time there will be more and more options, many of them priced reasonably.
The giveaways are now a century old.
.Info is much better than .biz. Always was and always will be.
And we disagree on the “priced reasonably”. From what I see registries are only getting more aggressive with reserved domains and premiums pricing.
The .Web auction will probably cost millions to the winner so I don’t think it is going to be “priced reasonably”.
I don’t see premium (single word noun, nominative form) .info domains losing value, but as Kostas said, those Sedo listings are nothing remotely close to premium. Search Flippa for some premium listings.
Have to side with Acro on this one. Particularly at Flippa, .INFO has been doing exceptionally well during the past year.
Well, that’s not entirely true. Top sales have been quite high, whereas lesser sales have remained very low. What that indicates, I suspect, is that there is less market consensus about .INFO, leading to wider fluctuations in demand than we’d see in something as established as .COM. But when someone wants a .INFO, he’s often willing to pay a premium price for it. So, by that measure alone, there ARE premium .INFOs.
Truth be told, the early .INFO giveaways mean little to people who don’t remember them. There’s a legacy effect, of course — meaning that most .INFOs are still maintained by registrants as cheap add-ons rather than as development-worthy assets. But new buyers have a different agenda. It’s safe to say that speculator interest in .INFO is higher now than it has been for a long time.
For branding purposes, not all keywords sit well beside .INFO. In that sense, it’s less versatile than .COM or .NET. Obviously, it works best for informational sites or services whose sales pitch begins by answering questions. Amazon.info would appear to be limited to the topic of the Amazon, whereas “Amazon.com” always had a different kind of potential.
I do think people will continue to prefer .INFO to many of the nTLDs, and that’s for a few reasons:
(1) It’s familiar and non-trendy. Many people out there are aware that .INFO is a domain extension, but few of them realize that .LINK or .BUZZ or .VENTURES is. They’ve seen .INFO here and there for years. It seems to have deeper roots than a company branded on .NINJA. Irrational, of course, but gut reactions are gut reactions. With .INFO, there’s less concern about how .INFO will be received or judged compared to a .GURU or a .RICH. A new extension may develop any sort of negative connotations by next year, but .INFO has a track record of benign public awareness that is unlikely to change so dramatically.
(2) .INFO is very cheap and run by a registry with staying power. Future renewal costs are fairly certain, and risks of the TLD going under are negligible. While other registries — e.g. .XYZ and .CLUB — are playing tricks on the public and ignoring their customers’ interests, we haven’t seen this happen much in the case of .INFO.
(3) .INFO works internationally. Most of my own .INFOs are Spanish.
(4) .INFO as a term / idea is absolutely basic. And it’s connotations are either neutral or slightly welcoming. As such, it interferes much less with the keyword to the left of the dot. Words like .GURU or .VENTURES or .CLUB or .NINJA possess very strong flavors of their own — flavors which frequently get in the way of branding objectives. Other keywords — for instance, .REVIEWS or .TIPS or .BUZZ — are more limiting in terms of business plan, since they define the website’s services very narrowly.
I’m looking forward and thinking about the next couple years.
Sounds like people are making two arguments against my thesis:
1. .Info is better than a lot of the generics coming out.
2. Because of new TLD pricing of “good” domain names, there’s a floor that makes the good .info domains still worth something.
I guess we’ll have to revisit this in a year or two.
Com
Org
Net
Info
Us
Biz
In that order