One example of a domain name losing value.
Yesterday Pizza.info sold for €2,900 in an auction on Sedo. That’s about $3,150.
Unfortunately for the seller, he paid $6,180 to buy the domain name on Sedo in 2014.
But hey, he shouldn’t feel too bad. Pizza.info sold for $20,452 on Sedo in 2008, according to NameBio.
The value of Pizza.info has apparently dropped 85% since 2008.
In real estate, the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices only consider homes that have sold at least twice. This way they can compare the value of the same home. This is much better than saying that home values in an area are increasing based on average numbers, such as price per square foot.
It’s hard to do that in the domain name business since there are rarely sales in which the original and subsequent sale are public. Pizza.info is one such case.
It doesn’t surprise me that this domain name has dropped in value. After all, .info is now competing with dozens of other generic names.
Yet the value of pizza.info is propped up a bit by premium pricing on new TLDs. Pizza.space and Pizza.website are available, but they’ll cost you over $5,000 a year to own!
Domain Crust says
The new TLDs will be suffering the safe fate.
If a person had never heard of or seen a .info domain and compared it to all the new TLD’s out there, they would probably think this is one of the best ones.
However, when registries release new TLDs so many people automatically think it is fresh, new, fun etc…. and then they start to piss their money away. They also think they are smart and are looking through the optic of a new paradigm….LOL….and they are on the cutting edge of the future. Too fu*kin’ funny.
Anyone that has been in this business for a long time has read this book so many times. No matter how the story starts the ending is always the same.
Wanna’ buy a .mobi? Mobile phones are hot! Didn’t think so.
John says
You’re wrong!
.info sucks – boring, dry, dull, “antiseptic”
.mobi sucks – awkward, weird, not a common term at all in the US market or vocabulary
That’s whey their value is falling.
I was more or less a naysayer and skeptic before they came along, but some new gTLDs are great, however. The best new gTLDs have what the likes of info and mobi do not in terms of appeal. There are some real gems especially when combined with certain keyword SLDs.
And while we’re at it by the way, I’ll digress to mention Pizza.us is worth 6 figures whether that is recognized right now or not.
Here’s a big part of the equation people seem to be so desensitized to and so familiar with that they can no longer recognize it:
What made “.com” great to begin with? Because it was here first? No, because “.com” itself is the very quintessence of “cool,” of not boring, of pizazz, the “it” factor, or whatever you want to call it. As in, not boring, not dull, not “antiseptic” at all, but captivating and appealing.
And that is exactly what some of the new gTLD gems are while certain legacy ones are not and never were.
Get the picture? 🙂
mwzd says
LOL, you’re exactly the kind of person that Domain Crust is talking about.
Pizza.us is worth a little more than the .info, hardly six figures.
And that too because of the artificial premium reg and renewal fees in the newgtlds.
Oh and just for the record, .com is valuable because of the all the development and marketing dollars that have gone into it in the last 30 years, not because it’s cool.
But you can keep calm and carry on.
John says
No, you’re being contrarian and perhaps deliberately obtuse because of personal bias. I also sold a much worse and much more limited use multi-word .us recently for $xx,xxx and a several word .us shortly before that for mid $x,xxx. There is also a difference between what .us is really worth vs. what *most* people recognize about it now, and the neglect of promoting it the way it could be, but that’s another topic. You have also not addressed what I wrote at all in your statement about .com. Everyone knows that all the momentum of the past several decades factors into the value of .com. But you’ve missed my point about what catalyzed that to begin with. There have been almost as many years for people to realize that .net, .org and some others were also suitable for commercial use, but none have the simple appeal of “.com.”
mwzd says
All existing gTLDs & ccTLDs, along with all the nTLDs combined will take 30 years to have sites built on them do the same marketing spend as sites built on .com, if that.
Look, I’m not a .com fanboy, am a proponent of and invested in various TLDs, but you have to speak from a place of logic.
I’ve sold two .ag domain for $x,xxx each but specific sales don’t make a market.
John says
My reply is “awaiting moderation.”
Dundee says
Great buy for whoever ended up with it imo. I thought .info had been doing just fine – a couple great sales recently including 3DPrinter.info for $8000 @ Flippa. Maybe some more outreach was needed on the auction.
Andrew Allemann says
I think it was an auction started by the domain owner when he received an offer on Sedo. There was only one bidder.
RegisterNuke says
It hurts to see someone lose money like that. Seeing a drop off value of 80% in a span of 7 years is really huge and eye opening. Personally I don’t think it’s going to get any better since there are just so many new tlds out there that it’s just getting a little bit too saturated.
John says
Well while my reply to the first commenter above is awaiting moderation, perhaps because of all the TLDs I mentioned preceded by a dot, I’ll just take this opportunity to tell “y’all” to be on the look out for it. In it I answer the question as to why the commenter is wrong, and why some of the new gTLDs may succeed while legacy ones have not.
Domain Crust says
Actually, .info is cooler than .com, but like mwzd said, it’s all the years of branding and countless billions spent that make .com what it is. How is .com better than .mobi even? Nobody knew what .com meant before NetSol just informed the world what the choices were.
.travel is a pretty cool old TLD also but nobody gives a sh*t because they don’t want to spend more billions climbing over the .com mountain to get people to type in.travel instead of .com. That’s a traffic leakage accident waiting to happen with .com as the beneficiary.
Joe Alagna says
And what about Pizza.Pizza for $4500.00 ? 🙂
John says
TLD.TLD can often be very awkward and undesirable, so it’s not for nothing they are sometimes released into GA by a registry. If America saw “Pizza.us” in a TV commercial one day, people’s immediate reaction would tend to be very positive surprise – “cool!” – and it would almost certainly ignite a new awareness that .us even exists, not to mention likely kindle a few sparks of patriotism as well. If they ever saw “Pizza.Pizza” however, they might still scratch their head and wonder what to make of it even if they were told, unless it was in a Little Caesar’s commercial, a company which uses “Pizza!Pizza!” in some of its ads.
John says
Another aspect to this story that isn’t mentioned is the domain’s metrics. I don’t think that we can assess the market as a whole based on this one domain sale. I would hope that anyone that is going to shell out thousands of dollars for a domain name would check the metrics like DA, TF, CF etc. If the domain has spammy links and needs a detox, that’s certainly worth a lot less in my book.
Sam says
Yeah, no one’s ever used .info except when they thought it was the only alternative to .com. It’s the same problem with .biz: you only buy it when you think it’s the only alternative to .com. .co would have been in the same boat if they hadn’t marketed themselves well and gained the admiration and loyalty of the entire startup sector (as you’ve noted in another post).
Pierre Aribaut says
Does that mean all .info have lost value ? I know some .info domain name that have great value and rank very well (but they are active since years and famous), maybe it lost some value because they didn’t made great things with that domain name, if they don’t have content, sure the value will fall.