Have a spare $30,000 lying around? You can step to the front of the line.
GMO Registry won an auction for rights to run .shop back in January, paying a (then) record $41.5 million.
It hopes to recoup some of that investment during the Early Access landrush period that begins this Thursday.
Rather than a seven-day early access that competing registries have run, .Shop’s period will run nearly a month. There will be seven price drops during the period.
Starting Thursday, you can pick up a .shop domain name at your favorite registrar for about $30,000.
That’s not a typo, and I don’t blame GMO for trying. After all, Hanes bought T-Shirts.store for about $30,000 during the .store landrush.
Prices drop to about $13,000-$15,000 (retail) on September 3, and drop all the way down to about $150 for the last few days of landrush.
.ShopForRidiculousDomains
.ShopToMakeGMORicher
.Shop is one of the few best of the best.
Although I wish things had never been this way at all leading to premium pricing, it is what it is.
Given the way things are, it is wise to do this. .Shop is that good, so that premium pricing for the best keywords prior to general availability is a good idea under the circumstances. And a long 30 days period is the same.
However…
The same is not the case after the best keyword have been picked off at premium prices. The opposite is true. If they think they can charge a lot for regular registration pricing the way some of the other TLDs are, they are deluding themselves. That’s right folks:
Self-delusion.
Furthermore, premium renewals beyond premium pricing may also backfire big time.
Does anyone know what the regular reg pricing will be?
Don’t forget about .Buy, by the way. It definitely rivals .Shop…
“Don’t forget about .Buy, by the way. It definitely rivals .Shop…”
Does it? English word order doesn’t suffer reshuffling gladly.
“Buy” is usually a verb; and transitive verbs usually precede a direct-object noun. That makes .BUY an unlikely suffix, BestBuy notwithstanding.
Meanwhile, “Shop” is often a noun; and it’s expected to follow a qualifying adjective.
We buy a cake at a cake shop. We verb a noun at an adjective noun. “Cake Shop” sounds more idiomatic than “Cake Buy”.
People have already gotten quite used to the “new normal” in the “lexicology” of the Internet and the reshuffling or reversal of words that often can entail. They are sufficiently accustomed to it by now, and no doubt even search that way “naturally” very often as well.
There are some words that naturally go better with “.shop” vs. “.buy,” and “cake” is certainly one of them. But as an end user you’d want “Cars.Buy” a lot more than “Cars.Shop.” And “Home.Buy” or “Homes.Buy” a lot more than “Home.Shop” or “Homes.Shop.”
There’s no question that great natural phrases using the normal word order with new TLDs are nice. But you write as if life is bricks and mortar and we haven’t had the “new normal” of the Web all these many years. It’s quite an oversimplification to be stressing normal word order by now.
One of the biggest factors you are neglecting is the psychology involved in those two words as TLDs. “Buy” is also going to resonate with and appeal to those targeted souls who are looking and ready to buy. That means sales, transactions, money and revenue. “Shop” would do the same, but it would also attract a lot more people who might merely want to look but not buy.
“RealEstate.Buy” is great regardless of reverse word order, and people know what it means and would tend to respond; “RealEstate.Shop” is downright awkward, even a bit ridiculous. And so on, and so forth…
P.S. I’m still no longer getting any email notifications for DNW, so if anyone replies further I will not know unless I check.
@John,
“But you write as if … we haven’t had the ‘new normal’ of the Web all these many years.”
Are you telling me that Cars.Buy is the “new normal”? I don’t see that kind of domain name in widespread use. If it isn’t prevalent, then how exactly is it “the new normal”? Normally, “normal” is something we actually do or use or see.
What do you mean by “all these many years”? Yes, the internet has been around for 3 decades. But domains like Cars.Buy weren’t even possible until 2014 when keyword nTLDs came along, allowing us backwards to words put want we to if. I promise you, John, I’m not unaware of the web.
You say that “as an end user you’d want ‘Cars.Buy'”. No, I wouldn’t. To me that phrasing looks quite awkward. It doesn’t match idiomatic English at all. Theoretically, language might “catch up” with the internet; but it’s certainly untrue, at this stage, that language is mirroring the construction of Cars.Buy. Few English speakers would regard Cars.Buy as natural, since the word order violates a lifetime of grammatical conditioning, beginning in early childhood and etched permanently into the brain.
Consumers CAN accept domains that strain natural word order. Whether they will is arguable. But it’s no use proclaiming that Cars.Buy is natural simply because the nTLD program has made it possible to register such domains.
If you had cited Car.Buy (singular), then you’d have a firmer footing. That example is a naming convention with precedent. Car.Buy is far less jarring than Cars.Buy. The reason is syntax. “Cars” is a plural noun. But “Car”, in this case, isn’t a noun at all; it’s an adjective. So Car.Buy follows the natural English word order:
Cars.Buy (Plural Noun + Verb)
Car.Buy (Adjective + Noun)
all this creates confusion, what about, .store, .boutique, or carbuy.com, is buycar.com, not buycars.com? or carbuy.store, I think there’s a gTLD for “cars”, buy.car? or car.buy?
And now for the first time in a very long time, my post is also “awaiting moderation.” Had looked like that was over for my credentials here, but I guess Andrew’s plugin or something is acting up again…