What does it mean that a web address ending in .pizza costs more than one ending in .beer? Or that .bar costs more than .academy? That .church is pricier than .company? Hard to say. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything at all.
Judging from a casual browse, the rental rates for top-level domains (.com, .net, .pizza, etc.) seem to be only tangentially related to the forces of supply and demand. They look more like a big pricing experiment in a sector of the economy that’s in flux.
“It’s not a true market,” says Joseph Cohen, the founder and president of a Brooklyn-based startup, Universe, that makes a phone app for building simple mobile phone websites. “There’s sort of a market, but it’s not very efficient or liquid.”
The most popular domain name, .com, is also the cheapest on Cohen’s site. It costs just $2.99 a month for a package including the domain name, web authoring tools, and hosting. He charges more for .sexy ($9.99 a month) and .farm ($6.99 a month).
You might think that a .com address would be more expensive since it’s more popular. The twist is that the name you want for your website probably isn’t available with a .com extension. So, sure, you can pay just $2.99 a month, but you’ll have to come up with a long, complicated tongue-twister that won’t look good in ads and on business cards.
As in the Cambrian explosion of 500 million years ago, when many of today’s life forms came into existence, the number of top-level domains exploded in 2012 after the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) authorized about 1,200 new ones. That's when .pizza and .beer, for example, became available. So even though angelospizza.com is taken, GoDaddy.com can rent you angelos.pizza. Short and to the point.
Likewise, “If you sell diamond jewelry and no .com is available for less than six figures, you might want to consider .diamonds or .jewelry,” says Chris Boggs, founder of Web Traffic Advisors in Wilton, N.Y.
According to the website nTLDStats.com, the most popular of the new top-level domain names is .xyz, with a 21 percent share, followed by .top, .loan, .win, .club, .vip, and .online. Most of the 1,200 have virtually no takers. By the time you get to #308, which is .poker, you're down to a 0.01 percent market share. That’s frustrating if you’re the investor who gambled on .poker.
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Judging from a casual browse, the rental rates for top-level domains (.com, .net, .pizza, etc.) seem to be only tangentially related to the forces of supply and demand. They look more like a big pricing experiment in a sector of the economy that’s in flux.
“It’s not a true market,” says Joseph Cohen, the founder and president of a Brooklyn-based startup, Universe, that makes a phone app for building simple mobile phone websites. “There’s sort of a market, but it’s not very efficient or liquid.”
The most popular domain name, .com, is also the cheapest on Cohen’s site. It costs just $2.99 a month for a package including the domain name, web authoring tools, and hosting. He charges more for .sexy ($9.99 a month) and .farm ($6.99 a month).
You might think that a .com address would be more expensive since it’s more popular. The twist is that the name you want for your website probably isn’t available with a .com extension. So, sure, you can pay just $2.99 a month, but you’ll have to come up with a long, complicated tongue-twister that won’t look good in ads and on business cards.
As in the Cambrian explosion of 500 million years ago, when many of today’s life forms came into existence, the number of top-level domains exploded in 2012 after the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) authorized about 1,200 new ones. That's when .pizza and .beer, for example, became available. So even though angelospizza.com is taken, GoDaddy.com can rent you angelos.pizza. Short and to the point.
Likewise, “If you sell diamond jewelry and no .com is available for less than six figures, you might want to consider .diamonds or .jewelry,” says Chris Boggs, founder of Web Traffic Advisors in Wilton, N.Y.
According to the website nTLDStats.com, the most popular of the new top-level domain names is .xyz, with a 21 percent share, followed by .top, .loan, .win, .club, .vip, and .online. Most of the 1,200 have virtually no takers. By the time you get to #308, which is .poker, you're down to a 0.01 percent market share. That’s frustrating if you’re the investor who gambled on .poker.
Source
What do you have to say about this?
