Domain Names,  General

The Extension Agnostic

I’ll start with what a lot of people will consider a fairly radical statement, though those in the know should probably agree – “Extensions are less relevant than the keyword of the domain”. I’ll take Exhibitions.ws over ExcellentTopExhibitions.com any day of the year.

With each new extension you have a subset of domainers who invest most of their money in that extension, then have to go around touting it as the next big thing since sliced bread else their investments will not get them the returns they want.

What it does for the extension is get a secondary rung of investors who will also buy not-so-hot keywords in the extension, that in turn allows the initial investors to point to the exponential growth of the extension and allows them to sell some of their domains at high prices.

These sales are then touted as the ‘definitive’ growth pattern emerging and allows even more fake hype, but almost all the secondary rung investors will lose their investments coz in actuality, aside from the hyped sales, there isn’t much demand for the said keywords in any case, let alone in an also ran tld.

We’ve seen it happen with .mobi, .tv, .asia, .me, .tel and will probably see it happening 100s of times again in the future with the new sTLDs soon to be launched. .mobi aftermarket is virtually non existent now, after the initial hype and hoopla, ditto for .tv. .Asia you can’t give away and the jury is still out on .me and .tel, though initial investors have already started dumping good keywords in these extensions too.

Moral of the story? Don’t believe in hype. If you find a good keyword in an extension you feel you can market, at a price which allows you to profit from it, invest. Else, walk away, no matter how many people are clamouring that ‘this’ extension would change the rules of the game, it won’t, really.

Samit Madan is an advertising professional with almost three decades of experience. He's known as the MediaWizard due to his expertise in advertising & marketing. He currently heads MediaWiz, a leading Media Company.

2 Comments

    • mediawizard

      Thanks Francis. Must add that this article is around 3 years old, a lot has changed since then.

      .TV is now doing great after the 2010 relaunch.

      But in essence the article is still true, a top keyword in an alternate extension is better for development than a long tail keyword in .com