If You Own the .Com You Can, and if You Don’t, You Can’t! Sorry.

Afternoon Folks!!

If you own the .com, you can use any domain or any gTLD you like and not be hurt by it. It can even help.

However, if you don't own the .com, you will lose traffic. You will pay a penalty for all your ad costs. You will pay a penalty for customers lost.

You will pay a penalty because your business growth may be stunted or not even there. They have been sucked up by those extra costs that would generally be used to grow your business. The money you might have actually put in your pocket as profits.

If you get waterproof.shoes you MUST own waterproofshoes.com. You must! At some point you either will own it or go out of business. The guy that owns waterproofshoes.com is gonna make more than you with no expense. YOU are paying for HIS advertising. THAT is why the .com will benefit from .whatever. Folks can argue the point, it won't make them any closer to being right. It is so obvious that anyone doing this as long as we have should understand it. I am glad the end-user won't. That will make me a fortune and you too!

Do a test. Tell 100 folks by word of mouth and see how many get it right. You will be stunned!

So hope Madison Ave buys into .whatever. I hope they all do. There is no downside for .com but there is a HUGE upside. Huge!

Put waterproof.shoes in a Superbowl commercial and waterproofshoes.com will have a record day. Guaranteed! He is growing for doing nothing. Getting advertising he could never afford. It is going to be a windfall for .com the likes of which you could only dream about.

Every startup wants their .com when they grow up.

So here is my next prediction. Most of the domainers that lost in .com will try .whatever and see it is even harder. They will get angrier and more frustrated and will lash out in ways we have never seen before. Why? Because they still don't get it. They still don't know the difference between tin and gold, glass and diamonds, water and poison. They will get angry at me for their own shortfalls instead of learning and grabbing their share of the pie.

Rick Schwartz



17 thoughts on “If You Own the .Com You Can, and if You Don’t, You Can’t! Sorry.

  1. Mark Hershiser

    This was the opening line from my last blog post, it is as true today as 15 years ago, and like I said “any 5 minutes” listening to Rick will be the same message, whether 15 years ago or this post right here:

    “I’m a gambler, not a casino gambler, I gamble on domain names, in the early days I was pretty sure of my investments, getting generic .com domains like SwampCoolers.com, Purrs.com, and StringBikinis.com for a reg fee was a pretty sure bet, at that point it was becoming a no brainer, all you had to do was listen to Rick Schwartz for 5 minutes, any 5 minutes, his message has always been the same, get generic recognizable .com’s.”

    Reply
  2. UFO

    So peeps, the name of the game is to register all the main generic keywords with the new TLDs after them.

    Bankxyz.com
    Pornshop.com
    travelapp.com

    All we’ll soak all their marketing efforts and retain the value of our .com’s….

    Bet Frank S has been super busy on reg’s re this in the last few months as he’s generally on the leading curve.

    Reply
  3. patrick

    Datacenters.com$190,000 waitress.com $168,000 yes the generics are being bought, how they are going to make money off waitress.com is beyond me but the point is if you have a keyword business dot com the money is there and sales like this only add precedence to the next generic keyword dot com sale.
    Look’s like your right again rick the dot com tsunami has started so to all you domainers that have held on to those keyword generics the future looks bright.

    Reply
  4. adriankinderis

    Great to to sum up the current environment. Aren’t we trying to innovate here? Shouldn’t we be looking at where the market is going to be in 5 years and mobilizing towards that. You are assuming that .com will always be king. Fair assumption, but I don’t think it allows for any innovation whatsoever. There are 1,400 folks with some of the biggest budgets on the planet that are betting against you. As I said in my last post you are free to promote your business and extract what value you can but, for your readers I’d expect that they look at new ways to get ahead of the curve (and looking backwards isn’t the best way to do this).

    Reply
  5. UFO

    @Patrick

    Something like waitress.com might sound a bit hard to work with but you’d be surprised at the types of companies that service events and provide supplies.

    Like ‘I want to hold an event and I want food supplied and people to make sure all the guests are happy and we’re having it in a big tent at the racecourse…’…hmmm who should I contact .. thats right I remember that company called ‘waitress’ they do everything… yada yada…

    Recollection is worth so much money. Its why short .com’s are worth so much.

    Reply
  6. patrick

    @adriankinderis. What rick is saying is that the dot com is so prevalent in society that it will be a fight all the way for the new tld’s,it has been ingrained in us since the beginning of the web,i think most new tld have been registerd as a defensive move by the fortune 500 and the registrars because if there is money to be made so be it, some will do well but most will just be fighting to catch up to that dot com.

    Reply
  7. UFO

    @ Patrick

    Thats right. But catering is gone and there’s room for more than 1 catering company in the US.

    Like here in the UK they had LittleChef which did all the motorway rest area servicing.

    But you are right thats a lot of $ unless you are already turning over a fair amount. I think it would be best for a generic supply company to the hospitality industry… uniforms, consumables etc etc… all generic stuff. At least you’d stand out from thisandthatsupplies.com

    Reply
  8. Matt

    Rick what’s your take on say a video media site on a descriptive phrase, say ‘NNNN’ on NNNN.tv and redirecting NNNNtv.com but without owning the NNNN.com

    Reply
  9. DN Select

    It’s not about innovation. It’s about ICANN trying to cash in. IMO, these new TLDs are just silly. Now people have to try to remember the characters before the dot and after.

    Reply
  10. Sebass

    Sorry for the late post, in reference to “if you have waterproof.shoes you MUST own waterproofshoes.com” I think that waterproof.shoes.com would also receive a large hit rate.

    Reply

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