Morning Folks!!
Are you easily swayed? Do you have a weak fortitude? Do you take the position of whoever you spoke to last? Another words are you a 'Wet Noodle' and just go where ever the breeze goes? Then again are you so set in your positions that no new evidence can sway you? No new information have value? No new information change how you might look at something?
I am sway-able. But it's not an easy job to have me change a position on a given subject. I can only do it methodically. One grain at a time and putting it on the scale and then re-weighing the new evidence to see if the scales have been tipped in a different direction. It's a procedure I do with everything in life. I clear off the irrelevant and give weight to each and every piece of true evidence.
Emotion is never involved at this point and seldom is. Facts are not emotional. Weight is not emotional. Evidence is not emotional. Information is not emotional. So when you limit or even exclude emotion, things look differently. Then you can always add the tint of emotion as you see fit afterwards. Separately. Like salt and pepper. Emotion might just be a sprinkling.
I think separating the emotion may be the single hardest thing to do. You can't always do it. It is always there. But you have to know when to factor in emotion and when to leave that emotion out of the equation.
The day you stop taking in new information and processing it.....you are DEAD! You are STUCK! You can only just rot away. The day you stop learning is the day you die whether you breathe or not.
And today, life moves so fast that if folks would slow down they would see incredible opportunity. Folks miss opportunity because they pass the exits of opportunity because they are in the left lane flying at 150MPH. Slow it down and you can have more options. Slow down and it is like magnifying things to see clearer.
When I listen to an idea I am completely open minded. But as the story goes on I get to shoot down assumptions the other party might be making. Usually because the number is based on a wish not a fact. Nothing proven. If it can withstand my assault, THEN there is something there. The key of a good idea is to try and shoot it down. If it can withstand the attack, then it has a viable chance of working.
So for me to be swayed, I have to have evidence that holds up to the scrutiny. So every new grain of information I get on any subject has to be put on the balance scale and re-calculated. Based on that, I am sway-able.
So we get to .whatever which for many is the single biggest question or even obstacle facing them. I have a panel at TRAFFIC. 'Do you See What I See?' See, I want to see .whatever through their eyes and then put it on my scale. What will they say that would sway me? Wishful thinking and grand ideas won't do much to move the needle.
Explaining what will change and WHY the consumer will adapt is more important. Explaining is there investment to be made or is this simply a clever way for registrars to make money? (That may not be a bad thing. That's Capitalism. Lead by a corupt ICANN of course)
The .mobi 'Regsitrar' might be successful but those that invested in the extension have not had the same success. Same with .Co. Great for the registrar, but a disaster for the end user like Overstock and investors like us. Point is even in a success, it is a fractional success. Not everyone up and down the chain is a winner. When that happens, I see a flaw. In the case of .whatever it comes in the form of a leak to the .com and the ONLY question or variable is HOW BIG IS THE LEAK? And when the answer ignores that part of the equation, it becomes hard to be swayed.
Domainers have reacted to .whatever like mind control. They just buy into these things without the evidence. They are easily swayed and if you are easily swayed then you become fearful. Snap out of it!!! It's not a threat!! Its an expansion. Manhattan won't collapse because Wichita is expanding. DUH!!
This is a simple equation from an investor and end user point of view. How can anyone in their right mind believe .com can or will suffer? Short term? Possibly. Long term? Are you kidding me? The leak will determine the value and ALL willl leak. WE know that, they do not. But they will LEARN! And when they learn, your dotcom counterpart of .whatever, goes through the roof. They are trying to scare you so you will drop your pants and it is working!!
They can build the mall right behind our small corner. But as long as we own that small corner, we can open almost any business and have a degree of success, while the mall loses business every day you are there. Whether it be in not enough parking. Not enough access. A competing entity. Whatever the case. Having owned that corner property before the mall was even thought of puts you in a pretty strong position regardless of huffing and puffing. So while they negotiate for a million this way or that way, they lose $10 million in time wasted and customers lost and other intangibles that exist but can't be measured. Like 'Good Will'.
Ya think Saveme.com.br has more or less goodwill then this time last year? What was the cost? What was the damage? What was the result of a self inflicted wound? Can anyone even measure it? Does ignoring it make it go away or help?
I think most surprising of all is after the loss he does not come to the table and get real. He is now infamous and I feel great to have been part of that. To help sway people and how they see things. People know right from wrong and THAT is the #1 way to sway! But he also missed an opportunity to rehabilitate himself and his reputation. He could be a Poster Boy with a message and he did not recognize it. Maybe even get what he wants, but he has to be willing to deal like a businessman not as a bully ad worse. He bullied for a few months and I get to repay that for a lifetime.
Saveme.com case will save more than just me. It will save you too. I am certain that companies that had been targeting me had to rethink what they were about to do. Is it worth risking their entire business and livelihood on a Reverse Domain Name Hijacking attempt? The 'Scarlett Letter' that WE have to enforce until there is a criminal penalty.
Ask Howard. I was waiting for a case like this since the day we met. One case that would be so clear and so overwhelmingly off the charts that I would be able to do my schtick backed up by Howard and sway opinion with right from wrong. That leads to the emotion you want in this decision. You can separate the emotion. The passion. And knowing this was the key we would all need to move forward through the jungle with less attackers because would-be attackers have so much at risk.
So we can sway in an effective manner and the number of Reverse Domain Hijacking decisions are becoming more frequent. That marks the beginning of the end for this practice. We have swayed opinion by proving something to be very wrong and then being able to have others feel how it would be like if it happened to them.
So I ramble a bit. But it is all connected. It is all from the same thread. It is all what we are dealing with more than any other thing besides paying the bills.
Sales is all about swaying. A customer comes in with their defenses at 100% strength and it is the job of the salesmen to melt that wall away. To gain their confidence by being knowledgeable and truthful. By being able to sway them from the point they came in the door to the sale as they left the door. That is the big sway. Each of us has to be a salesman but you sell from knowledge and comfort and no tricks at all. You sway. Sway is the dance that makes the world go round.
Last nights debate was all about 'Sway'. Thing of all the things you do or involved in where 'Swaying' is the key.
Have a GREAT Day!
Rick Schwartz
-----
Furkat
What should the average speed of”driving” be to see the opportunities?
Scott Alliy
the new GTLDS are as perfect storm as were the early .com IMO. Speculation is rampant will they work won’t they work will people buy them? use them? but no matter the gamble effect and human emotion is at a fever pitch and will rise more as ICANN GTLD deadlines come and pass.
A video on domain sherpa [one of your picks for a good domain name service which I agree BTW] was released about a GTLD advisory services company. My point … opportunities are here already even though the GTLD extensions have yet to be awarded officially.
So what are we doing at my co? We are stocking up on GTLD services names (86 names currently) to be ready to assist and advise the advisors LOL. See they may be experts at their craft in the legal profession but we are experts in our craft.
Each domainer and or domain investor no matter their style or interest should spend some time looking at the GTLD situation IMO. Determine their interest level and use their experience to as you mention look carefully (not passively) for that door or window which may now be opening to or for them.
Tsunamis don’t happen often but that level of energy akin to the level of what can happen with GTLDS is sure to provide much more than ripples in the Internet and domain industry. What will they be where will they be. If you know all the Sunday sports scores by heart you are probably not spending enough time you need to to capture your share of the coming tsunami.
Thanks for keeping this GTLD discussion alive BTW Ready or not … The Future is coming!
Anunt
Which one of you geeks did a whois check on sway.com to see who the owner is and then went to the website sway.com and then checked the whois for swaying.com and then went to the website swaying.com and then found an email on the site and then emailed the owner and then keep on checking for his response…
Slow the fuck down…
You are driving too fast…slow the fuck down…
todd
Since you used Manhattan I will use it in my example and lets say apartments are the dotcoms. If I am a land owner in Manhattan and lets say I have 5 buildings on prime property, I am charging through the roof for my apartments (dotcoms) and making a killing but some new group comes in and decides to build 1,930 (gtld’s) new buildings within the same prime space. What will naturally happen? Its inevitable there is going to be a massive price adjustment considering there is now 1,930 new buildings that all have brand new apartments and these new spaces are going to be marketed to the consumer with massive marketing budgets. Yes they may not be as great or as beautiful as my 5 buildings but it saturates the market just like foreclosures bring down the value of homes in your neighborhood so will the new gtld’s. Yes, if you have the greatest dotcoms your value may not drop that much but I can promise there will be an adjustment. Everyone has to be realistic in their thinking, its not just one or two or even three new extensions coming. Its 1,930 new extensions all being blasted at the consumer basically at the same time and unless dotcom plans some new marketing they may get lost in the shuffle.
This is a quote from one of my favorite movies”The American President” -“People don’t drink the sand because they’re thirsty. They drink the sand because they don’t know the difference.”
The consumers don’t know the difference this is why they will buy the new gtld’s.
Slender Sea Robin
@ Todd
Your example is off. The new apartments are not located in Manhattan. They are located in Oklahoma. Oklahoma prices don’t affect Manhattan.
If you look at coins, baseball cards, property, etc…. the best of the best goes up 500% to several thousand percent, where as the less desirable coins, cards, property, are lucky if they hold their price or even go up 50% over a long course of time.
An MS-70 grade coin is like .com. A MS-65 grade is like .net, MS-60 like a .org…..everything else is common coins you can find anywhere that are not coveted to a large degree.
Just go look at historical price changes. The BEST OF THE BEST is what goes through the roof in price and becomes almost untouchable unless you have a lot of cash.
Most of the folks that go with the new TLDs will realize their error and will have to step up to .com if they want great success.
todd
In my example the apartments are in Manhattan and just so you know Wichita is in Kansas.
Joao
Todd, you’ve builted a ghetto in Manhattan! Tell me, do you really think that google will become google.lol and leave their .com, without even making a forward?
There will be nice ntlds, but they will be very specific and probably very restricted as well. Because if they want to become mainstream, they will face the already established and massively advertised .com
Anunt
Dot com will remain king but the value will go down as new gTLDs keep rolling out.
This is just phase one…there will be many more new gTLDs coming.
Google will be the big winner!!!
Show us the money...
My recommendation to anyone is whatever you do just take one step forward each day. Each day add an incremental piece. You will be surprised where you end up after a few years. Don’t look at the whole picture and think it’s insurmountable… just one foot forward. You really can go places with that mentality.
SerryJW
ANUNT..As a total newbie, I think you are incorrect. What I see happening is DOTCOM will become MORE valuable and most will not be able to afford them. They will choose a great name with DOTNET or DOT ORG or DOTWHATEVER. We have a society of have and have nots. THEY are wiping out the middle class. As a brand new start up home based business, THOUSANDS $$$ is not realistic.
Rick deals in a whole different league where he can demand hundreds of thousands AND a piece of the profits. That is not something 99% of domain end users can do.
Privy Domains
Nice thought thought some may not agree…
Like in stock market generally good leader stocks tend to outperform but for astute investors the mid caps perform better over a longer time frame.
Also some times even the true blue chip stocks fall like who would have imagined that Kodak, Yahoo etc could fall like this.
It all depends upon your entry exit times.
Also nobody is speaking about the market disruptor”Goggle”. Some may love it & some may hate it but the truth is it has the power to disrupt the whole game with its market share & reach.
The recently launched EMD (Exact Match Domain) Panda update from Google has the potential to harm all EMD’s whether in any TLD.
Just go to any webmaster forum and already people are saying that they are now much less interested in EMD or Keyword domains. In the end these are the end user customers / developers whom we all need to survive ………………
Chadi Ghaith
Its funny I know few people who are easily swayed by whom they listen to last yet ironically they’re in position of power, and so they keep each one around them so damn busy and creative tryin to compete for their final decision. Those people are not easy when they’re in power.
Anyways, for some reason am not worried about this new .whatever cz I feel its chaos will drive many to hold on more tightly to .com; and on a customer level, people will always be inclined to type the .com of any domain like they’re inclined to look at the date of a wine bottle.
Concerning the .co , I will always see it as a special case of its own (and co as an extension tht stands for company has a long history that dates back prior to the internet), but I think its most attractive for company names than for generic terms. A company names Hypco will definitely find it attractive to own HYP.CO or HYPCO.CO and there are tons of companies around the world which end with the extension CO but still there isn’t tht much awareness to the internet beyond registering an online presence rather than running a business in itself.
As for generic .co domains like GreekCuisine for instance, I don’t think any extension will ever compete with the .com
I must admit, I was swayed by .CO and still am, but i don’t feel the bit swayed by the new .anything yet even still if this anything is a company, .co and .com will still be better than .company
Colin Pape
I think the distinction that many fail to make is between online and offline marketers.
Online marketers generally rely on SEO, PPC, PR & link-building. For them, a proper domain that does not leak or fail the ‘radio test’ is not as critical. For this demographic, more supply in the form of new GTLDs will likely drive down prices.
This will affect the low end of the market, as these marketers generally do not spend as much on domains to begin with as they are typically fulfilling demand for a product or service instead of creating it. Limited demand = limited marketing value.
However, offline marketers that are creating demand for a new product or service, and who are targeting a much larger market inherently have larger budgets and generally real, viable products/services that are monetizable through both online and traditional channels (retail, direct sales, VARs).
Because these marketers are spending real money to execute their campaigns, they must be more concerned about things like leakage, customer confusion, etc. As more information and case studies like the O.co/Overstock.com situation become available (haha – as I was typing this, I actually put in O.com without realizing it), more marketers will insist on the dot com domain that matches either their brand or category, as marketing anything else will not make financial sense.
So, at the higher end, I don’t believe GTLDs will have any impact, positive or negative for dot com owners. More GTLDs may create more confusion in the marketplace, but will likely not add more value to the proper dot com, unless someone makes the poor decision to actively market an alternative TLD with the same string. So any benefit would be on a case-by-case basis.
It is already well-proven that online destinations (whether they be websites, social media profiles or other online) are the optimum starting point for the buying process, so it makes sense to drive people online to a specific place.
A marketer can use a Facebook URL if they like, but it’s still shorter to use a domain name. Therefore, domains have marketing value as text can be bigger and more impactful in marketing creative, and there is less chance for typos and other conversion-killing miscommunications.
We will not even take into account the authority factor, ownership of your channels, etc., which also have significant strategic value to savvy marketers.
To me, the real question is when/whether marketers will wake up to the benefits of owning a category instead of building a brand.
Again, I think serious marketers are better to own a descriptive generic domain, as it shortens the marketing message (and therefore the cost of spreading that message). They no longer need to market a brand and then describe it separately.
As marketing becomes more and more competitive on our race to the bottom (there is still a significant amount of cream to skim, so it may take some time), this will become increasingly important.
My feeling is that as more marketers become familiar with the benefits of generics, and great domains make their way into end user hands (let’s face it, the #1 thing holding the values of generics back is that such a huge percentage of them are owned by investors who have not developed them to their potential and highest, best use), the more valued they will be and the more common direct navigation (especially if it’s through a search engine) will become.
Either way, whether brand or category wins, real marketers will want/need the dot com and will not settle for an alternative TLD, no matter what it is. If .info didn’t work, then none of these other ones will, no matter how much marketing is done. People don’t seem to realize that there will be no cross-benefits for branding and consumer recognition if someone is marketing .music or .web, as there’s no direct relation (aside from the obscure technical TLD aspect that the general public does not recognize or care about).
None of these TLDs will receive the same marketing exposure as .com, and so it will always remain as the true call-to-action and verbal/written representation of ‘online’.
A string like .web may gain some traction if it is very heavily marketed by many entities, but at best it will match .info, another great, meaningful string that never really took off. The problem with this theory is that 95% of the serious marketers will be running .com, so an alternative TLD will at best connect with 5% of serious marketers with market-moving power, and the rest will be done by second-rate marketers with no real ability to change perceptions or habits.
Facebook.com will always represent Facebook. Google.com will always represent Google (unless it’s a CCTLD). Those are the two biggest forces with the ability to move markets, and they are already committed to .com.
There is certainly room for domainers to resell alternative TLDs to online marketers, or to entities that market to very savvy consumers (ex. Donuts.co), but I would expect sales to remain at the low end, and true values to be even less in the long term.
One must ask the question, if the flood of GTLDs is going to affect the values of .coms, then wouldn’t the effect on other GTLDs be just the same if not greater? If so, then the entire thing is a moot point from an investment perspective.
My final thought is that people who view Google’s investment or Amazon.com’s investment in GTLDs as confirmation that there is value in this as an investment class should consider the overall percentage of capital that is being put into these strings. Google has billions in the bank, and a market cap of hundreds of billions. It’s not much of a risk for them to put $20-30 million into such a campaign to hedge their bets. I don’t think it’s overall particularly meaningful to the overall market, or representative of the average market participant.
As usual, and as Rick and many others have written, the main beneficiaries will be those selling the shovels – registrars, TLD operators, etc. History has proven time and time again that that is where the money is. That’s why savvy business people like Frank have staked a claim. I highly doubt that these entities will become end users themselves, aside from the bare minimum they need to seed the market.
Domain Names
As stated in the comments, .com will remain king.
The expansion of available extensions will initially attract companies buying up the relevant extensions for brand protection purposes and others for speculation purposes.
There will be newly formed companies and business websites that will use an extension that is more relevant to their business / idea.
As for the privately formed extensions that only the large companies can afford to register, the .com will remain in the portfolio, but will be redirected to the newly formed extension, as will any other extension, as they will safely be referred to in this way.
The only people who will really benefit from these new extensions are the Registrars and associated companies who will have the extra avenues of revenue available to them.
With regard to the ccTLDs, these will also remain just as popular. People have come to recognise the Internet as it is and will continue to default to the .com or specific ccTLD as required when searching blind for a known company or service.
The Internet is not going to grow at a pace as seen in the 80s and 90s and therefore the new extensions will not be a boom as the original TLDs and ccTLDs were.
Only time will see, and in 5 years time we will be able to reflect on our present thoughts.