.com is now premium

[Dilip]

Some domains with .com are sold at insane prices. They are available but the price range is mammoth for no reason. Only because they are .com

Is it the end of .com for normal webmasters?

 

[Arantor]

It's been headed that way for a while because gotta make as much money as possible, right?

Fortunately, the wealth of new domains makes it easier to find *something* and honestly, given how we've slowly been adapting to the new domains without it being fuss, that's no bad thing in my book.

 

[Dilip]

There are a lot of normal people who do not know anything about the new TLDs. They simply type .com after the name.

Even worse, they Google the name instead of typing the domain.

 

[Arantor]

The latter isn't a problem, it tends to get people to where they need to go.

The former is more of a problem, but it's not insurmountable.

That's how come, for example, that I had a site at one point called floo.network - and I was regularly getting people coming to the site in search of a popular Minecraft mod with the same name, but my SEO-fu beat theirs...

 

[Niko]

I totally agree!
I had a domain .com years ago.. I was just renewing it for 12€ each year, then went through something and had to leave it.
When I checked again it was worth 6000$ just to have it back 🥸

 

[Cedric]

I totally agree!
I had a domain .com years ago.. I was just renewing it for 12€ each year, then went through something and had to leave it.
When I checked again it was worth 6000$ just to have it back 🥸

The people in charge of making that up are crazy to think it's worth so much. Some registrars just keep an eye out on expired domains and price them very high in hopes of sales.

 

[Niko]

From 12€ to 5.408€ - it's a lot ahah
or maybe I was amazing and made it really valuable 🤪

 

[Cedric]

From 12€ to 5.408€ - it's a lot ahah
or maybe I was amazing and made it really valuable 🤪

That’s the spirit.

 

[Nomad]

SEO treats all extensions equally, there is no need to pay for insane price, except for branding, of course.

 

[Arantor]

It doesn't though, it really doesn't.

It's long been understood that .info is toxic and should be avoided along with .cc, and that .xyz is headed in the same direction. There's just so much poor quality content on these TLDs, especially where the domains were cheapest for the longest time so the content farmers/scrapers shoved their clone sites there.

It's also been understood for years that country-specific domains generally align to country-specific content, with the extension of domain hacks (think .ly from Libya, .to from Tonga, .is from Iceland)