.COM: Long Live The King?

by Chris Connor

In the first part of a multi-part series, DomainRadar.com looks at the most popular domain name extension in the world, .COM.

Ask any person not involved in the domain name industry and has not spent much time on the Internet to list the various available domain extensions and very few will list anything besides .com. Now ask somebody who has spent time on the Internet to list all of the global extensions and see what they say. I bet a few people will still only list .com while most others won't get past .org. For further proof of the pervasiveness of .com outside the domain name industry, just look at what happened when the famous "Internet Bubble" finally popped and the stock market crashed. What did you hear back then? Was the "Internet Bubble" also called the ".NET Bubble" or maybe the ".ORG Bubble"? No, this important period of the Internet was also referred to as the ".COM Bubble" (.BOMB in some places) countless times. Thus, anybody who listened to the news in that time period undoubtedly heard .com this and .com that. That's not even mentioning the fact that a plethora of Internet companies like Amazon.com showed off their .com domains on various TV commercials. 

A few years have passed since the height of Internet mania on Wall Street but the Internet continues to become more involved in our daily lives and .com still remains the undisputed champion of domain name extensions despite many more being introduced like .info, .biz, and .us. From a domainer's point of view .com is king as well since the overwhelming majority of domain sales over $10,000 are .com domains. Although not as large a margin between other extensions in end-user sales, even premium sales between domainers are usually .coms. Furthermore, from a personal standpoint, my top five domain sales have all been .coms.  

However, domain newbies and most seasoned domainers should not be completely reliant on .com. Why not? Without question, .coms should be a major portion of your domain portfolio but don't forget that a great portion of  .coms are actually stinkers. For example, I would take a non .com domain like Jokes.org over a .com like eWebJokes.com all day long. To get the .coms that truly deserve a premium you will have to do one of three things:

1. Spend big bucks.
2. Be the first to backorder a name at a non-auction drop catcher like SnapNames.com or GoDaddy. 
3. Buy it off somebody who doesn't know what they have or just need a quick return. 

Trying to manually register a premium .com is like trying to win the lottery. You chances are in the millions to one because people like myself spend enormous amounts of time trying to find hidden gems. I have sold a few .coms in the $xxx range that were manual regs and a few that I have developed as sites, but none are what you would call premium names. On the other hand, my best manually registered domain sale was from a .info in the mid $xxx range. In fact, I have more manually registered sales in the $xxx area from non .coms than I do from .coms. Why? Simply put, the names were better on the left side of the dot. 

Having said all that, a good strategy for domainers without deep pockets would be to research expiring domains for opportunities to pick up a premium .com via a non-auction drop catcher while constantly looking for quality  available names beyond .com. For more info on the other extensions, stay tuned to DomainRadar.com for more installments in this series.  

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