Biggest issue facing the domain market in 2013 — Here’s the

How fresh TLDs will affect domain market is a top concern.

Ask people in the domain industry what the “biggest issue facing the domain name market in 2013” is, and a lot of them will tell you its fresh top level domain names.

30% of people who responded to the question on this year’s Reglike survey cited fresh TLDs as the biggest issue facing the market this year.

With some of the fresh domains hitting market in 2013, we’ll start to see what impact these have on existing second level domain investments.

Although 30% of survey takers cited fresh TLDs as the biggest issue facing the market, most think the introduction of hundreds of fresh TLDs will not hurt .com values. 43% think fresh TLDs will boost .com values while 46% think they’ll have no effect. Only 11% think they will hurt .com.

The same can’t be stated for .com alternatives — 55% of respondents think other extensions (e.g. .info, .biz) will take a hit.

Here’s a list of how domain investors rank the 5 biggest issues facing them this year:

1. Fresh Top Level Domains 30%
2. Overall economy 26%
3. Anti-domainer interests (overreaching trademark interests, reverse domain hijackers) 12%
4. Government regulation (SOPA, etc.) 9%
5. ICANN policy decisions 7%