Reglikedomain industry desk

People are buying fresh TLDs when the “matching” .com is available

Would you pay over $1,000 for Metadata.guru when you could get MetadataGuru.com for just $10?

This morning I posted regarding GoDaddy’s auction results for fresh top level domain names thus far. The post included nine domain names that sold for over $1,000 at auction.

I totally missed something very, very interesting regarding some of these domain purchases.

As Joseph Peterson pointed out in a comment, two of these domains had matching .com domains that were freely available to register at the time these people paid over a grand for the fresh domains.

Queens.guru sold for $1,025 when you could have picked up QueensGuru.com for $10. Metadata.guru sold for $1,035 when Metadataguru.com was available for just $10. (Both domains have since been registered.)

So at least four people walked right past unregistered .com domains to bid $1,000 on the fresh TLD versions of these domains.

These people either viewed the fresh domains as better than .com or they got swept up in the excitement and weren’t paying attention.

Are they better than the .com’s? I’d argue not in 2014. Not when you don’t also own the matching .com.

If nothing else, if you’re going to buy these domains you’d invest another $10 to protect yourself, wouldn’t you? In fact, some of the people who paid over $1,000 for domains by now own the matching .com’s, which is probably why they went following the fresh TLDs.

Also on the wire

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