25 FREE .INFOs HURT DOMAINSTATE MEMBERS

Look at the start of the flood of appraisal requests:

“MADE-UP.INFO, registered for free, please appraise. Ok, I’ll take $5. Appraise my other 24 great .infos, also offered at $5”

Such posts (the flood is just starting) take the bullishness out of the market. Buyers think differently seeing free junk.infos posts vs. reading at DNjournal.com creditcards.com went for $2.75 million.

All our .INFO domains will be degraded in value, in my opinion, during 2005. However, the good news is, it may just last through 12/31/05. After the drops related to 25 non-renewals clear, we will be boomeranged to a tremendous .INFO recovery in 2006, and better years ahead. Just my gut.

I would love to read a dissident post saying my logic is poor and thinking stupid, .infos will zoom in value immediately.

pro: this "freebie flood" is only likely to affect low tier term reseller to reseller sales, end user decision makers are unlikely to even know of the promotion

con: end user decision makers are unlikely to know/care about the .info tld in the first place

I'm in agreement with you as well as Safesys' comment that $10 is *NOT* going to stop someone from regging a domain.

I feel the reason this campaign is being run is to hide the massive drops that are about to start, Afilias does not want another decrease in the registration level to be perceived as a failure of .INFO.

I think as you that giving the domains away like this does more harm than good in the long run. As Snoopy pointed out to me in chat .INFO reg level could hit 3 million or more by the end of the year .... And what happens next year when .INFO has record devistation when it becomes the first TLD in history to lose 50% of it's registrations in less than a 6 month period? It's nuts.

And then there is the possibilty of spammers grabbing .INFOs for domains to send span from thus possibly posioning peoples view of .INFO....

As I've been saying forever, IMHO, Afilias should have focused on something that targets an ideal niche for their TLD and could help move .INFO recognition forward. My idea for sometime has been personal domain names as I feel .INFO is perfect for this: JoeBlow.info for example. If they want to give away free domains, put in some work and allow anyone and everyone to get their name in .INFO for free, and even throw in a few years of free registration. I feel strongly that would be a benefit, and there are tons of phone directory CD's with peoples names to automate the free registration validation and those it can't could be manually checked -- Yes it's work but I feel the work would convert to real benefits.


That all said *I* need to get my sites up and start contributing to the benefits that I feel .INFO has to offer. So I also need to criticise myself for not having yet made any real contribution to help the .INFO namespace.

My impressions and opinion, based on industry observations and personal experiences over the last 3-4 years, is as follows:

1. The true end-user usage and prices have nothing much to do with what we all live with day and night; i.e. happenings in the domainer's world. If a true end-user do somehow end up at DnJournal.com and sees this week's top .com sale of Viajes.com
at $300K, they would also see SolarStrom.info seeling for $9802.

2. Even in the domainer's world, the appreciation and henceforth value and after-market pricing of the truly valuable names (at the re-seller level) is not going to be affected much by these freebies.
Case in point, this weeks DnJournal's reported sales of Michigan.info for $5k and Asian.info for $1K....apparently both bought by an industry insider and not a typical end-user.

You see, the unique beauty of the domain world has always been that any given name in any given tld can be regged only once ...Travel.info is not going to be diluted in value by CheapTravel.info or WorldWideTravel.info. The only potential dilution comes from more tlds and the exact same name in alternate tld; i.e. Travel.web.

You see, the unique beauty of the domain world has always been that any given name in any given tld can be regged only once ...Travel.info is not going to be diluted in value by CheapTravel.info or WorldWideTravel.info. The only potential dilution comes from more tlds and the exact same name in alternate tld; i.e. Travel.web.

The tld plays as important a part in the value as additional prefix/suffix/compounds do. outside of .com, gtld's are not neutral and can't simply be ignored when looking at the domain as a whole imo.

in other words, the noncom tld *is* an appendage, just like the other words you used above. they all fall into the "settling for second best" category. prices reflect that.

We didn't need a free promotion for people to offer junk names for appraisal, they were doing that before when the names were $8. And people are always trying to get a lowball deal on names, even for premium .com names. I don't think this hurts .info in the long run, though it doesn't really help either. .Info success, in my humble opinion, will be decided by developers of all sorts, from the marketers to the small businesses to the corps. What some newbie, ill advised, inexperienced speculators do will not really matter much imo.

What would be more helpful imo is if afilias, instead of giving names away, either encouraged people to develop their names through site contests, or, if they did some advertising like neustar/level does. Just saw an advertisement for the 100th time promoting the registration of .us domain names on att.net. I still have not seen really any high profile/any profile .info advertising campaigns done by the registry. Either of these would be a better direction imo.

It seems that reseller sales (sales among domaiers) might have cooled a bit and therefore prices deflated...
We probably see the real impact in weeks to come ..
But the premium names remain premium...
if somebody outside the domain market has/had his sights on of them (premium or not ) I doubt this "free info " scheme will influence it's decision , it might however influence the seller's pricing.
The cream will rise to the top... (IMNSHO = Geo and Pharma)

Originally posted by generic
[...]or, if they did some advertising like neustar/level does. Just saw an advertisement for the 100th time promoting the registration of .us domain names on att.net. I still have not seen really any high profile/any profile .info advertising campaigns done by the registry. Either of these would be a better direction imo.

I think this promotion is in fact the advertising you are suggesting. That is registrars are giving .INFO top face time on their sites and Afilias has minimal out of pocket expenses for this advertising.

Also note that .BIZ and .US is own by Neustar and that http://www.neustar.biz is an old established profitable company that among other things is *THE* company with sole authority to issue telephone numbers, exchanges, and areacodes. Neustar has money to advertise since they have many other sources of income.

agree robert, the free domain promotion only really affects the value of domains in the same value park as what can still be registered because people who look with saucer eyes at the difference between $10 and $0 aren't the same people who pay 4 figures plus.

Afilias was supposed to advertise the extension if I remember correctly. And by advertising, I don't mean giving it away, but by showing how it has value, like .us does - the extension of america. .Info could be the extension of the information superhighway, not the extension of poverty () - just kidding but I mean an advertising program run by the registry not registrars. A paid for getting the message out there that there is a viable alternative to .com.

Originally posted by RobertF
But the premium names remain premium...

And there are many other as yet untapped possibilities for .INFO, such as personal sites, which remain untapped and thus does not provide the positive benefits they could.

Anyone with a personal web site in .INFO will have their decisions making influenced when deciding or talking about domains and TLDs with others. So long as people have personal sites in .COM they have no reason to even think about .INFO or any other TLD for that matter.

A paid for getting the message out there that there is a viable alternative to .com.

It'd be wasted dollars if they tried to promote it on that basis imo.

But even better - make a site contest - encourage development, not registrations.

Originally posted by safesys
It'd be wasted dollars if they tried to promote it on that basis imo.

Yup. So long as people here keep thinking .INFO == .COM they are their own worst enemies. This free campaign is itself kinda sorta doing that very thing,

"It's just a domain so lets differentiate based on price for 4 months" [sic]

Maybe safe but some sort of registry sponsored advertisement would be nice. They were suppose to do it. .US does it. They should promote its strength.

I don't think the personal direction would work. Thats more the domain of .name imo. A nichey waste of an extension with a lot of applications.

You register a lot of personal names ili? (j/k)