The new year is only a little over 2 weeks away,

What do you think will do well for domainers?

What will do poorly?

What trends do you expect to emerge?

How will the market go overall?

He is my predictions,

-Parking to remain largely stagnant for another year.
-3 letter .com to hit 10k minimum value by the end of 2008.
-12 or more million dollar sales reported for the year.
-Another "annus horribilis" for .tv buyers despite likely increased usage of the ext by media co's, increased usage won’t translate into increased profits due to high reg fees, large losses for many premium names buyers as many of the demand media premium landrush names get dropped.
-Another year of below average gains for .info and .biz. .info to perform better than .biz though once again.
-.mobi to see continuing high prices, though without seeing any real rises (ie stagnant prices/underperforming of market) might be a couple of years before the market as a whole realises the name is a dud in terms of end-user usage.
-Market generally to rise by a good %, but not as big a % as years gone by.
-Big potential wildcard a US reccession which could be a major drag on the market. (not sure how likely this is and just how much of an effect it could have on the domain market)

The 4 letter .com's will be back to reg.

- LLLL.com domains will hit $100 base price, good ones will go way higher.

- Some PPC companies will take a big hit as frustrated domainers will eventually start developing.

- Some ppc companies will change course and provide transparency to avoid the mass exodus of frustrated domainers.

- Middleman development companies will emerge to help domainers transition from pure ppc to either ppc/minisite hybrid model or full development model. Hopefully this will make Bid happy

1.Many domainers and parking companies will be taken to court over TM violations and lose 100 of thousands of dollars thereby pretty much putting legitmacy in our our business by force.TM typos wont get a penny no matter the traffic. Domainers themslves will wake up and realize that tm and brand violaters are hurting legitimate domainers financialy and there will be a rejection of them in the industry at large
2. parked domains will get better ppc based on googles new algorithem for traffic analysis
3. new hype scams will come forth generated by a few key people who invested heavily
4. dot com will remain KING
5. dot com will remain KING
6.dot com will remain KINg

Originally posted by fatter
4. dot com will remain KING
5. dot com will remain KING
6.dot com will remain KINg

Its like predicting: "US will remain the biggest world economy; US will remain the biggest world economy;US will remain the biggest world economy"...(in 2008 that is)

An EU investigation into the .eu and Eurid results in Eurid losing .eu ccTLD for gross incompetence. Cyberwarehousers and others dump .eu domains at the second landrush anniversary pushing .eu below the 1.5M domains mark. All the ccTLD operators in Europe continue to see their ccTLDs grow with .co.uk and .de remaining the blue-chip operators.

A possible curb on domain tasting with a "restocking fee" being introduced. The .com and .net TLD fall back to 65M and 10M domains respectively and only reach December 2007 levels in September 2008.

People begin to develop .mobi sites instead of just parking them.

The parking industry gets a blanket ban from all search engines. The rise of toolbar search hits the direct navigation part of the domaining market.

Localised search forces generics domainers to try and target their pages. Some do it the simple way by using geo domains.

Advertising feed wars. Some search engines might give priority to sites using their advertising in SERPs.

ICANN becomes more responsive to the industry instead of their expense accounts?

Legal action becomes far more widespread and RICO statutes are used against large domainer operations.

ICANN registrar agreement rewritten allowing for termination of agreement if the registrar is found to be domain tasting or being actively involved in organised trademark infringement.

Regards...jmcc

* PPC companies will continue to blame Yahoo and Google for our stagnant earnings while spending on online advertusing will go up 20% again in 2008.

* PPC companies will continue to be amongst out biggest competitors in buying good domains.

* More and more domainers will move into development with many failing, but more importantly, many great successes will happen.

* .info and .biz people will continue to say ... wait till next year.

* quality of names at the "show" auctions will deteriorate in quality.

* spam from people trying to buy names will skyrocket.

* Verisgn will raise fees 7% .. every year from now on.

* Icann will buy out Frank Schilling with their Air Miles earned from their travels around the world.

Originally posted by Shaun


* Icann will buy out Frank Schilling with their Air Miles earned from their travels around the world.

LOL

Nothing too unexpected really:

- many more high profile tm suits making blatant tm infringing domains less attractive

- like-for-like parking rpm's will remain largely static

- there will be a lot more posts about parking companies with people demanding transparency and blaming the se's but finding they can do little about the actual earnings by moving around

- more emphasis on development with plug and play solutions becoming more widespread - along with which will come an increase in the false assumption that development automatically adds value regardless of quality

- non-domainer show auctions will continue to generate poor levels of interest in domains at the higher level

- the wildly optimistic domainer hopefuls of late 2007 will enter into stages 2 through 5 of snoops "5 Stages of Domain Speculation" in rapid succession during early 2008: http://www.domainstate.com/showthrea...threadid=72760 )

- more domain articles citing big sales leading to more newbies registering poor domains and having totally unrealistic expectations as a result

- an explosion of domainer blogs - like someone turned a garden hose loose on a sackful of gremlins

- an increased volume of non-domainer middle manager types entering the business and trying to make a name for themselves through hot air rather than any actual experience/reputation

- more significant portfolio sales brought about by the uncertainties surrounding tm issues and lack of growth in ppc

- a great increase in full internet access mobile devices

- .mobi will continue to be mainly a domainer buy in the aftermarket with prices for domains of like quality at the higher end of the price spectrum falling

- dedicated mobile sites remain fragmented with end users using m.domain.tld/mobile.domain.tld/auto-content selection as much, if not more, than .mobi.

- continued bullish rising in .com values pulling up the value of the other gtld's in the domainer pool by a smaller degree

My predictions:

- Parking revenue will, on average, remain consistent with 2007. Increasing online advertising spend will be offset by traffic quality initiatives at Yahoo and Google.
- Parking revenue for portfolio holders with blatantly contentious domains will decline sharply and significantly before the end of 2008.
- Google and Yahoo will increasingly throw the baby out with the bath water in 2008 whilst trying to improve traffic quality on their networks. They will ban many perfectly legitimate generic domains from been monetized on their networks.
- Resale market for generics will slow down but still show healthy % gains.
- Whilst .com will remain king, many of the larger and savvy domain investors will increasingly be investing in the major ccTLDS.
- .us may be the surprise of 2008 with a number of big dollar sales that will significantly increase its profile.
- Many domainers will turn their hand to development in 2008 without the appropriate skills and knowledge and end up de-monetizing their domains.
- A small minority of domainers come developers will be very successful and fuel the above trend.

Many of the above will not happen if a real recession bites in the US.

I see one of two things hapening with the .mobi. Either their pushing it is going to stop working and the prices will slowly sink, or they'll do some real research on how to market to mobil browsers. They'll give definitive answers (that came from actual research and split testing) on user behavior, eye tracking, click-through statistics, and marketing trends...the kind that the end developers will find useful and help them monetize the mobil world.

- A domainer of some quality and character opens a "vetted portfolio" program, allowing domains to be added onto their feed, taking a smaller slice than the parking firms and yet profiting and making friends.

- .info starts to get legs by virtue of development of .info websites

- Development? Sure, because everyone knows that diversity is key to financial security.

- Domain auctions, to industry verticals, begins to gain traction as all the auction houses and players realize that Moniker does a pretty good job - so they stop playing "Mine, all mine!" and they all agree to channel "event targeted domains " to the different industry event auctions. For example: All agree to pool their best (and best priced) "affiliate marketing" domains to Affiliate Summit, their best internet marketing domains to PubCon, etc. They all realize the benefits "to all" will exceed the perceived loss from giving the live auction reigns to Moniker.

- Noobs? Love the imagery of a "hose on a bag of gremlins". Sounds about right.

- PPC companies continue to clean house and get transparent or get their clocks cleaned. 1 or more get hit either with a "concert of action" lawsuit (for profiting from cybersquatting) or FTC investigation. Someone may be indicted by 2009.

- Domain centric events start to lose their luster. The smart money looks for ways to affiliate with webdev industry events, such as PubCon.

- At least one of the above predictions comes partially true. Well, . . at least one of the above predictions reveals itself not to be miserably incorrect. Errr . . . ummm . . nevermind.

.com becomes bloated and passes gas ..the stench keeps forces the evacuation of .com

.Ws offers safe haven for .com evacuees at affordable prices ..





longstring .com domains become the next auction hot sector as most short string .coms have settled into longterm housing arrangements..either already moved to enduser or will continue to be held as longer term investment by domainers

.mobi emerges as household terminology as a major "young peoples" vertical adopts the domain for it's portable site.. thus ..

.mobi pricing will remain strong

Developed parking will come up short in it's ability to draw significant vertical or SE traffic , the intelligent content software not intelligent enough..yet

ccTLDS hot hot hot



Cowboys.com investors become irritable and in fighting emerges as they begin to realize they own 1/19th of ... of a parked page that will lose more than half it's traffic in less than a year and fast falling revenues as rankings and revenues start to take a dive after the initial increase in CTR and Revs after the initial transition. (parked from developed)

Those that supported the Parked position will try and sell off their positions on the initial uptick of CTR/Revenues

My guess at 2008:
- good keyword ppc earnings will be much the same as /07 but with a slight increase.
- there will be lots more 6 fig.+ sales of premium .com's than we've seen in /07
- ppc companies will offer a bigger % to their key generic players in order to keep their traffic from moving away.
- my mail inbox will go from 200+ spams / day to over 500
- I'll get another year older.