Sunday, March 1, 2009

Cheap Dot Com's and Dear Me's? How Come?

Ever wonder why a new Dot-Com domain can be purchased from a registrar for less than eight dollars but the going price for a new Dot-Me is more than twenty dollars? Doesn't it seem logical that the Dot-Com should be more expensive? They are many times more popular: there have been over seventy million Dot-Coms sold and a good deal fewer than a million Dot-Mes. Where is the iron law of supply and demand here?

Aftermarket domain dot-coms have certainly sold for considerably more than aftermarket dot-mes. Love.Me, for instance sold for about thirty-three thousand; insure.me went for almost seventy thousand. That's big bucks to most people but it's chickenfeed considering sex.com's reputed price of fourteen million. Why then does a freshly minted Dot-Com sell at a third the price of a new Dot-Me? I've search all over the net for a satisfying answer and haven't found it.

I know that Dot-Coms originally sold for considerably more. Thirty-five dollars or so. But that was in the good old days. After all, Dot Com was the original domain extension and has been around since the mid eighties; computers cost a lot more then too. An acquaintance compared Dot-Coms to Chevrolet cars: GM sold several million more Chevys than Cadillacs, but the Chevys are still cheaper. True, but I'd bet most of the people buying a Chevrolet wished they could buy a Cadillac. How many people buying Dot-Coms really wanted to buy Dot-Mes? Not many, I should imagine. Who then-or what-is setting the prices.

Competition, of course, is part of the answer. Virtually every registrar sells Dot-Coms. Pricing them above a certain level would insure fewer sales. And once they've got you hooked the price can always go up in preceding years (something to think about when you decide how many years in advance you want to purchase your domain).

Another possibility is that the most accurate analogy here would be to compare domain extensions to jewels rather than automobiles. Diamonds, maybe. The perfect diamonds bring a high price; those with imperfections bring a lot less. The Premium Dot Coms were snatched up a long time ago; what's left has been heavily picked-over. Dot Me, on the other hand, is relatively new and there are a lot of rich words and phrases yet to be claimed. Yes, you can wait and the price will go down, but so will the value of the remaining domains.

Mike Nardine operates http://www.CheapMikesDomains.com and learned everything he knows about business,domains and websites the hard way. He has a Dot Me Special at Less Than $20.

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