.pro

[akcampbell]

One other unusual fact about .pro. The last 10 reported sales of .pro on dnsaleprice.com were all $1,000+. You won't find that in any other extension, including .com. The underlying reason for this is that .pros are tightly held and the people who buy them are usually professional business people, entrepreneurs or web developers so they have more money than the average domain buyer, they also appreciate the marketing appeal of Pro branding.

 

[Gerry]

One other unusual fact about .pro. The last 10 reported sales of .pro on dnsaleprice.com were all $1,000+. You won't find that in any other extension, including .com. The underlying reason for this is that .pros are tightly held and the people who buy them are usually professional business people, entrepreneurs or web developers so they have more money than the average domain buyer, they also appreciate the marketing appeal of Pro branding.

It was either photo or photography dot pro that sold for a nice amount. I believe it was posted on this forum (sales result).

 

[katherine]

One other unusual fact about .pro. The last 10 reported sales of .pro on dnsaleprice.com were all $1,000+. You won't find that in any other extension, including .com.

Could you quote a few .pro sold in the 5 or 6 figure range ?

 

[akcampbell]

Could you quote a few .pro sold in the 5 or 6 figure range ?

Video.pro $35,000, Movie.pro $22,000. Can you give me 2 examples of .coms hand regged since 2005 from a WHOIS search that sold for $20,000+. Also, there are 40,000 .pros regged versus 80m .coms so with that ratio in mind, can you give me 4,000 .coms regged from the WHOIS since 2005 that have sold for $20,000?

The .pro I just sold for 5,000 Euros was regged in 2007 and has been sold twice since then, both times for 4 figure sums. Can you name some .coms regged from the WHOIS since 2007 sold twice for 4 figure sums in the last 2 years?

I would love to go back in a time machine and register some .coms in the early 90s and sell them for 5 or 6 figures but I am stuck in the present, I deal with it as I find it. The letters Pro are unusually brandable, the restrictions keep the average domainer out so when I caught .pros on the drop in 07 and 08 I didn't have to compete against scripts and Snapnames. For example, I caught Play.pro by getting up at 5:00AM four mornings in a row. There was a neat opportunity and I took it. I hand regged Switch.pro for $99 in September 2007, 2 and 1/2 years after the initial landrush.

I have spent about $80,000 on .pros and for that I bought, caught, or regged 350 of the best 5,000 .pro keywords. If a .pro sells, I have probably got a 350/5,000 chance of being the seller. There were nine $1,000+ .pro sales in October 09, you do the math, I'm going to get a $1,000+ sale ever 6 weeks or so if that trend continues, it won't, but I probably get the option of a $1,000 sale every 8-10 weeks or so. These are all relatively new domains, both my recent sales were 2007 regged, I couldn't do that in .com. I spent hundreds of hours searching for .coms to register in 2006 and there was only rubbish to pick from, the sort of domains you would need to hold 1,000's of to sell 1 or 2 per years at low to mid $XXX.

I nailed my mast to .pro because it was the best opportunity available at the time, it's still one of the best opportunities available now they are $15 rather than $99 to register. .pro is a gTLD, it's more brandable than .mobi, .biz, and .info, it's held back by restrictions and poor registry marketing but things change. Just over a year ago, reg fees were 7 times higher than they are now. I handed regged domains like Gadget.pro by searching the WHOIS and picked up domains like Piano.pro on the drop. Within 4 weeks of catching Piano.pro I had an offer of $1,500 on Sedo. I've never had ANY offers on .coms I hand regged in 2006.

It was either photo or photography dot pro that sold for a nice amount. I believe it was posted on this forum (sales result).

Photography.pro sold for $2,210 in Feb 07 on Sedo according to dnsaleprice.

 

[hnh]

Name one company that has had significant a marketing campaign using the .pro extension.

That's right. There are none.

An extension can exchange hands within the reseller community all it wants, but it will always lack value if no end-user accepts it.

 

[akcampbell]

Name one company that has had significant a marketing campaign using the .pro extension.

I can't do that but I can you an example of a very large company taking an interest in .pro beyond a defensive registration. I registered Train.pro in December 2007. In September 2008, I received an email from a French Yahoo email address asking if Train.pro was for sale. I did some checking and found SNCF had registered Trains.pro the previous week. SNCF operates 14,000 trains daily in France and employs 180,000 people.

Also, bear in mind that marketing campaigns and domainer opportunity are often inversely related. If domainers become aware of marketing campaigns, the WHOIS gets hammered and premium keywords disappear. I invested in .pro because that hadn't happened but I thought it might if restrictions were removed. Restrictions still haven't been removed but I'm hoping they will be by May 2010.

An extension can exchange hands within the reseller community all it wants, but it will always lack value if no end-user accepts it.

I sold Switch.pro to a Japanese lighting engineer and designer. Have a look at the site, it's developed. I have had multiple expressions of interest in my .pros from established companies. For example, I traced back an enquiry for Quote.pro to an insurance software company called QuotePro. Just this week I had an enquiry from a French company called Agroform for Campus.pro. I had a bid earlier this year for Campus.pro on Sedo, maybe from the same party. They are looking to develop a site called Campus-pro.fr and were looking to upgrade to a shorter, more brandable domain.

I acknowledge that .pro is little unknown, undeveloped, badly marketed, lightly regged at 40,000 domains etc etc, but it still sounds good! Even people who criticise .pro and other similar alternative extensions acknowledge .pro has a ring to it, it's catchy and has a certain wow factor. High profile .com domainers have recognised .pro's potential, for example I bought Surf.pro and Skate.pro from Page Howe, the guy who sold Guy.com for $1m and Seniors.com for $1.8m. Obviously, if Page saw that potential being realised he wouldn't have sold them to me but at least he registered them to begin with. Few .com domainers give alternative extensions the time of day because their wealth is built on direct traffic not brandability. Surf.pro and Skate.pro are inherently very brandable, they sound cool. Pro is already used with .com with similar activities, for example ScubaPro is a leading diving gear brand, see ScubaPro.com.

 

[keyser]

Seeems .pro is the next big thing then

 

[katherine]

So when do you expect to recoup your 80K investment ?

 

[akcampbell]

Seeems .pro is the next big thing then

No, it's the next small thing. Lucky for me, I bought in when it wasn't even a thing. Now at least people talk about .pro, and it's not me who has to start all the .pro threads!

So when do you expect to recoup your 80K investment ?

Well, I've sold .pros for $2,000 and 5,000 Euros in November, that's a start. I'll be honest with you, I didn't buy my .pros to resell, primarily I bought them as a development library, I can code in HTML and PHP. I still buy .pros, for example I bought Game.pro for $5,000 in October. I don't need to recoup my $80,000 investment in any particular timeframe, development and domaining is a hobby for me, I make enough money from my day job to pay the bills. My target was to be left with some nice domains 5-10 years from now, cover my costs, and have some fun. If .pro fails, I can always fall back on my $50,000 of .infos!

 

[hnh]

It's really opportunity costs for me. If I had that kind of cash, I'd probably not spend it on .pro's, or even on domains at all, but to each his own I guess.

 

[BRENHED]

Well what a good read....And thank you akcampbell for your input youve really helped and for what its worth i like your plan as buying .coms is hard work and anything half decent is mega bucks atleast you have taken a step outside of the box and your seeing a return good on you. I think i will now registar the ones i was going to and as you say for the price if things do go the right way for .pro it will be well worth it thanks and good luck.

UP THE .PRO:lol:

 

[akcampbell]

If you are interested in picking up .pros Snapnames is the place to go. You can still pick up bargains. If you see a .pro somebody has already bid on, bid on it, the first bidder will win it automatically at $59 even if nobody bids during the auction so you are under no obligation to buy, but being in the auction will give you a feel for the price .pros sell at auction for. Also by cross checking the winning user name to the WHOIS after the drop, you can see which .pro domainer bought what and the value people attach to different types of keyword.

I picked up Truck.pro at Snapnames for $59 a couple of weeks ago, the .com sold for $101,000. The auction ended at $350 in August 09 but the buyer didn't pay, I emailed Snapnames 2-3 months after because I was the second highest bidder and the only bidder who had bid more than the start bid. They offer me the domain and I said I would take it if I paid the amount I would have won it at if it hadn't been for the bidder who didn't pay. Truck and Pro have a nice fit, if you do a Google search for Truck Pro you will see what I mean.

People will say but if Truck.pro sells for $59, that doesn't bode well for the extension. But the truth is only a very small % of domainers can register .pro, know about .pro, or have the time and inclination to monitor drops.

For example, when Lorry.com dropped a couple of months ago, 71 people bid for it on Snapnames, including me, Lorry is the UK word for Truck for anybody who doesn't know. It sold for about $10,000, if I had more money at the time, I would have bought it. You can't say Truck.com isn't worth $100,000+ because Lorry.com only sold for $10,000 or that any premium .com isn't worth $5m because Lorry.com only sold for $10,000 and so on. Snapnames offers a genuine opportunity to pick up domains for significantly less than their market value because people are looking for bargains and not everybody is tracking what is dropping so the auction is full of enthusiasts and resellers on very low budgets looking for value.

The other place to look for .pro bargains is Encirca. They show what is dropping on Encirca.com/feed This used to be the place to go because at one point 95% of the 6,500 .pros regged were held with Encirca so anything decent that dropped was on their Expiring list. When I started regging .pros, there was a period when .pros would drop at a few seconds after 8:57AM UK time so I was always at my PC before work manually hammering the WHOIS. You can't do this now, the drop times varies, and the premium keywords go to Snapnames. I think some people still pick up .pros this way. I bought Airplane.pro for $485 to add to my collection of "big rig" .pros like Yacht.pro, Boat.pro, and Truck.pro, I'm pretty sure the seller picked it up on the drop the day before he sold it to me so I should have been paying more attention.

Sometimes just being known for buying .pros helps. When .pros cost $99 to renew, alot of premium keywords got dropped and sometimes people would offer me them to me at firesale prices a couple of days before. For example, I picked up Salon.pro and London.pro for very modest sums this way. Salon.pro is the type of .pro I really go for. There is a very strong association between Salon and Professional or Pro. Salon products are advertised as professional to convince women to pay 5 times as much as they need to pay in a supermarket for a similar product. Salon is also a professional context keyword, skilled hairdressers and therapists work in a salon. I think keywords like this work well in .pro, I bought Studio.pro and Office.pro on the aftermarket based on this logic. If you look on dnsaleprice, the keywords that sell for the most money tend to have a professional context or link, for example Freelance.pro sold for $5,440 in Oct 08 and Chef.pro sold for $3,650 in May 08. I kicked myself when Chef.pro sold, I could have bought it for about $600 the year before.

 

[zuriko]

Name one company that has had significant a marketing campaign using the .pro extension.

That's right. There are none.

An extension can exchange hands within the reseller community all it wants, but it will always lack value if no end-user accepts it.

for example:
www.sedo.pro
www.myfx.pro