- Joined
- Aug 24, 2004
- Messages
- 250
- Reaction score
- 61
Hello fellow domainers and veterans.
In recent years, tech media has been flooding us with news of startups raising massive rounds using non-traditional domain extensions. Within the domain investment circle, this has fueled a speculative frenzy around .ai, .io, .co, and even .xyz. Watching the consistently high sales data on aftermarket platforms gives many investors a false illusion: that simply hoarding short-letter combinations of these trendy extensions means you can easily flip them to end-users for a massive premium.
But this is a highly dangerous blind spot in investing.
If we step outside our industry's "left pocket to right pocket" speculative bubble and return to the brutal reality of the B2B commercial world and IT infrastructure, the actual willingness of end-users to pay for these extensions has a very strict hierarchy.
For a stark real-world parallel, look at the infamous U.S. military email leak. Millions of highly sensitive .mil emails were continuously misdirected to Mali's .ml ccTLD simply because users missed a single letter "i". It perfectly demonstrates a terrifying formula for corporate IT:
Human Error + Typo Proximity + Third-Party Sovereign Control = Structural Risk.
This communication friction is a very real cost for B2B enterprises. That's why we constantly see companies splashing out big money to acquire the exact-match .com as soon as they secure their Series B funding. In later funding rounds, upgrading to the exact-match .com is not a branding luxury. It becomes operational risk mitigation.
Those astronomical short-letter .xyz sales we see on NameBio are often domainers trading among themselves.
Let’s ask a simple question: Aside from Google’s early novelty play (abc.xyz) and standard defensive registrations, can anyone name a single legitimate, non-crypto Fortune 500 company that operates its core business on a .xyz?
Not a campaign microsite.
Not a redirect.
Not a defensive holding.
A primary, mission-critical domain.
Outside of crypto/Web3 circles, enterprise B2B adoption appears extremely limited. Corporate IT systems evaluate risk statistically. Abuse rate matters. Deliverability matters. Firewall scoring matters. If an extension carries higher abuse density, email trust signals are affected, regardless of branding narratives.
The real investment risk in .xyz is not volatility. It is terminal illiquidity. Waiting for an end-user segment that may never meaningfully materialize. This does not negate niche success within crypto-native ecosystems. It simply highlights the gap between sector-specific adoption and broad enterprise integration.
However, it carries an underlying jurisdictional risk. With the UK gradually handing over sovereignty of the Chagos Islands, this extension theoretically faces the risk of being retired or merged within the ICANN framework.
Commercial interest groups will undoubtedly fight to keep it alive. But even if the probability is low, institutional buyers do not ignore non-zero jurisdictional risk. We have all seen what happens when ccTLDs face sudden registry-level paralysis or policy shifts. The current operational standstill with .cd is a perfect example. I personally used to own xmas.cd, so I know firsthand how powerless registrants can be when structural instability hits. This punctures the myth that .io is a completely risk-free, legacy asset.
High registration and renewal fees effectively keep scammers and low-end abusers at bay. High abuse costs naturally lead to a clean ecosystem. This makes .ai one of the few emerging extensions that actually carries B2B authority and an "infrastructure" feel.
There is a perpetual debate among founders today: should we build on [Brand] .ai or [AI Brand] .com? But from what we are seeing in the market, this is often a false dichotomy. Serious enterprises and well-funded startups riding the AI wave aren't choosing one over the other. They secure both. They might lean on the .ai for immediate signaling, but they preemptively lock down the .com equivalent to protect their brand equity and hedge against future shifts. Even at the peak of the AI hype, the .com remains the ultimate anchor.
However, its investment risk lies in its strong industry-binding nature. Fast forward ten years, when AI is simply the default underlying tech rather than the main market narrative, whether end-users will still be willing to pay a premium for hoarded, non-core keywords remains to be seen and requires careful evaluation.
For players holding premium .coms, these alternative extensions actually offer an incredibly powerful hidden function: they are the absolute leading indicators for .com aftermarket pricing.
When you realize that the .ai, .io, and .co equivalents of your .com have all been registered by different startups who have built actual businesses on them, the asking price for your .com should instantly double. Because those startups will eventually face an IPO or explosive growth, and to establish absolute industry dominance, acquiring the exact-match .com is their inevitable destiny. The prosperity of these alternative extensions is essentially driving up the strategic acquisition premium of our .coms in the background.
But the crucial difference is how and when these were acquired. I hand-registered these first-hand back in the early days when Vince Cate was still managing the registry, long before the current hype cycle and capital influx. I appreciate a good ccTLD, provided it has real structural value and a clean foundation.
Beyond tech ccTLDs, my portfolio also includes a strategic mix of New gTLDs, City TLDs, and domain hacks when the commercial logic holds up. For example, I hold strategic assets like CEO.CITY and CITY.CEO—a perfectly mirrored pair where both terms act interchangeably as the keyword and the New gTLD. I also secure brand-aligned exact-match pairs like Once.Cafe and OnceCafe.com, and even hold high-tier domain hacks like Dili.gent.
I buy value, not hype.
ccTLDs like .io, .ai, and .co were written into the internet root zone back in the 1990s. They are known, stable entities within corporate firewall systems. Their commercial value evolved organically from the bottom up. Conversely, New gTLDs led by .xyz rely on top-down, aggressive marketing and low-price dumping to show volume to VCs. The incredibly low cost of bad acting has bankrupted their credit ratings at the foundational level.
In the legitimate business world, an end-user's trust in a domain is always built with real money and historical legacy.
These are my personal observations from over 20 years in the corporate brand domain market. Of course, the market is always shifting. For the veterans on this board, are you currently allocating funds to these non-traditional extensions? In your negotiations with end-users, have you noticed similar differences in their trust levels and willingness to pay?
I welcome any counter-arguments, data, or shared experiences. Let's discuss.
In recent years, tech media has been flooding us with news of startups raising massive rounds using non-traditional domain extensions. Within the domain investment circle, this has fueled a speculative frenzy around .ai, .io, .co, and even .xyz. Watching the consistently high sales data on aftermarket platforms gives many investors a false illusion: that simply hoarding short-letter combinations of these trendy extensions means you can easily flip them to end-users for a massive premium.
But this is a highly dangerous blind spot in investing.
If we step outside our industry's "left pocket to right pocket" speculative bubble and return to the brutal reality of the B2B commercial world and IT infrastructure, the actual willingness of end-users to pay for these extensions has a very strict hierarchy.
The Reality Check: End-User Market Breakdown
I’d like to share a few harsh realities regarding how these four trending extensions perform in the actual end-user market:1. .co: The End-User's Stepping Stone and Traffic Leakage
.co used to be the go-to alternative when an end-user couldn't acquire the .com. However, its fatal flaw is infinitely magnified during actual business operations: traffic and data leakage. When a company operates on brand.co while brand.com is owned by someone else, clients and vendors will inevitably send contracts, invoices, or highly sensitive emails to the wrong address.For a stark real-world parallel, look at the infamous U.S. military email leak. Millions of highly sensitive .mil emails were continuously misdirected to Mali's .ml ccTLD simply because users missed a single letter "i". It perfectly demonstrates a terrifying formula for corporate IT:
Human Error + Typo Proximity + Third-Party Sovereign Control = Structural Risk.
This communication friction is a very real cost for B2B enterprises. That's why we constantly see companies splashing out big money to acquire the exact-match .com as soon as they secure their Series B funding. In later funding rounds, upgrading to the exact-match .com is not a branding luxury. It becomes operational risk mitigation.
2. .xyz: A Registry Numbers Game and the Illusion of Liquidity
This is arguably the most overhyped extension in our circle in recent years, but I remain highly skeptical of its true end-user liquidity.Those astronomical short-letter .xyz sales we see on NameBio are often domainers trading among themselves.
Let’s ask a simple question: Aside from Google’s early novelty play (abc.xyz) and standard defensive registrations, can anyone name a single legitimate, non-crypto Fortune 500 company that operates its core business on a .xyz?
Not a campaign microsite.
Not a redirect.
Not a defensive holding.
A primary, mission-critical domain.
Outside of crypto/Web3 circles, enterprise B2B adoption appears extremely limited. Corporate IT systems evaluate risk statistically. Abuse rate matters. Deliverability matters. Firewall scoring matters. If an extension carries higher abuse density, email trust signals are affected, regardless of branding narratives.
The real investment risk in .xyz is not volatility. It is terminal illiquidity. Waiting for an end-user segment that may never meaningfully materialize. This does not negate niche success within crypto-native ecosystems. It simply highlights the gap between sector-specific adoption and broad enterprise integration.
3. .io: The Tech Dividend and the Unpriced Jurisdictional Risk
.io has successfully established itself as a high-tech symbol within the developer community and is currently a highly accepted ccTLD among end-users.However, it carries an underlying jurisdictional risk. With the UK gradually handing over sovereignty of the Chagos Islands, this extension theoretically faces the risk of being retired or merged within the ICANN framework.
Commercial interest groups will undoubtedly fight to keep it alive. But even if the probability is low, institutional buyers do not ignore non-zero jurisdictional risk. We have all seen what happens when ccTLDs face sudden registry-level paralysis or policy shifts. The current operational standstill with .cd is a perfect example. I personally used to own xmas.cd, so I know firsthand how powerless registrants can be when structural instability hits. This punctures the myth that .io is a completely risk-free, legacy asset.
4. .ai: The Registry's Price Moat
The success of .ai isn't just about the AI boom; the core lies in its price barrier.High registration and renewal fees effectively keep scammers and low-end abusers at bay. High abuse costs naturally lead to a clean ecosystem. This makes .ai one of the few emerging extensions that actually carries B2B authority and an "infrastructure" feel.
There is a perpetual debate among founders today: should we build on [Brand] .ai or [AI Brand] .com? But from what we are seeing in the market, this is often a false dichotomy. Serious enterprises and well-funded startups riding the AI wave aren't choosing one over the other. They secure both. They might lean on the .ai for immediate signaling, but they preemptively lock down the .com equivalent to protect their brand equity and hedge against future shifts. Even at the peak of the AI hype, the .com remains the ultimate anchor.
However, its investment risk lies in its strong industry-binding nature. Fast forward ten years, when AI is simply the default underlying tech rather than the main market narrative, whether end-users will still be willing to pay a premium for hoarded, non-core keywords remains to be seen and requires careful evaluation.
The Hidden Wealth Code: A Leading Indicator for .com Pricing
For players holding premium .coms, these alternative extensions actually offer an incredibly powerful hidden function: they are the absolute leading indicators for .com aftermarket pricing.When you realize that the .ai, .io, and .co equivalents of your .com have all been registered by different startups who have built actual businesses on them, the asking price for your .com should instantly double. Because those startups will eventually face an IPO or explosive growth, and to establish absolute industry dominance, acquiring the exact-match .com is their inevitable destiny. The prosperity of these alternative extensions is essentially driving up the strategic acquisition premium of our .coms in the background.
A Quick Disclaimer: I am NOT a .com Maximalist
To be clear, I am not a strict .com maximalist blindly hating on new, short extensions. In fact, I hold some premium alternative assets myself, such as FTP.AI.But the crucial difference is how and when these were acquired. I hand-registered these first-hand back in the early days when Vince Cate was still managing the registry, long before the current hype cycle and capital influx. I appreciate a good ccTLD, provided it has real structural value and a clean foundation.
Beyond tech ccTLDs, my portfolio also includes a strategic mix of New gTLDs, City TLDs, and domain hacks when the commercial logic holds up. For example, I hold strategic assets like CEO.CITY and CITY.CEO—a perfectly mirrored pair where both terms act interchangeably as the keyword and the New gTLD. I also secure brand-aligned exact-match pairs like Once.Cafe and OnceCafe.com, and even hold high-tier domain hacks like Dili.gent.
I buy value, not hype.
Conclusion: "Native Genes" vs. "Trust Barriers"
The underlying structural divide in this extension war is crystal clear: the organic evolution of ccTLDs vs. the capital-forced growth of New gTLDs.ccTLDs like .io, .ai, and .co were written into the internet root zone back in the 1990s. They are known, stable entities within corporate firewall systems. Their commercial value evolved organically from the bottom up. Conversely, New gTLDs led by .xyz rely on top-down, aggressive marketing and low-price dumping to show volume to VCs. The incredibly low cost of bad acting has bankrupted their credit ratings at the foundational level.
In the legitimate business world, an end-user's trust in a domain is always built with real money and historical legacy.
These are my personal observations from over 20 years in the corporate brand domain market. Of course, the market is always shifting. For the veterans on this board, are you currently allocating funds to these non-traditional extensions? In your negotiations with end-users, have you noticed similar differences in their trust levels and willingness to pay?
I welcome any counter-arguments, data, or shared experiences. Let's discuss.
