Hopefully no one had the pleasure of pinching you this St. Patrick’s Day. While I enjoyed time at church, many locals and tourists enjoyed St. Patrick’s Day and the final weekend of Austin’s SXSW.
News stations reported great music in the air on nearly every corner in downtown Austin, and surrounding neighborhoods and venues.
While there was no shortage of St. Paddy’s Day celebrations, one celebration caught my eye by promoting an annual St. Patrick’s Day block party via a .pub domain.
Jack & Ginger’s Irish Pub — with locations in Austin, Dallas, and Houston per their website — hosted a 10am to 9pm block party with live music in Austin on Rock Rose Street (a.k.a. The Domain).
I stumbled upon Jack & Ginger’s ad in the most recent edition of Northwest Austin’s Community Impact (see ad image below). The party itself didn’t do much for me, but I was pleasantly surprised to discover a .pub domain getting a little action: JackAndGingers.pub.
While I like Jack & Ginger’s creative use of their .pub domain, I so wish they could have been able to secure the matching .com domain — currently owned and operated by a Chicago-based sports bar.
Most websites have long settled that .com is the king although it had a 30-year or so head start on the new domain extensions.
However, a new breed of business owners are throwing caution to the wind, and blazing a new path by launching websites using new domain extensions.
While I don’t recommend investing in domain extensions due to their newness and high level of risk, I believe new domain extensions could prove to be beneficial for businesses, especially small businesses, based on the extension or word to the right of the dot being a industry-specific keyword match.
Like Jack & Ginger have capitalized using a .pub domain for their Irish Pub, many existing and new pubs could stand to realize and gain SEO traction following suit — although .pub registration stats say otherwise.
Based on .pub stats from ntldstats.com (see image below), .pub launched back in 2014 and hit just over 70K registrations in July 2016 and July 2017. As of current date, .pub registrations have dropped by 50%, hovering around 34K.
This steep drop in .pub registrations is likely due to initial discounted annual registration pricing of $9.99 while years following are renewed at $39.99 per .pub domain.
Introductory pricing, amongst other factors and considerations, makes investing in new domain extensions highly risky, especially when one considers the average time to sale a domain is roughly 400 days at minimum. Anything less than this must be considered an anomaly by most domain investors, especially the inexperienced.
That’s why many longtime domain investors investing in new domain extensions have chosen to soundly invest in one word, numeric, and single-character domains. It’s rare to find domain vets touting two-word or more new extension domains and sales — not to say it doesn’t exist, just that it’s not as common as .com or legacy extension domain sales.
In closing, one certainly needs more than a four-leaf clover, leprechaun, and a pot of gold on their side to strike it rich investing in domain name extensions.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day and I wish you the best!
As a domain investor and business consultant, Alvin actively participates in daily domain auctions. Outside of auctions, he passionately shares his views, opinions, and vision for how businesses should and should not use domain names to generate greater customer growth and revenue.
