It was a great pleasure to get a letter from Afternic that our domain has been sold for BIN price and the transaction is complete now. According to Namebio this is the second largest .tips sale ever. The top list is lead by city.tips which was sold for $9528 in 2015. Tips domains were not shining this year so far, there are three registered sales on Namebio, pet.tips for $100, diy.tips for $134 and quick.tips for $715. I especially like diy.tips on this list and feel that it was sold way below its potential value.
We have a tiny .tips portfolio and focused one one word domains having search volume with the word tips: interview.tips, wedding.tips, parenting.tips and this blog, domain.tips. All of them has a regular or moderate (<$100) renewal fee and we have registered these in the last Early Access phase.
Our recently sold domain has a similar pattern and has a business value and I was confident it will be sold once but it was a pleasant surprise it happened sooner than later. It is important to mention that these keyword rich tips domains have considerable type-in traffic, the sold domain has about 1000 type-in visits/month. This free traffic can be a high boost if used properly. Although Google deny this, my experience is that their algorithm uses the extension in the search. Thus, interview.tips will rank (much) higher than something like interviewtips.xyz if everything else is the same.
Similarly to most of the other nTLDs, .tips is not shining in the last couple of years. The number of registered .tips domains is shrinking since 2015, it was 37,000 on its top and 32,000 now. nTLD aftermarket suffers from premium renewal prices, which is a terrible practice. Domainers are crucial players in the domain ecosystem while the premium renewal model makes it almost impossible to make profit from these domains. If the registrars are not willing to share their profit with domainers to sell their domains, domainers will not work on that extension and the extension will fail in long term. If domainers don’t register an extension because of the renewal fees, there won’t be a competition for the domain, and the domains worth much less. Since in most cases all good names are billed as premium and all bad names for regular fee, it results in spammed extension, good names that could make the extension widely known and accepted are not registered and unused, only cheap names are registered and used for low quality content. Thus, registrars also lose money with this model, which model should be dropped right away to save the new extensions.
Anyhow, our recent sale proves that there is still room to make profit even with the unfair premium renewal model and you need not drop all your nTLDs right away if there are real gems in it.
