All those esoteric DNS TLDs could soon find a whole new market.
In the not so distant past, a longtime domainer said that if it’s not .com, then it’s basically .crap. But domains aren’t just about websites anymore. People are starting to use them for things like online usernames and crypto wallet addresses. For example, a crypto address that looks like this 0xC18360217D8F7Ab5e7c516566761Ea12Ce7F9D72 can be shortened to look like ens.eth. It’s a nice little feature and a popular one. With the Ethereum Name Service (ENS, which uses the .eth extension) for example, 767,301 unique users currently own 2.5M active names, none of which work as resolvable websites in DNS despite being formatted like one. But so what?
According to a poll, 51.7% of .eth name owners said the primary usage of their name was for identity/branding while 30.6% said it was for easier transactions. Only 4.1% said it was for the purpose of running a website (which involves a URL hack and is a story for another day.) Even the founder of ENS, Nick Johnson, said that the first purpose of building ENS was for “improving usability.”
And there’s a lot of crypto addresses out there that could benefit from improved usability. In fact, as of this writing, there are 246.5M individual ethereum addresses currently in existence. Whoa.
And that’s the opportunity. There is a massive potential market for blockchain-capable names on the internet and they don’t actually have to be web3 names at all. They can be regular old DNS domains, thanks to a variety of blockchain integrations that are already available and still being further developed. So whether it’s a .com or a .horse, a prospective buyer may not have a website in mind at all. They may only be thinking about it as an online username or crypto wallet address.
Here’s an example of me signed into a platform with the username sean.loan (a real DNS domain).
Is sean.loan a million dollar domain? Obviously not, but all of the sudden the .loan registry earned a customer who didn’t care about the web-based value of a domain at all and still bought it anyway. Might there be other buyers like me in the future?
Suppose that most buyers will care about having a website but in an ecosystem in which the username of a brand matters. Think back to the days of America Online with screen names. What would have been a cooler screen name? yankeesfan.com or yankees.fan? Yankeesfan.com screams website while yankees.fan sounds like a username. That it’s a website too is almost incidental.
I’m not saying that the .com is worse or is somehow less valuable. What I’m saying is that because of the blockchain era, we’ll be entering a market in which there will be domain name customers that are thinking username first and website value 2nd, 3rd, 4th, or not at all. And with that being the case, hundreds of odd-named tlds that are stuck with the incredible burden of trying to convince businesses to use them should consider keeping their eye on a new kind of customer who might not be a business and operates in a different kind of web. And if the customer or prospective buyer is a business then educating them about web3 add-ons might win the sale or allow the seller to mark up the price.
“This isn’t just a domain name, it’s ___and___and___and___and____!”
You fill in the blank on your pitch. 😎