.BERLIN Starts The City gTLD Goldrush, One Day Closer To .NYC

gold-rush

Call it what you want but let’s just be honest. There’s a modern day gold rush going on in the new gTLD space as premium properties open up on extensions that didn’t exist a year ago, heck they often didn’t exist a week ago. With new domain extensions launching every week it can be easy to miss some.

Today DNJournal did a great article on the .BERLIN launch tomorrow and the wave of new city TLDs that are just around the corner. What is to follow without a doubt will be a modern day gold rush for premium “digital” real estate in some of the most expensive cities in the world.

I have a friend who pays $4,500/month for a studio apartment in NYC, how much is Apartments.nyc worth to an agent that specializes in apartment rentals? That’s what we are about to find out NYC residents will have a nice edge, according to the official dotNYC website:

New York City businesses and organizations with a physical street address in the City and individuals whose primary place of residence is in the City can register a .nyc domain name. Trademark holders with a NYC address will be given priority during the application process in order to secure their intellectual property. For more information (source – http://www.mydotnyc.com/)

According to the .NYC website the new extension could launch as early as May of this year with the first 45 days being dedicated to Trademark holders only. It will be interesting to see what the response is like to .BERLIN, this will certainly set the stage for what is to come.

Hey, it’s 2014 and owning real estate should mean more than owning a piece of physical property. Domain names are the real estate of the Internet and for first time the playing field has been leveled and new investors can go up against the big guys to acquire premium names.

The only question in everyone’s mind is, will these be worth anything? I think most domain investors will be sad to find little-to-no resale value for their names, but like mining for gold, it’s something that’s exciting and gets a lot of people excited about domain names as an asset class.

I think the more people think of a domain name as an asset class, the better. As for people losing money I sure hope people do realize that like mining for gold, most of the time you end-up empty-handed, okay worse, with less money than you started. Just make sure that you buy domains you can use for your business and you’ll always find value, hoping someone else will see value could backfire as it’s hard to tell between the real gold and the fool’s gold…

(photo credit – http://www.pinterest.com/pin/187180928235993838/)

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton