Last week, famous businessman and author of The Domains blog Michael Berkens spoke at a conference of domain investors in North Carolina (United States), sharing his own experience of working with new gTLDs. In 2015, Berkens sold his portfolio of about 70,000 domains to GoDaddy. The price was not disclosed, but it was estimated at dozens of millions of dollars. Explaining his decision, he said he didn’t want to spend 24/7 all year round in front of a computer. However, he decided to experiment with new TLDs and chose the Miami geo extension among other names.
Berkens explained his choice quite logically. The city has gained popularity from many movies and series, and attracts a lot of tourists both from inside the US and abroad annually. Miami has popular baseball, football and basketball teams with many fans all across the country. It’s also the home of the biggest art show in the country, Art Basel. In simple terms, the city cannot complain about the lack of attention. Based on this, Michael Berkens registered 29 domain names, including such potentially attractive ones as weekend.miami, hotelrooms.miami, artshow.miami and rentahouse.miami.
The result was sad. The investor parked his domains, which received a total of 532 visitors over the last 12 months. Moreover, Berkens didn’t get any offers to sell his domains. He believes this means geo domains have no future. He also shared the statistics for .NYC and .LONDON, which also do not boast great results. Berkens concluded that registering geo domain names was ruinous business for domain investors.
