Dot Com Real Estate: Our 2014 Domain Predictions, Graded

The web extension .com is becoming rare and more valuable each and every day. New extensions are being launched into the internet to accommodate all the growing demand for up and coming websites. We are simply running low on good .com names these days that someone has not already registered. I have always considered the internet to be a form of digital real estate and as time progresses it proves it self to be just that.

Finding a quality unregistered name with a .com extension is extremely harder than it was just 5 years ago, most quality and catchy names are in use or parked to be sold as a premium domain name for thousands of dollars. “A good racket for forward thinking domain real estate agents I must say”. Personalty I like a domain to be short and sweet and I also prefer it to be a .com, these domain are valued the most and sought after. A .com is an industry standard in web surfing but in some cases its just not practical for us to obtain our favourite domain with a .com extension. In the near future I for see sales in the mega thousands or maybe million for average .com domains.

You might ask yourself why is a .com so special? well its simple, easy to remember and when we think of the web we immediately gravitate to a .com, a good example is if a friend tells you a good site to visit you will probably assume it was a .com and go home to type it to your favourite browser and not find the site you were trying to looking for. This is just one of many examples why a .com is so special and will be a big deal in the near future.

Have you ever registered a domain name and then let it go because you did nothing with it or were not interested in the concept you were aiming for? I have and went to search them out at a later date in regrets of letting it go, I discovered there is companies that takes domain names after they expire or were deleted and they re-register it then try to re sell it as a premium domain. I have seen some of my old domain being listed for 14,000 dollars. It is very obvious that the .com  will be like a vintage wine so hold on to your .com’ s and register your dream sites while you can.

Photo Credit: Diana Parkhouse

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Revisited in 2026: what we got right, and what we got wrong

The article above was published in February 2014 and has not been altered. This section was added in October 2026.

Right

That .com would stay the standard. Correct, and it was not the obvious call. Hundreds of new extensions launched in the years after this was written, and .com still holds the position. The instinct that people default to .com when they half-remember a name held up.

That quality .com names would keep getting scarcer and dearer. Correct. Short, memorable, unregistered .com names are effectively gone.

That an industry exists to catch expiring domains and resell them. Correct, and larger now than it was then.

That prices would reach the millions. Correct for premium names. Publicly reported sales include Voice.com at $30 million in 2019 and CarInsurance.com at $49.7 million the same year.

Wrong

“Sales in the mega thousands or maybe million for average .com domains.” This is the overshoot. An average .com still costs roughly the price of a sandwich per year. The eight-figure sales are one-word, high-commercial-intent names — a different asset class entirely. The market did not rise; it split.

The lesson

“Digital real estate” turned out to be a better analogy than intended, including the part we missed: in property, scarcity concentrates value in a few locations rather than lifting everything. The same happened here.

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