Depressing (1.Viewing)

I was just on DNJournal and once again, not a single .ca reported sold. It bothers me greatly because I've been waiting for 20 years for the .ca market to really take off. Yet there are so few .ca sales being reported.

Are you not reporting? (Ron loves reports of sales as long as you can back it up)
Not selling?
Are you actively engaged in efforts to sell?
Making no effort at all?

Why?

Quite honestly there is not much to report, the few sales I am getting are all in the 5k range and any offers I have on my premiums are too low, I simply ignore the offer and go on with my day.

I think there is a lot of holding going on and the majority of the movement is in the 1-3k range. For me I don't sell in that range but a number of domainers I know do quite well in that space.

The reason you are not reading about any sales is because there is only sub level activity.

Quite honestly it has always been my opinion that most higher .ca sales were anomalies generated by domainers. The recent hush.ca sale was probably the only sale of significance but the sale (reportedly over a million) is probably skewed because it was technically not a real domain sale. A lot of the sale price was because hush.ca was actively used as a website and the owner had to have a significant offer to move the business to a two word address. Had the sale been strictly for an unused domain I doubt the price would have been anywhere near a million.

That said the .ca is ripe with inventory, domainers are sitting on a large inventory, but if my inbox is any indication there is going to be a sell off coming. I have been actively pursuing .ca purchases and for a long time I had to hunt owners down. Now I am being contacted one or two times a week from people with nice domains that are willing to part with them. The problem is there are only so many times I am willing to part with 10k to buy from a domainer so I am finding myself saying no more often than not.

As far as two word domains go, I rarely ever look at them anymore and if the listings on the forum are any indication the resale values are pretty poor. I hand register two words like SilverStyle.ca if they make sense to me for use in commerce but if a domainer asked me to pay $100 for it I would have turned it down.

Domainers have to create interest, we have to educate people as to the value of domains but as you can see by the level of activity on the board nobody is really interested in generating a proper .ca resource to educate potential clients. I have been trying to get traction for this forum since November and other than a few spurts of activity most everyone that comes to read never posts. I look at the stats, I see tons of visits but no posts. DNJournal means nothing to perspective clients, we need a Canadian resource to show the value of .ca and I have tried there but it seems to be a one man show, so much so that I have thought about moving the resource to blog.dn.ca and transitioning from a forum to a blog format. I mean if I am going to be the only one starting articles why put in an effort maintaining a community.

So yes, I get your point, I am not depressed but definitely saddened by the lack of interest in .ca on the domainer end, if we cannot get excited and create a buzz how can we expect our clients too?

I agree with much of what [notify]MapleDots[/notify] said, but I also think the lack of sales data boils down to the fact that almost nobody is reporting their sales to namebio. Not individual people, nor marketplaces.

I'm rather certain the only marketplace that will report .CA sales is Sedo, and that's only if the sale is 2K+. I like the 2K mark, as smaller 3-figure sales aren't exactly helpful, but Sedo is kinda fading in the wind and we can't really rely on them to pump out tons of sale data, especially when less and less Canadians are using Sedo (and I never felt like Canadian buyers really trusted Sedo to begin with).

But lots of sales are still happening, and we'll just never know about it. They mostly fall into the 1-5K range [notify]MapleDots[/notify] mentioned, but I'd still love to see them on namebio (generally speaking).

I've actually seen a pile of sales mentioned on Twitter lately, and I'm actually trying to convince them to report them to namebio. He probably has 5 decent sales from the past 2-3 weeks that would look very nice on the charts.

I've also already convinced a few people to report sales that would have not been reported otherwise, but clearly we do need a lot more reporting as it is depressing.

I myself will continue to report what makes sense. Some don't want to report anything below 2K but I think 1K+ is alright for some domains (like blackmold for example). There's really no magic number to decide when to report, as it always depends on the domain... and perhaps the relationship you have with the buyer. Quite honestly I'm not crazy about seeing john .ca sell for 5K, as I think it should have been closer to 25K, but hey it's not terrible and I think it was bought by domain investor which makes it different.

In short, we all need to try and report sales ourselves if we don't want the charts to look so depressing.

PS: If GoDaddy reported every .CA sale to DNjournal / Namebio I bet we'd be blown away with the amount of sales happening on the daily, but we'd also see a lot of weak sales too.

MapleDots said:

As far as two word domains go, I rarely ever look at them anymore and if the listings on the forum are any indication the resale values are pretty poor. I hand register two words like SilverStyle.ca if they make sense to me for use in commerce but if a domainer asked me to pay $100 for it I would have turned it down.

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Sorry for going offtopic, but that's funny, I used to be part of a shortlived game development project/company that was called SilverStyle for a bit

Esdiel said:

I agree with much of what [notify]MapleDots[/notify] said, but I also think the lack of sales data boils down to the fact that almost nobody is reporting their sales to namebio. Not individual people, nor marketplaces. .

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Sorry, not at all familiar with Namebio. The standard for domainers here since the beginning has been DNJournal. Every domainer here since the late 1990s or early 2000, knows Ron. These are the people sitting on all the category killer domains.

Sedo has been more European-centric, we don't get much attention from them. And they had some troubles early in their history, thus people not trusting them much.

I gave some serious thought years ago to launching a sales channel for .ca & .us, which has suffered the same neglect.

The thing is, if you're not out there, you're not seen to be a contender. Lack of reporting even 2000 sales contributes to that.

And don't get me started on the locked-up Canadian gov mentality that doesn't allow foreigners to own...!

DropWizard said:

Sorry, not at all familiar with Namebio. The standard for domainers here since the beginning has been DNJournal. Every domainer here since the late 1990s or early 2000, knows Ron. These are the people sitting on all the category killer domains.

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Ron and DNJ are great, but so is Namebio. I've reported a couple sales in the past and they require solid proof

DropWizard said:

And don't get me started on the locked-up Canadian gov mentality that doesn't allow foreigners to own...!

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True, this is a big thing for domainers but I'm wondering how the general public would feel about this?

On top on the restrictions for .CA, another issue is that the extension isn't easily used as a hack, abbreviation or industry term like IO, CO, VC, AI, etc...

So it would have very little functionality outside of meaning 'Canada' so even if it did open up to anyone, who would use it and why?

I think the California market would probably be the obvious market for it.

California would suck it up in a heart beat, it would double the registration numbers.

Good for domainers and the registry but bad for businesses and domain availability.

The domainer inside of me says open it up but also as an end user businessman it would diminish my canadian presence for my .ca shopping sites.

If I personally had to vote, I would probably vote to keep it closed, there is nothing like going to a .ca and immediately knowing you will be paying in Canadian funds to a Canadian business. That trust factor is huge and I make more income from my online sales than I do in domaining.

I understand the California factor and I admit I completely forgot about it in my previous post. But would there be real widespread adoption and understanding?

CO is the state abbreviation for Colorado, IN for Indiana, ME for Maine, AR for Arizona etc...are American companies/individuals located in those states repurposing those ccTlds

California would definitely provide a bump, but I don't think it would be significant or long term

So I'm really on the fence. The CA should be more prevalent (both for Canadians and for my wallet ) but opening it up might not even move the needle

MapleDots said:

California would suck it up in a heart beat, it would double the registration numbers.

Good for domainers and the registry but bad for businesses and domain availability.

The domainer inside of me says open it up but also as an end user businessman it would diminish my canadian presence for my .ca shopping sites.

If I personally had to vote, I would probably vote to keep it closed, there is nothing like going to a .ca and immediately knowing you will be paying in Canadian funds to a Canadian business. That trust factor is huge and I make more income from my online sales than I do in domaining.

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Totally agree.

The guys like Peter @ Emall have been screaming to open it up for many years. I prefer to keep it closed. The fact that it is closed makes it easily the #1 option for Canadian businesses, that exclusivity keeps it relevant to Canadians and keeps the integrity of .CA intact. If it were open, it dilutes the .ca brand and then Canadian businesses would be much more tempted to go with any other random tld. Opening it up would make the low end market more liquid due to the influx of domainers, but that's about it, I doubt it would help higher end sales at all.

And yes, there are open ccTLDs that already prove that simply matching a state's abbreviation doesn't mean much at all, I have yet to see any major or even minor adoption of a ccTLD by a state.

rlm said:

I have yet to see any major or even minor adoption of a ccTLD by a state.

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.ca would be different because in California everyone refers to it as ca in print.






There was already a history of Californian's using .ca until it was shut down and enforced. I remember a conversation about that years back already. It was a natural fit just like .to is being heavily marketed to toronto.

I recently picked up a domain via TBR and it was a Californian girl who previously owned it since 2009. Not sure if she ever met the presence requirements.

MapleDots said:

It was a natural fit just like .to is being heavily marketed to toronto.

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The difference is that .TO has nothing to lose, they have no natural user base, and they have to market themselves anywhere/everywhere that might make sense.

Ruining the exclusivity of .CA to Canadians isn't worth it in my opinion, and its certainly not in the best general interest of Canadians as a whole. The only benefit might be to a few hundred .CA domainers.

People need to understand this and put it behind them, opening .CA will simply never happen.

rlm said:

People need to understand this and put it behind them, opening .CA will simply never happen.

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Unless CIRA gets sold or turns to FOR PROFIT

I am with you and hope it never happens but if you look at .org as an example anything is possible in the world of corporate greed.

MapleDots said:

I am with you and hope it never happens but if you look at .org as an example anything is possible in the world of corporate greed.

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True enough...

I like seeing .ca sales being reported, but it doesn't bother me too much if I see none in the weekly report - you still know .ca sales are happening all the time. The real test for me is whether I'm getting regular inquiries on my .ca's, and are they up or down. Every year seems to have slow and busy periods for me. Can go a month or two with almost nothing, then one week get a bunch of inquires. The DNJournal report shows if the domain market is hot or cold, and lately it's been pretty hot. A rising tide lifts all boats, that's good for .ca too. The .com is almost always the best, but as the .com get taken up or priced up, for a Canadian the .ca starts looking better or becomes the only choice. Personally I'd say the .ca market is about as good as it's been for me, in terms of inquiries and offers being higher than normal. Barring a severe economic downtown, and considering the advancement of tech, start ups, crypto, and the continued migration of everything online and going digital, I see the domain market continuing its strength.