back to article So who just bought the rights to .blog for $20m? A chap living in Panama

The rights to sell .blog domains – one of the most sought after new dot-word gTLDs – have been won at auction by an unknown Colombian working out of Panama. Gerardo Aristizabal and his company Primer Nivel paid an estimated $20m for the premium piece of internet real-estate, beating out industry giants Google, Afilias, Donuts …

  1. RaidOne

    Is the TLD important?

    Everyone I know, lately myself included (even if I know it's a bit stupid), stopped typing the domain in the browser bar and just use Google or whatever is the default search engine to find the desired site.

    E.g. let's say I am looking for The Reg and I don't have it bookmarked. I just type 'the register' or even 'the reg' in the address bar and Google shows theregister.co.uk as the first result, which is what I want.

    It's not even a dot com, which proves that the TLD is kinda irrelevant.

    So is it worthy to pay that much for dot blog?

    1. Ole Juul

      Re: Is the TLD important?

      I think there is some value in the branding. As for typing in a whole name, I agree that most people just click or search.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Is the TLD important?

      It matters for search, from the way Google does its page ranking. Of course, with all the various TLDs out there that will inevitably take advantage of that, it may become a negative before long and all those $30 million TLDs will become pointless.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Is the TLD important?

        "...it may become a negative before long..." I agree with this. Although I'm not sure if it will be an all out negative (which it could be), but I believe it's moot. *IF* google starts rolling out their own domains, then it will surely be moot. I have a feeling everyone is working towards making the domainname.??? moot in the near future anyways.

        ("Moot" * 3, person...* 4, personal record).

    3. Jellied Eel Silver badge

      Re: Is the TLD important?

      "So is it worthy to pay that much for dot blog?"

      No, not really. So you have an existing blog. Call it myblog.com. Most people would probably think of it as myblog and not care about the TLD. They have it bookmarked or just type myblog into their search engine of choice. So along comes .blog. They need to convince you that registering myblog.blog is valuable and necessary. You may be unconvinced because you're happy with your existing traffic and anyone else registering myblog.blog who isn't you may be infringing or passing off. Easier if you're running cocacola.blog

      If you're thinking of some exciting new blog, then it's still about whether the name exists or infringes. Having a new TLD may not save you from lawyers. Or may not save the .blog operator if the registrant attempts to register a domain that infringes. Why pay large sums of money to protect your IP when you can throw a sueball at anyone who aids passing off? Coca cola may respectfully decline the offer of $100k a year for a protective registration and point out that if they let anyone else use it, it'll be the registrar's nuts in a vice.

      Having .blog for a blog could be more fun though, but the registrar probably wants to use that themselves.

      1. HofmanLaursen

        Re: Is the TLD important?

        You misunderstand. It's not the idea that you should rebrand to .blog for your existing site.

        There is a new blog created every second - or 175.000 per day. Surely .blog will be top of mind, when deciding on a domain name. WP has a 25% market share of all websites. 2 bn more people are coming online over the next years.

        This is the reality we face, and therefore .blog and many of the other new domain endings will come in handy.

        1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

          Re: Is the TLD important?

          There is a new blog created every second - or 175.000 per day. Surely .blog will be top of mind, when deciding on a domain name.

          Surely? My guess is that most people buying a new domain name will take the first choice, which will likely be .com. Those who decide to buy a .blog will probably do so because the name they want is already registered in .com, and consequently their new blog will see very little traffic.

          I'm thinking most of those 175K daily creators won't even know blog is an available gTLD.

          WP has a 25% market share of all websites.

          Yeah, and there's no way that will ever change. Or will it?

          I won't be at all surprised if personal blogs turn out to be a passing fad and the creation rate drops off drastically over the next few years. Already we're seeing a backlash against the "my students made blogs!" crap that infested college-comp classes for a few years.

    4. Electron Shepherd

      Re: Is the TLD important?

      Or if you know it is a .com you're after, just type the domain part (i.e. no www the front and com on the end) and use Ctrl+Enter - even quicker, with the added bonus that you don't tell Google which site you're visiting.

  2. Cliff

    Soooooo 2000's!

    Blogging used to be spoken of in the same terms as tweets are now. Time moves on, I can't imagine $30M will look so clever in a couple of years.

    Buying TLD's has been likened to a 'land grab', but there's a crucial difference - they're not making land any more, whilst dot-vlog is a few clicks and dollars away, as is dot-blogs, dot-vlogs, dot-weblog, dot-onlinediary and each namespace is infinite in itself.

  3. d3vy

    I registered a .solutions domain a while ago, take a guess how many people (including tech savvy people) don't believe me that you don't need.com on my email address...

    Then there's the email address validation on web sites...

    1. Ken Hagan Gold badge

      I guess ... not many, but waaay more than "none"

      I have a ...me.uk email address and still suffer from both of those problems. (The rest of the address is just lower case letters, dots and hyphens, so I'm assuming that some fool is complaining about the domain. Perhaps we should ask t.berners-lee to see if he's ever had problems with his amazingly unusual name. Oh, and as I write that, yes I'm thinking now of our regular commentard with the name O'Brien who is, if you'll forgive the phrase, "beyond the Pale".)

      Happily, raised eyebrows amongst otherwise-tech-savvy colleagues doesn't stop anything working.

      Sadly, email "validation" code does. Perhaps we need to send that memo round again:

      You (yes, you, personally) cannot validate an email address. Every time you write code to try to do this, it costs you time to do it, time to deal with the customer complaints, and lost customers from those who can't be bothered to complain and just take their money elsewhere. There is no business case for trying to validate an email address. It just makes you look like an idiot when it goes wrong (as it will, see above). Stop it, you cretinous fuckwit. Go back over your life and remove all such checks from code you have written in the past.

      1. heyrick Silver badge
        Facepalm

        Re: I guess ... not many, but waaay more than "none"

        "and lost customers from those who can't be bothered to complain and just take their money elsewhere"

        Oh hell yes.

        There's a dash, it's invalid. Really? There's an unrecognised domain (.eu), it's invalid. Really? The name part is too long (no, it's a spam trap address with their name in it), it's invalid. Really?

        The good sites actually send an email to the given address once to "verify my account", the bad sites choke. And, of course, if they aren't willing to accept my email address for notifying me of the status of my order, well I guess I'll just have to take my order elsewhere.

        For what it is worth, it is usually American sites that display this incompetence. The same sort that let me pick a country from a drop-down list but then choke because the zip code is invalid/missing, and after wading through loads of pseudo-legalese it says in small letters that they don't ship overseas. Well, why didn't you say that when offering a country instead of wasting my time you retarded assholes...

        Still, between that and the price USPS wants for sending anything, it is getting to be cheaper to order from anywhere else on the planet.

        tl;dr version: random rant about incompetent online ordering

      2. Electron Shepherd

        Re: I guess ... not many, but waaay more than "none"

        "There is no business case for trying to validate an email address."

        You can do some validation that is perfectly sensible.You can do validation to catch accidental typos - anything from simple string testing such as there is at least one character either side of the @ symbol, to doing an MX lookup on the domain to make sure the domain is configured to receive emails.

      3. Alan Brown Silver badge

        Re: I guess ... not many, but waaay more than "none"

        "Sadly, email "validation" code does. Perhaps we need to send that memo round again:"

        No need for a funny domain. All you need is an address with a "+" in it.

      4. Andrew Meredith

        Re: I guess ... not many, but waaay more than "none"

        I regularly get blocked from sites because my email address is "invalid".

        - it ends in .org

        - it has a 5 character word before .org, all alphas

        - the username part is 6 characters, all alpha

        - it has an MX record

        - it has an SPF statement even

        I take the approach that I don't want to do business with any organisation incompetent enough to block that as invalid.

  4. myhandler

    @KenHagan: man you're rude ... so, you cretinous fuckwit:

    A key reason to validate email is reduce spam merchants and fake registrations

    I expect you only see it from a customer viewpoint

    Validation has its place

    1. Glen 1

      Re Email Validation

      Email validation is important when the email address needs to be used.

      I would not want any important (or mildly pertinent) info being sent to me@myaddress.comm

      That said, valid emails should be valid...

    2. Pen-y-gors

      re:e-mail validation

      @KenHagan is making a very good point. Yes, perhaps he's looking at it from the customer point of view - but any competent web designer must be able to see things from the customer's point of view. And making sure validation of e-mail addresses works is pretty important to website owners as well. E-mail format validation is very helpful, but if we're being strictly accurate, code which rejects e-mail addresses because they don't end in .com, .org or .net isn't technically validation code at all, is it?

      1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

        Re: re:e-mail validation

        any competent web designer must be able to see things from the customer's point of view

        Yes, "myhandler" should buy a copy of Dave Platt's Why Software Sucks and learn something about what web application development actually requires.

        But based on the tone of his post, I suspect the material would be lost on him anyway.

  5. Trigonoceps occipitalis

    There are still some big-name TLDs who ownership will be resolved by auction, including dot-app, dot-uber and dot-diy.

    FTFY

  6. Alan Brown Silver badge

    As others have commented:

    The proliferation of TLDs dilutes the value of domains.

    This is a good thing, unless you're trying to flog off sex.com

    It's a bad thing if you're trying to find something relevant, but to be honest that stopped being an issue nearly 2 decades ago when search engines started popping up.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    re:e-mail validation

    If anyone wanted to do email validation then the best bet short of sending an email is to do a MX record look up and then fire up a SMTP session, do the EHLO, MAIL FROM, RCPT TO and see if it is accepted. This is sender verification and is a (not so popular these days) tool in the anti spam armoury for us MTA herders.

    Now there are one or two potential problems, starting with greylisting but if that is done sensibly then you should get as far as RCPT TO. Another major problem is if you cock up your HELO/EHLO or have a blacklisted IP but then your verification email would fail as well.

    Oh ..... topic ..... .blog? Whatever

    1. heyrick Silver badge

      Re: re:e-mail validation

      "then fire up a SMTP session, do the EHLO, MAIL FROM, RCPT TO and see if it is accepted"

      ...and the user will then find that the email address is rejected as the server discards non-SSL connections that have not logged into the server.

      The company validating the address wants less spam? Guess what, so do server admins.

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  9. This post has been deleted by its author

  10. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

    Oooh, I know this one!

    Very little is known about Primer Nivel's plans for dot-blog

    Sell it at a substantial loss in four years? That's it, right?

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