What are .me Domain Names Actually Worth?

My last post talked about Godaddy and it’s recent .me registration fiasco. Now let’s take a closer look at the question on many people’s minds: what will .me domains be worth in the future?

I think .me domains are highly speculative.

.me is no .com

There’s little question about the value of generic domain names, but .com’s rule that field - by a very wide margin. The .com tld has been branded in most people’s minds as THE default website extension. .net’s and .org’s have historically fetched a small fraction of what the .com is worth.

Lots of other tld’s have popped up over the years, including .info, .ws, .name, .mobi, etc. but none of them have gained much traction. The last well-hyped extension I remember was .mobi - a lot was spent to hype it up and lots of registrars made good money selling them to speculators. Fast forward almost 2 years and the jury is still out on whether or not .mobi will be a winner or a loser when the dust settles.

Even people like Rick Schwartz, who invested the heaviest in .mobi are not entirely sure of their future value.

The more time I spend in the domain speculation world, the more I tend to agree with Andrew that non-.com’s don’t have that much value outside of 2-3 letter and 1-2 high-value keyword domains.

ICANN recently made it easier to create new extensions, but sites such as “microsoft.me” and “microsoft.microsoft” will probably just confuse most consumers. A good percentage will go to microsoftme.com and microsoft.com instead.

I will venture to say that most people buying up .me domain names right now are probably speculators. I doubt that most .me domain name buyers have plans to build out these sites. I am careful of any market where prices are determined by speculation rather than development (real estate bubble of 2005 anyone?)

what about .me?

If you can lock up eat.me or aweso.me or anything that’s a short logical 1-word domain, go for it, but know that’s it’s still a gamble. Possibly a few high-value keywords will be worth something (but not a whole lot, if you ask me).

I like .me better than most other extensions because of the personal nature of “me”, but I don’t buy most of the hype that surrounds this landrush. I think registrars will be the only ones who really profit from .me.

If you disagree, I’d love to hear some arguments about why you think .me’s will appreciate any more than your average non-.com in the comments.