Comment on Why do so many Lemmy instances use weird TLDs?
HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year agoThere is an entire industry “domaining” that trades domain names like baseball cards. It usually boils down to two things:
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People register pdrq.com because they hope someone will have a wonderful new product named PDRQ later and will pay $10,000 for a domain that cost them $11.
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Even if there’s no direct buyer, there are services that will run low-quality ads on the page. and you can more or less estimate traffic and revenue from typos or dead links pointing to the domain. A three character domain, all letters, will get more than 12 characters with random digits mixed in. If you get $12 a year of random clicks seeing ads for “hot singles in your area offering PDRQ”, you’re ahead and can justify holding it as part of a portfolio.
loobkoob@kbin.social 1 year ago
Which really illustrates how much of a bubble waiting to burst online advertising is. Ads on pages like those don't translate into any real-world value for anyone. The advertisers are paying out but they're not actually gaining any sales/users for their money at all because no-one is mistyping a website name, then clicking an advert on the crappy-looking page that comes up, and then deciding to buy/use a product/service from that advert.
___@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Based on my discussions with some domainers I’ve met, the ads themselves haven’t been profitable for the past 5+ years. Their renewals are done at a loss until they make a sale, which covers a few year’s worth of renewals on all their domains. It’s not as profitable as it used to be with all the new gTLDs out there