Park.io published an article on the continued growing usage of .io. The article titled, “The explosive growth of .io domains” takes a look at the growing percentage of websites using .io and the fact that Hillary Clinton has got her own .io domain.
From the article:
The percentage of websites using .io domains has more than doubled in the last year alone, according to w3techs.com. This makes it the fastest growing TLD by far, of all TLDs that make up roughly 0.01% or more of websites on the internet.
.io domains have grown from about 0.042% of all websites on the internet in April 2014, to about 0.088%. This is a growth of around 400,000 websites built on .io domains in one year:
There is also a chart of .io on Google Trends
Read the full article on Park.io
The place for .io sales continues to be Flippa, this week’s sales included:
tShirts.io $2,500
Giftcard.io $2,001
Giftcards.io $2,000
Opinion.io $750
I wonder how .app will affect .io.
With the way Google plans on running it, maybe not much. You need to prove you are an app developer, they will monitor you, domains can be suspended. They may be the only registrar that sells them because of all the restrictions, I don’t think Go Daddy will be like, “Ok, Alan prove to us you are a real app developer”
A bubble of malinvestment.
What country runs this thing?
http://techtools.domains/tld-whois/.io
There is no bubble in .io one of the few extensions where there’s actual real development on.
disagree
io is a bubble
havent EVER gone to an io site
havent EVER seen an io url advertised
NOT ONE
Ever
$99 ANNUAL registration fee?,..For a BRITISH INDIAN OCEAN extension????
NO THANKS!
$40 at namecheap and gandi.net
They’re even cheaper at name cheap and io not a bubble because some anonymous poster on a domain blog says it is. you’re nobody
You must learn to never feed the trolls my son. Let the force guide you, you know the true path.
Hi Spencer,
If you want to actually do some research – here’s a few companies that use .io that work with Fortune 500 companies: Predicta.io, ExactMedia.io & Tulip.io
It’s pretty easy to find many successful .io companies out there.
Tim
We own Scottsdale.io and a few other numeric .io and the renew fee is $35 with GoDaddy. We plan to buy more numeric .io. There is no “bubble” in the .io extension. The Globe.com going up 600% on the first day of it’s IPO in 1999 was a bubble.
Google : .io site and you will see plenty of websites.
Can we see the value of .mobi go up with anytime soon?
If the market interest in .IO were deep-rooted, then we’d see .IO domains selling across all market places. As things are, the aftermarket commotion is mainly just at Flippa. To me that’s evidence of localized hype.
Both .IO and Flippa are heavily promoted, targeting the same audience of novice domainers. In the past year, there have been scads of articles on domain blogs promoting .IO, as well as marketing interviews on DomainSherpa by Park.io, whose promotional agenda is being furthered here as well (even if only accidentally).
All this has occurred in tandem with a minority of .IO portfolio holders pushing up one another’s .IO auctions on Flippa with bids and comments. Soon Flippa management and brokers began to fan that flame, encouraging domainer investment in .IO as the next big thing. Since the investment habits of newbie domainers are easily steered toward less established TLDs (due to lower pricing and high hopes), Flippa knows where to steer its audience of newbies.
So the market appetite for .IO appears to be intense … but mainly just at Flippa. And who are the bidders? End users or credulous domainers? In some cases the bidders (as opposed to buyers) are also the busiest .IO sellers. So it’s a fair question to ask whether they bid to buy or bid to lift prices for their own inventory. Several people I’ve been speaking with have tried selling promising .IO domains on Flippa with poor results. So I’m skeptical that this market interest goes much deeper than the top layer of Flippa promotion.
Keep in mind, that compelling graph doesn’t show prices or registration volume. Emotionally it seems to. But what it really shows is evidence of search volume. That means that hype produces effects. But I’m not sure it means more than that.
Would be interested to look at those 400,000 .IO websites launched during the past year.
Where would you like to see that Joseph ? This is mostly a techies extension go check out egghead.Io there’s a real site behind that. They wouldn’t be advertising on American Idol.
who you? u r just a nobody on a message board domain shame 😉
Lolasaurirex !1111
.io
HAHAHAHA
ok..egghead.io has a site
yas convinced me !!!!!!!!111111
;P
I understand that .IO is mainly for techies. And I’ve run across a few .IO websites over the past couple of years that interest me as someone who dabbles in code.
Since .IO is primarily for techies who traditionally have wanted a cheap, hacker-friendly TLD, I’m naturally suspicious of any sudden surge in .IO prices – particularly when it’s a phenomenon that seems to be happening nearly in isolation at 1 venue known for shills and heavily weighted to novice domainers … and when the timing coincides with a lot of domainer-targeted .IO publicity.
To me that’s a red flag. Domainers surely aren’t the techies building .IO sites, yet they’re buying these .IO domains in expectation that such techies will arrive. The original .IO fad began because .IO was a relatively cheap alternative to .COM. Now there are hundreds of such alternatives. Hackers are still as cheap as they were 2 years ago. Nothing has changed where the techies are concerned. So they’ll continue to go where TLDs are cheap.
Where would I like to see .IO sales? Well, if this upsurge in .IO prices is a real reflection of the overall market, then I’d expect to see .IO sales everywhere – at all the major market places. As it is, it’s mainly just Flippa. Some specific .IO Flippa auctions I scrutinized were obvious fakes. Some sales are undoubtedly real. But the sudden interest in .IO among the Flippa crowd seems more like a stampeded herd of domainers than anything else.
.io may not be considered truly investment grade; however, to muddle the Flippa experience (shill bidding, cheating, bullshit cross promotion of sites, relisting) and the consistent willingness of unmitigated Park.io advertising with the actual development potential and value of .io is a little bit of a disservice to the .io space. I know you state that you see development and that it’s the cheap alternative to other options (.com) but you still consider it almost solely as a cheap option when it’s actually a fairly simple branding play.
As someone who is active in the development space I can say that that the usage of .io is far higher than it is for similar other cheap alternatives. Take atom.io or brackets.io – this are proper tools for real developers, these are the types of sites that are visible to IT. Even those sites that aren’t necessarily commercial are often technical blogs or used socially aware users as part of their digital marketing optimization efforts.
What does that mean? Not a lot, it’s still a bit of a bubble but the usage of .io in the h4ck3r space is far higher than people would admit. Sales north of $1000 are not surprising which is a decent return on $50. That said anyone registering now may be trying to cash in on an exhausted mine.
@h4ck3r
Yes, I agree with much of what you say in this case. .IO means something to programmers. And that does make it a straightforward branding play … for that niche audience. They encounter .IO somewhat frequently – unlike the rest of humanity.
So I’m sure that .IO is fashionable enough in those circles to produce some aftermarket sales. My impression is that the fad began because hackers found their name ideas expensive in .COM but freely available in .IO. After a few hand-reg’d .IO sites succeeded, some better funded tech startups decided to copy their predecessors. But the hacker mentality was – and still is – to find a workaround. If your name idea is taken in a given TLD, you pick a different TLD where it’s cheap & handy.
So with .IO domains being gobbled up by domainers (now at prices far above wholesale), tomorrow’s hackers are going to find their names taken or overpriced in .IO. Fortunately they’ll have HUNDREDS of other options. Just like the early adopters of .IO – for whom .IO was too unknown to be much of a branding play – the next group of out-of-the-box thinkers will experiment with something new and (to an increasing degree) leave .IO sitting in domainers’ portfolios.
Think about it. How big is the population of software developers? Are their tastes in TLDs conservative, or do they jerry-rig a solution based on some novel TLD as soon as the more established TLDs get too expensive? Compared to the mainstream population, this group is tiny. Their interest in .IO will only go so far price-wise before they look elsewhere; and as soon as some tech startup starts a trend on some other TLD, the copycats will follow suit.
Mainly the issue that I’m seeing is that .IO is somewhat familiar to programmers, but to a mainstream audience it’s even LESS familiar than .CLICK or .LINK or .TIPS. At least those nTLDs (and hundreds more like them) at least are words that ordinary people understand. Domainers are very gullible – especially the audiences at particular venues. And the new domainers seem to have swallowed the idea that .IO has gone mainstream, that it’s suitable for any sort of project.
My own favorite .IO site is probably Codepen.io. Notice that it’s about programming and intended for programmers. So why do I see frenzied bidding for Tshirts.io and GiftCards.io? Domains like those aren’t aimed at the techie niche that has embraced .IO. Instead they seem to be pitched for Walmart shoppers. To me it looks like domainers have been sold on the idea that .IO is mainstream; so they’re evaluating keywords purely in terms of search volume and CPC and forgetting that .IO belongs to programmers.
Walmart shoppers would respond much better to Tshirts.link or GiftCards.click or anything in .COUPONS. With .IO, they’ll just ask “Huh? What’s an IO?”
It’s somewhere between hilarious & tragic that domainers at Flippa believe any good word in .IO is worth $x,xxx to them while they simultaneously refuse to buy these same keywords in nTLDs from one another!
I would have grave reservations about trusting those numbers.
You said it yourself on your linked in page!
“Opportunities are born in the blind spots — when mainstream organizations fail to notice potential that their competition sees … and seizes upon! The fringe IS the frontier.”
I think you’re angry that you see the back of the train leaving the station and now you have to run your butt off to catch it. And then what? When you do climb on you have to make your way to the front, out of breath and tired.
Dont worry – there will be other trains..
… and Jill came tumbling after … Nice to see these discussions continue after a quarter of a year!
Without re-reading my ancient comments now, I do think I gave a pretty measured opinion of .IO, its merits and its limitations. What was being discussed was short-term hype surrounding .IO auctions at Flippa. At a distance of three months, people can draw their own conclusions about whether there was hype last Spring and whether that has by now subsided.
Some people assume that any critical thought at all masks anger or jealousy. You’re free to imagine anything you please. To date, I haven’t registered any .IO domains. In retrospect, I ought to have picked up a few. But I’m hardly “[running my] but off” to catch that train. As you say, there are plenty of other trains.
Please, accuse me of being “out of breath and tired”! I exhale paragraphs, my dear.
There were twice as many .io startups in Q1 as .net and .org combined-so where’s the bubble?
@John,
Where are you getting that figure from? Thin air?
That was a rude remark-what is it with some people on these blogs? DNGEEK-go look at the chart if you know how to read.
No, John. Asking that a claim be accompanied by some evidence or citation is hardly rude. In that case, all journalism, all science, and all research are rude! Throwing around the number 2 without reference to any data is meaningless. Am I not allowed to be curious and ask what on earth you’re talking about?
Yes, I know how to read. Thanks for lecturing me on politeness!
DNGeek is a nice blog. However, those lists are hardly a representative sample of startup websites. Doron chooses to look at certain sources of information (not all), and from those he personally selects domains to discuss. The startups he discusses tend to be tech startups, which explains the presence of .IO. What’s most interesting to me, though, is how many of those domains (regardless of TLD) were hand registered rather than purchased on the aftermarket.
There is a difference. What DNGeek will often show is a .IO that was hand-registered 3 years ago, extensively developed, and now receiving VC funding. That’s a completely different phenomenon from .IO domains being indiscriminately bid up to $x,xxx by domain speculators.
I’m not arguing against the idea that techies sometimes use .IO. What strikes me as suspicious is the sudden surge in aftermarket prices for .IO at 1 venue where .IO has been heavily marketed to domainers. Since I don’t detect any underlying market justification for the feeding frenzy, I do see .IO at Flippa as something of a bubble.
877.io was just relisted on Flippa because it couldn’t even bring in $200-where’s the bubble you’re talking about? Did you take the “bubble” notion out of thin air?
It snowed here 2 days ago. Therefore there’s no such thing as Summer.
This is all about hype. Out of 100 sales listed on NameBio only 8 were sold at Sedo. 92 sales out of 100 through Flippa all within a 2 month time frame. (Feb 13, 2015-April 18, 2015)
I am sure half of these sales are faked just to hype the extension. If you think .io is a good investment you better look again. Foolish investment!!
I’m intrigued that “you’re sure” that half of the .IO sales were faked. By my count, we see less than 2% reverse upon point of sale.
Rule of thumb to keep in mind from our perspective: if it’s reported on our Weekly Domain Rundown (via our blog), the sale has gone through unless otherwise noted at a later date.
When will Flippa begin publishing lists of reversed sales?
My assumption is never.
You wouldn’t have a negative bias towards Flippa now would you Joseph ?
Since you ask, yes, my opinion of Flippa – as they have been operating in recent months – is quite negative.
Why?
The place is rife with fake bids. Shilling isn’t easy to prove, since Flippa management continues to mask bidder identities, which I’d say does a disservice to customers. Yet some of us stumble across shills regularly, which makes me doubt Flippa management’s commitment to policing its auctions. If those of us outside Flippa keep running into fake accounts while full-time Flippa employees can’t be bothered to find them, then that says something. Even when Flippa does ban users, such incidents tend to be swept under the carpet. Past sales where shilling is suspected to have happened don’t result in reimbursement for buyers.
Apart from bids that come from aliases or are bought outright by sellers at such sites as FlippaBid.com (which I wrote about at DomainNameWire.com) or Fiverr, there’s a huge problem with buddy bidding. You may call that “fraud lite” if you wish. Sellers suffer from poor visibility (unless they pay exorbitant fees); so they’re naturally tempted to form networks and bid up each others’ auctions in order to gain exposure. Such bids are, of course, fake, since the bidders don’t intend to buy. On any given day, it’s a piece of cake to spot multiple sellers who are doing this. That puts honest sellers even further behind. Thus they’ll be more likely to pay $300 or more for a Flippa upgrade. It’s an ugly situation.
Privileged sellers and brokers are promoted above the heads of paying customers, and their success (orchestrated with the full backing of Flippa’s marketing) is used to lure in naïve domainers who pay for expensive upgrades. That wasn’t the case a year ago. Back then, the playing field was more or less level. But these days, it’s like a billiards table heavily tilted toward the corner pocket – i.e. toward a minority of Flippa users who receive free promotion.
Am I biased? Or is Flippa?
Negative though my opinion of Flippa is, I’ve sold there in the past and would sell there again if I sensed that good results could be achieved without fraud or favoritism. Currently, I don’t believe that’s possible, based on what other sellers tell me they’re experiencing and what I observe from a distance. But anywhere I can sell, I’ll sell. Bias would only cost me money.
In addition to updating Namebio, I’ve been alerting Raymond as well (so he can make changes to his blog posts).
That’s very significant. I haven’t checked that. But if 92% of .IO sales recorded by Namebio have happened during a 2-month period at 1 venue, then what ON EARTH could possibly justify that kind of surge?
Easily explained by hype … Nearly impossible to justify based on market fundamentals.
I understand where you’re coming from but your talking as if .oi is running comparable to a stock running three standard deviations above it’s trend line-there’s two different things here.The answer is simple I believe-there are simple so many one word names and numbers with .io available to a startup and many being “tech” they feel comfortable with the short .io extension. Now if there were selling for $100,000 a clip i’d agree-that would be a bubble,but they’re not.
@joseph, I have to agree with your arguments on this whole .io subject. I have been suspecting that this sudden surge in .io “sales” was something of a bubble, and wouldn’t be surprised if there is some sort of shill bidding going on.
I also have a sneaking suspicion that there may be shill bidding going on for regular domains over at Flippa. I have seen some domains sell then the winner immediately re-listing the domain and selling for profit (sometimes in the $1000s of dollars) within 45 days. Example: keyboards.net sold on Feb 24th for $4500, then was relisted and sold on April 8th for $6800. Very strange to find another buyer that will beat a previous auction so quickly. This is not founded in any hard facts (other than the dates and sales figures) so it is just a suspicion of mine so far and sure, it CAN happen.
I also often see what looks to be “preferred” domains shooting to the top of the domains list and staying there. I recently ran an auction where I paid my $350 and received no such treatment, and my domain was buried among the others. Needless to say i did not see a tremendous response from the “Flippa community” with positive comments about my listing. Again, this is hard to prove because we are talking about two different domains here. But in my opinion the domain I had up for sale was a decent .com that should have organically received more attention than it did (when comparing against some others that have a large number of “bids”).
It also appears that Flippa has a bias towards it’s own broker’s listings. Those often shoot to the top of the domains list and remain sticky there. Are they great domains? Some of them, sure. But not all, and I often see comparable names that get buried in the list with no real reason as to why that is happening.
Just something to think about.
Thanks for your comments, George. We value your feedback.
First, reach out to me anytime (attn: Kevin) via our CS channels. I’d like to know the domain you launched, as well as waive all associated fees (including upgrades) so you can try again. Or if I deem the domain to not be a good fit for auction on our platform, I’ll work with you to find another one that is.
There is an issue with brokered domains staying towards the top, and we’re working to solve this discrepancy by separating brokerage entirely from the main auction docket. The product team in Melbourne is also working on a revised domains channel/page so listings get better rotated throughout the results.
I was suspicious of the second Keyboards.net sale, too — and had actually advised the seller (or rather, new owner from the first sale) to NOT try and flip it so soon after his acquisition. But he did manage to find a buyer, and the sale went through.
I urge you or anyone else to report listings that appear discrepant, seeing as we find most of what we uncover on our own, but the rest are reported to us.
I’ve noticed lots of startups and apps using the .io extension. It’s very popular with the hacker/developer community. Input/output
I don’t own any .io domains. I wish I did.
My co-founders and I launched an API in 2011 which received a lot of press, and which we hosted on an .io, upon the advice of one of our technologists. The technology was acquired in 2012. I have no idea what extension is being used now to host it.
No doubt the buyers would prefer the .com, but when you can’t get Fleet.com, or Brain.com, Fleet.io or Brain.io are great options to get your product launched.
@ Kevin Fink, thanks for the reply. I appreciate you wanting to help me out with my sale. It is also good to hear that sales like the keyboards.net example are on your radar and that you are looking into separating out the broker listings. I think transparency like this will help to earn your company trust among domainers and the community.
Hello Ray,
The coming carnage will fast change .io and others adversely.
The stage has been set, for a confrontation of ALL Present Online Extension Holders with Google and Amazon Both. The Online and offline DNS Stakeholders will crush both Google and Amazons assault on the Domain Name Systems Hierarchy and The Subverting Monopoly Power Grab will ultimately topple both GOOGLE And Amazons effort s to topple the DNSs Nuetrality. COMING SOON !
JAS 4/20/15
Gratefully, Jeff Schneider (Contact Group) (Metal Tiger)
Jeff .io is a country code that has been around for 18 years it is not a new gtld.
877.io selling on Flippa-right now-for $60. That’s certainly a “bubble” to be worried about. Nonsense.
I use an .io site every few weeks that converts .wav files to mp3 files, for free. I have also seen a bunch of .io tech sites in the news (I read techcrunch.com every day). So, the .io domain seems to be catching on. But, no more than .info or .co or other popular extensions.
Joseph Peterson says
Hello Joseph,
It snowed there ? Where are you located just out of curiosity ? By the way you are very often right about things and are a Intelligent Commentor. Kudos JAS 4/21/15
Gratefully, Jeff schneider (Contact Group) (Metal Tiger)
Thanks.
Sometimes right. Frequently wrong. Hopefully always cautious.
Love to be disagreed with.
“Love to be disagreed with.”
No you don’t 🙂
Ah, h4ck3r, you don’t know me at all!
Disagreements are as pleasurable as sex. I prefer a partner.
having been interested in domains for a few years now it appears to me that net,org,inof etc have merged into the new gltd mire.
there is com and everything else, however i sense that one extension will emerge from the mire and be great.
the problem for the domainer is which one, why not .io
Hello chris brennan says ,
Its the well established legacy extensions with first to Market Beach Head Establised players thatwill win the day, and .BIZ is the dark horse favorite that IBM.Biz is emerging in our professional opinion. Follow the Really Smart Money and not the New Quasi-Derivative gTLD Aggregators who have a limited role in aggregating traffic to the Big Boy Legacy and established Extensions. JAS 4/21/15
Gratefully, Jeff Schneider (Contact Group) (Metal Tiger)
I’d say that .ORG retains a clear identity of its own. Not every keyword or phrase functions equally well with the .ORG brand, perhaps. But Wikipedia has a very deliberate intent when it forwards .COM to .ORG.
Anything’s possible. Maybe 1 extension out of a thousand unfamiliar TLDs will emerge as dominant. Yet with so many nTLD options to choose from – and the main argument being variety of choice – it’s equally possible that, after the already established TLDs, no single newcomer will overcome its 1000 rivals.
Theoretically, .IO could go mainstream and enter the vernacular after .COM, .NET, .ORG, et al. Yet if some new TLD is to achieve such prominence, it could as easily be .WEB or .LINK or (if Negari’s puffed-up antics are believed) .XYZ. Fragmentation of the non-.COM, non-ccTLD space is bound to happen to some degree. And any new TLD would have a long way to go to catch up to .NET and .ORG. As for any single TLD catching up to .COM, well, that’s probably impossible.
But that’s the future, and the future is up for grabs & guesswork. To say that .IO might go mainstream in spite of competition from all the nTLDs is different from claiming that it definitely will or that .IO is mainstream already. Few are arguing that.
think tipping point [Malcolm Gladwell]
net, org etc are old and stale, they have degraded to the mean in my estimation.
it is the new people with brightness who will decide which tld rises above.
i don’t say this because i have bought a specific tld, mostly i only own .com, but new life is like a forest bursting out from a disaster, nothing can stop it and when the new life decides which tld will succeed that will be that.
a $1k bet on google 20 years ago would have been a safe place to hide your retirement, hence .io or whatever could be the new google, everything depends on fashion and what catches on with the “in crowd”.
disclosure above comment laced with redbrest 15 year old,
The thing about .ORG is that everyone knows it and hears it on TV every day in one form or another. We own 1ea.org among others and have no idea if it will ever be worth anything as if it were .com. Time will tell.
Joseph
We need to add this one to the commentators hall of fame
“Disagreements are as pleasurable as sex. I prefer a partner.”
I haven’t done research much but what i have seen on Flippa in recent few months, i dont see .IO as bubble. Just last week Analytics.io got sold for $10,000.
Then mostly it is looked as good option for new Tech start-ups. Same as the case of PHP.io got sold for 5 digits. There is no doubt that it is getting in position among others.
I simply can’t understand one thing, if .io domain are so valuable then why people are letting them to be expired? You can find hundreds of pending delete domains at park.io.
Would be interesting to see the stats on the role played by park.io in this. They catch pretty much every interesting .io domain that drops. Some go to their auction, then immediately re-listed on flippa. they must grab 100s of .io domains per week, and not all for their customers.
My biggest problem with park.io is that they don’t make all dropping domains available in their lists and auctions. They hold back certain ‘premium’ domains. A recent domain I wanted was not listed, so I took a chance to manually register. But they caught it, then when I enquired they wanted $4750 for what I would consider a $100 to $200 domain. I think it’s very underhand for a drop catching service to reserve premium domains for themselves.
Look at the whois for domains from past park.io auctions & you will see many of the “new” owners cannot be bothered to transfer out, or update the whois – they are still registered to park.io & sitting on park.io nameservers. Why is that?
re Park.io it’s not at all “underhanded” I’ve used this service and Mike couldn’t be more helpful. As to holding “Premium” domains himself-first of all he makes it very clear that he holds some for his own portfolio secondly why shouldn’t he? He wrote the program to “catch” these names. It’s very unfair to call Park.io “underhanded” because you missed a dropped name when you left out that you could have gone to NIC.com and paid a $60 “catch” fee and got the name but obviously you didn’t want to pay that fee. Nic.com (the Reg.) gets any and all dropped .io BEFORE Park.io. So please post the whole story if you’re going to knock someone in a such a public way.
Maybe underhand was harsh, buy I certainly wasn’t aware they kept some domains to buy personally. Having just checked again it is in their faq, but they also say “Do you or any park.IO employees bid in the auctions? No, we don’t think it would be fair, so we have a company rule that no employees can bid in any of the auctions.” So they do recognise there is a conflict between themselves as domain purchasers and the service they offer.
Due to the nature of the auction system, I think drop catching services need to be completely transparent to provide confidence in the service.
Backorder via the registrar is relatively new, and I agree would be the preferable way to go, it also seems like park.io are using this to guarantee some of the domains they make available for auction.
I dont want to sound bitter, it wasn’t a domain I was desperate to buy, I was just surprised after it wasn’t in their drop list but they showed up as owners. Maybe they should buy domains personally under a different handle? I think Mike has built a great business, and promoted .io as a tld, which was my original point. A lot of .io’s appearing on Flippa originated from park.io.