I've looked at that pool.com site a few times, out of idle curiosity. Every time I do so, I never fail to be amazed at the absolute mountain of complete junk domains that <someone> <somewhere> has registered.
They seem to fall into two categories; the "my cat walked over the keyboard" + <dot>com ones, like 342yfgtg.com and the "maybe if I add another word, I'll find a combo that's not been already registered" + <crappy new TLD> ones, like "topgoodholidaybargainsales.info"
It's all very well the author of the article coming up with a "buy great domain name > profit" get rich quick scheme. But it's a bit like those "how to make money online" articles which advise you to "start a blog about something lots of people will want to read". If having a good idea was all that was involved in getting rich quick, most of us would be millionaires.
Personally, I think the most of the new TLDs are complete junk. I did snap up a 4-letter<dot>bid one, when they first came out, purely because there was some stupid offer on where you got something like ten years for a few quid. But I only use it for testing random web stuff on. I don't think I'll ever do anything serious with it.
I am lucky enough however to have a 5-letter-real-word<dot>net one that I registered back in the 1990s which I use for my business site and my IRL name is unusual enough that I was also able to snap up myfirstname<dot>net and mysurname<dot>net a few years back as well. I tend to prefer <dot>net for my domains as I think it rolls off the tongue nicer than <dot>com.
Speculation-wise, I've registered a handful of domains over the years, in the vague hope I'd some day be able to sell them on when their 'subject matter' became popular, but nothing ever came of any of them and I ended up just letting them lapse as I'm too poor to keep renewing domains I don't use, on the off-chance.
I can barely remember what any of them were now. Apart from one which sticks in my mind; "genet-X.com" which I registered back when genetic engineering was just starting to get talked about in the news. I had high hopes that some thrusting new biotech company might spring up with that name and offer me untold riches for the domain. But no-one ever came a-knocking, bearing sacks of cash and I let that domain expire with all the rest and my dreams of riches!
Yeah. There are tons of bad domain names on those drop lists. I wonder what the deal is with that too.
The new TLDs aren't that bad IMO, especially if you want something short and memorable for a quick site. Last year I wanted a non-SSL site to help out with captive portal redirection and I was able to register wifi.help rather than some crazy long name on an ogTLD.
Not all the new TLDs are terrible. A few of the short ones like <dot>me [for a personal site], or <dot>info for a reference site are OK. But I think a lot of the other ones do sound really dodgy. If I saw a link to a company website with a domain name like <dot>bargains, <dot>blackfirday, <dot>creditcard, <dot>discount... [to pick just 4 at random near the top of a very long alphabetical list] I'd avoid them like the plague.
They just set off alarm bells in my head that, at best, I'd be venturing on to some godawful spammy site, loaded down with a dozen hacky-tracky javascripts and, at worst, I'd be opening up my computer to god knows what insecure data processing.
Funny how the <dot>xyz domain [which, to be fair, wasn't one of the worst of the new ones] attained a measure of respectability when adopted by Google, in their Alphabet guise.
They seem to fall into two categories; the "my cat walked over the keyboard" + <dot>com ones, like 342yfgtg.com and the "maybe if I add another word, I'll find a combo that's not been already registered" + <crappy new TLD> ones, like "topgoodholidaybargainsales.info"
It's all very well the author of the article coming up with a "buy great domain name > profit" get rich quick scheme. But it's a bit like those "how to make money online" articles which advise you to "start a blog about something lots of people will want to read". If having a good idea was all that was involved in getting rich quick, most of us would be millionaires.
Personally, I think the most of the new TLDs are complete junk. I did snap up a 4-letter<dot>bid one, when they first came out, purely because there was some stupid offer on where you got something like ten years for a few quid. But I only use it for testing random web stuff on. I don't think I'll ever do anything serious with it.
I am lucky enough however to have a 5-letter-real-word<dot>net one that I registered back in the 1990s which I use for my business site and my IRL name is unusual enough that I was also able to snap up myfirstname<dot>net and mysurname<dot>net a few years back as well. I tend to prefer <dot>net for my domains as I think it rolls off the tongue nicer than <dot>com.
Speculation-wise, I've registered a handful of domains over the years, in the vague hope I'd some day be able to sell them on when their 'subject matter' became popular, but nothing ever came of any of them and I ended up just letting them lapse as I'm too poor to keep renewing domains I don't use, on the off-chance.
I can barely remember what any of them were now. Apart from one which sticks in my mind; "genet-X.com" which I registered back when genetic engineering was just starting to get talked about in the news. I had high hopes that some thrusting new biotech company might spring up with that name and offer me untold riches for the domain. But no-one ever came a-knocking, bearing sacks of cash and I let that domain expire with all the rest and my dreams of riches!