Domain GURUs: What makes a .NET valuable?

I'm just guessing here, but in the beginning you had 4 choices when registering a domain name...

.com = commercial

.net = network

.edu = education

.gov = government

When you couldn't get a .com you would reluctantly settle for a .net, as it still made a bit more sense than .edu or .gov

Nowadays you have lots more options if the .com has been taken, so I don't know the answer either.. I would think .biz or .info would be at least as good as a .net for a second choice.

Let's see if someone knows...

keywords, keywords keywords.

your forget .org

Not talking about the SE position, I mean in regards to selling domains.

the same as a .com, its just less valuable. a .net used to be worth "roughly" 10% of the .com value, or that's what i've always based it on. i bought an excellent generic .net the other day from sedo, and when the sites built, because the domain says the keyword, ranking it high on the search engines will be easy (and i couldn't have afforded the .com version anyway). you miss out on a few typeins but i can live with that.

i've allways had doubts about .info and .biz, i don't know if its the case but i wouldn't be suprised if google marks down for a info or biz in its algo. so many spam sites are on .biz and .info it would make sense if that was the case. if the .com's not available i would allways go for .net next.

Sorry to butt in.. but what do you domain gurus think about .co domains??

I don't like .info and .biz, they seem really spammy and scammy.

.biz and .info suck asshole

you use exact same logic as pricing .coms, except you value .nets less...

As someone said, it's basically the same factors that go into a .com except the value is less.

The thing to note is that when looking at US only traffic, .org is actually 2nd and .net 3rd in terms of most prolific extension (based on quantcast's top 2 million list). Go international and .net is 2nd and .org is 3rd (based on Alexa top million). If I recall correctly, .net hasn't seen a 7-figure sale yet whereas .org has (Poker.org for $1 million).

Something like Lyrics.net sold primarily based on the huge amount of searches containing "lyrics", over half a BILLION per the Google Keyword Tool. Exact searches for only "lyrics" is only a few million but throw a lyrics database on there and SEO the output pages to the song/artist + lyrics and you have a good shot at getting a good chunk of the 500+ million searches per month that contain lyrics, and of course with adsense or CPM banners or whatnot, money can be had.

I had and sold Tourists.net for $6,500 I think, but I'm actually not a HUGE fan of .net. I think .org serves more of a purpose (non-profits, help/info sites, conveys trust/authority, good for medical/health, education, politics etc.) and .net is usually just seen as a subpar option to .com.

Also, .info and .biz are incredibly weak in comparison to the major 3 (.info was semi-popular for a while but really died down once people realized SEOwise they're pretty weak), as are .us and even .me and .co despite their hype-filled popularity. Rule of thumb if you're not in this biz is to stay away from anything that's not com/net/org, and in general it's good to stick with .com. I myself focus on mostly .com and .org, but used to deal with a lot of other extensions and while I saw some bursts of success, the markets for .com and .org are a lot more stable than for other exts.

Nice replies, thanks!

.org leaks a lot more to .com than .net

.net leaks but not as much because its so recognised