General

Astute Buyer Stakes Their Claim – Claim.au Sold

Posted on by Ned
21
Jun

First the good news. We recently had a decent .au sale of Claim.au. Congratulations to the buyers.

If this was the .com.au, they would definitely have paid mid to high 5 figures in my opinion.

But being the .au, they acquired it for a fraction of this. To me, that is astute buying. Why? Because it is a “category killer” word.

The com.au is registered to a Queensland No Win, No Fee Compensation Lawyer Firm.

Is the .au domain extension a “flop”?

Being diplomatic, I think it is fair to say that the new .au extension has been “disappointing”.

This aligns with what happened in New Zealand and the UK.

Hundreds of them are expiring every week and not being renewed. The subsequent take up by others is minimal – or the prices being paid are ridiculously low.

Many experienced people in the industry warned auDA that this would happen, but our concerns fell on deaf ears.

auDA seems to have washed their hands of the .au in that there has been no recent ongoing promotional advertising. Hopefully this will change.

Does the .au extension have a place in our domain name ecosystem?

Despite what I wrote above, in my opinion, there is a place for the .au.

In particular:

  1. Where a business has no chance of acquiring the com.au because it is already taken – or its aftermarket value is too high for their budget; or
  2. If registrants are a small business, hobbyist, blogger or influencer who does not have an ABN / ACN etc. Provided you have an Australian presence, the registration rules are very easy.
  3. Brand protection. The need to protect one’s brand is always important, and I and many others believe auDA took advantage of this in allowing .au.

At Profit, we have made many .au sales because of the three points above.

Summary

The com.au domain extension is always going to be king. The value of them far exceeds any other Australian extension. Nothing will change this in my opinion.

But if you fit into any of the three categories above, then the .au is definitely worthwhile.

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