There’s a new domain conference around the corner and it will only cost you $199 until December 1 (then $399 before January 7th). The NamesCon conference will be held January 13-15 at the Tropicana in Las Vegas. The conference overlaps with Affiliate Summit West and InterNext, so there may be more than one reason for you to be in Vegas. Richard Lau is sponsoring the conference, and the not-so hidden agenda seems to be attracting domain investors to the new .whatever TLDs that are currently launching. What will this mean to your .com domain portfolio? That’s sure to be on the agenda.
Frank Schilling and Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker are being promoted as keymote speakers. Frank is highly respected by domainers, and is investing heavily in the new TLDs. His debate with Rick Schwartz at a recent TRAFFIC conference is informative and entertaining. He is clearly betting a lot of money on .whatever TLDs, and his .tattoo TLD is having a sunrise in 2 weeks and is actually live and resolving. Shoemoney had an incredibly popular podcast for several years and is one of the kings of affiliate marketing.
How will this affect your domain portfolio? Obviously Frank and Rick have different opinions about this. In the short run I doubt that it will affect things too much – but I have let go of most of my .net and .info domains. 20 years from now we will likely see a completely different domain landscape.
If TRAFFIC is a little too expensive for your budget in these times of lean parking incomes, you may want to consider a winter trip to Vegas. I can’t pass up a good deal. I’ll be at NamesCon to see what all the fuss is about. Who knows, maybe this will be my last domain conference. There should be good drinks all around, but I don’t expect to be drinking the new TLD Kool Aid.
NameMonetizer 
Good to hear your perspective, Dr. Leonard, and happy to hear you'll skip the kool-aid for the full bar!I routinely filter all .info btw. It will likely be harder to tune out spam and phishing, I'm thinking, in the TLD future.I suppose for 'branding' there may be lots of glitter and potential, but still people will go to pepsi.com rather then coke.realthing (so I imagine). Have fun. I'm not big on Kool-aid either. Have an exotic drink for me. Hoping what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas! And Happy Holidays!
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It was a good conference and I left with a slightly different impression of the new TLDs. It's a future that we can't change. I don't think people will go to coke.realthing, but Pepsl may spend a lot of money on drink.pepsi, for example. I have not bought into any new TLDs and still have no plans to do so.
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