Long Term Declines are Likely in Domain Traffic

It appears the great success of Smart Phones combined with the strong impact and heavy usage of Apps has already done considerable damage to typein traffic along with browser-based search traffic too. Things will no doubt get worse as the mobile market expands even more.

In addition, once the new unlimted .tld’s start resolving that too in all likelihood will have a negative impact on traffic going to .com and other extensions since so many large websites will have their own tld and people will start simply typing-in that new tld instead of doing a search or typing in dot-com, etc. A random example is websurfers who will go to LasVegas rather than Lasvegas.com or bother to do a search for other las vegas websites.

This is all very distressing and disturbing news for domainers in general and especially for typein traffic domains and websites (including sites which rely heavily on search-engine traffic). Unfortunately these new development look like generating domain/website traffic from typeins and search is well past its peak of a few years ago and is quickly becoming a long-term bear market.

All of that negativity to traffic/revenue potential combined with ever increasing renewal fess (i.e. just discovered my Moniker account .com renewals went up to a high $8.99 today) makes it quite likely more and more domaine operators will let much of their portfolio expire or possibly even exit the business starting this year.