Tens of thousands of .UK domains are getting registered, what am I missing?

As many of you know (or are about to learn) a bunch of .UK domain names just flooded the market. Companies that had the matching .co.uk domains got first crack at their .UK, and if they didn’t take it – onto the open market it went.

Now over 40,000 .UK domains have been registered and while it’s a relatively small number when it comes to domain names, it’s not meaningless.

Right now it’s hard to know what the split is between people who registered the domains to put to use vs. people who bought them as an investment…but I’ll use my crystal ball and say more than half are now owned by investors hoping to resell them later down the road.

I wrote about .UK domains a couple of weeks ago and based on the comments it seems like most of my readers feel like these are junk. For me personally, I’m pretty much laser focused on .COM at this point in my life but I am interested in understanding if there is an opportunity here for investors.

If there is an opportunity, it’s probably not to buy and flip now but instead to bet that say five to ten years from now, people in the UK will favor .UK over .co.uk…which kinda makes sense to me since it’s shorter and sounds better. That being said, old habits die hard and getting an entire country to move from their go-to domain extension to something different is a big task.

But people are registering these names and my guess is we’ll continue to see this number grow. So what am I missing? Is there an opportunity here or has speculation just gone rampant and we’ll find all these people kicking themselves a few years from now.

What do you think? I want to hear from you, comment and let your voice be heard!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton