As a fellow very-common-name sufferer, I long ago gave up any hope of getting a vanity domain name (how I wish I had paid the $25 back in 1996). Most of the new TLD seem pretty scammy to me, the costs in obtaining and running most obscure TLDs far outweigh what could be got by paying customers actually waiting to run sites off them.
I suspect that a lot of them are just hoping that enough large companies buy up kfc.blog, walmart.porn, etc to make a return on investment. Fleecing people who actually want the domains is just icing on the cake.
I am somewhat of a hypocrite, I run my blog off https://sheep.horse/, but only because I thought that the .horse TLD was silly enough to be worth supporting.
At a USD200,000 price for a new TLD, it takes 2,000 domains at $100/year to break even. Of course there are other costs associated to running a TLD, but they probably don't scale linearly.
So on a 5 year term, it might even be a small profitable business.
When I started reading this post, I clicked the get.blog link first and wondered if chris.blog might be available. I assumed not and didn't check before going back to the article and seeing the topic domain, hah.
That's exactly it. Brand protection companies like MarkMonitor will buy these up as a matter of course to protect their clients, and they'll do so at the inflated Early Access rates to boot. By the time the domains are released to the public, these companies have already made their profit.
At one point even their clients will realize that the value of owning {name}.{everything} is more finite than the number of possible values for {everything}. When this happens, TLD racketeers will be sitting on a well oiled money burning machine, because only few of those who are attracted by that kind of business are good at keeping expenses low in times of plenty. The end game for many squatting-TLDs will be an existential pricing standoff between the dying registrar and the very low number of users that were foolish enough to build a long term identity in one of its namespaces.
I registered "steve.org.uk" back in 1999 and it cost me way more than $25. In fact I hate to think how much I've paid for it over the years, it's been a while now!
(Recently managed to register "steve.fi", as it expired just a few months after I relocated to Finland. That was a happy coincidence. I guess that means I have two vanity-domains!)
I suspect that a lot of them are just hoping that enough large companies buy up kfc.blog, walmart.porn, etc to make a return on investment. Fleecing people who actually want the domains is just icing on the cake.
I am somewhat of a hypocrite, I run my blog off https://sheep.horse/, but only because I thought that the .horse TLD was silly enough to be worth supporting.