Originally posted 28th January 2017, updated 29th March 2017

Eventually ended up acquired the young.kiwi domain name to replace the longer young.kiwi.nz (which I’ve since dropped). I guess as well as representing my last name, the “young” + “kiwi” word combination does have a nice ring to it. The young.nz domain is still in a conflicted state with about 5 different claims on it and it looks unlikely anyone will get it any time soon.

Not quite sure what is going on with dot Kiwi and their domains. Their front page is incorrectly indicating domains which are taken as being available. Additionally, late last year, young.kiwi couldn’t be registered (had some funny lock on it preventing registration), and prior to that, the dot Kiwi registry was trying to hock it off as a premium domain name for a thousand dollars.

There is also a bit of an identity issue with “Kiwi” as a word in itself. Seems everywhere else in the world, the word Kiwi is firmly linked to Kiwifruit (Chinese Gooseberry) as opposed to New Zealand’s Native Bird, or a New Zealander / New Zealand CItizen, or anything about New Zealand as such. Go to Google NCR (“No Country Redirect”) and type in “Kiwi” to see what I’m referring to.

As an aside, how is this for unusual pricing? The young.blog is listed with an asking price of 110,000 USD per year. Not sure who will go for those with the plethora of Top Level domains to choose from these days.

I’m assuming these prices are negotiable… right? As I don’t know who in their right mind will pay the current ticket prices per year for a premium .blog domain? An inquiry to “Knock Knock WHOIS There” (The subsidiary company to Automattic looking after the .blog registry) has so far failed to yield any sort of response.

Anyway, trawling a lot of the recently release Top Level Domain (“TLD”) names, it seems many “young.<TLD>” are being hocked off as a premium domain name by their respective registries, with eye watering and frankly absurd 4 to 6 figure yearly renewal prices… Just go to any registrar and see how many silly little Top Level Domains there are now. The market is totally saturated.

Interesting to note, that with the excess liquidity in the world today, Folks from my Ancestral Motherland are apparently going nuts speculating on domain names. Nothing makes any jot of sense anymore… We’ve seen rampant credit fueled speculation with Auckland’s house prices (Obvious Bubble is Obvious) and now this.