[gravitas]

To put an example to the other comments, look up the history of the XYZ domain - in a nutshell, they had a fire sale selling domains for pennies to gain market share. Besides normal people, three groups descended upon it: spammers, squatters and hackers. 6 years later and the entire .xyz space is blocked in Enterprise firewalls (source: my workplace) due to that behaviour, preventing me from getting to valid tech sites on the TLD. The XYZ image is still tarnished from cheap domain fire sales at the beginning of it's life - I'd never pay $50 for anything in .xyz today.

To contrast, the .io space entered at what, $50 USD? and continues to be expensive to maintain year over year, providing a natural monetary resistance barrier to the same three groups of people (spammers, squatters and hackers) and seems to enjoy a healthy respect amongst internet users; most consider it a tech-type domain space with tech worker dollars buying the domains for real sites, I even owned one for a brief period when they came out.

[rukshn]

Same thing happened to me but with an .icu domain, it’s always better to buy an expensive domain extension than a cheap one https://ruky.me/2020/12/15/dont-buy-a-icu-domain/

[gravitas]

While I only named .xyz above, my (enterprise) company blocks several other TLDs as well like .info, I'll check .icu when I'm back after holiday but would not doubt it's blocked. Corporate IT subscribes to some sort of hosted service, I would not doubt other companies are using this same service (name-brand).

[rualca]

> To put an example to the other comments, look up the history of the XYZ domain - in a nutshell, they had a fire sale selling domains for pennies to gain market share. Besides normal people, three groups descended upon it: spammers, squatters and hackers. (...)

I don't know which point you were trying to make, but as far as I could tell that's the business model that's being followed by all vanity gTLDs.

The only nuance I've noticed is that there are a bunch of domains being sold for peanuts with the caveat that after a year or two it's price is hiked to somewhere in the range of 30-50$.