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Domain Names Worth Their Weight in Gold Again
prostoalex writes "So far in 2006 domain name on.com fetched $635,000, Macau.com was sold for $550,000, blue.com was sold for half a million, and Jasmin.com was bought for $310,000. With the exception of the last domain name, which is currently used for erotic video chat, the rest of the domains run some sort of domain parking ads. USA Today talks about revived interest to domain name trade, and companies like Marchex, a 'leader in vertical and local traffic', which happens to own a .com domain for every single zip code in the United States. There's also a report that in the few days that .eu domain names were made available, 1,454,218 European domains were registered."
To all those companies that are being so helpful in "parking" domain names for me and then charging outrageous prices to "register" them........ FSCK YOU!!!. Seriously though, how many of you have tried to go out and register even the most obscure of domain names for your website only to have companies like Marchex or GoDaddy say "Sure, we'll get that domain for you for the low, low price of $5000.00" (or more). This is the concept of the middle man taken to criminal levels. Can someone enlighten me as to what benefit(s) they provide? What services do they provide? Is there anything good at all about these companies or are they simply parasitic ticks feeding off the belly of the Internet?
:-)
And what does it say about the market audience when domain names with misspelled words (like Mortage.com) can go for $242,000?
Oh, I forgot.... at least one domain level parking company provides Microsoft with advertising because they "parked" all of their unused domains on IIS servers....which......appear at some level to be able to handle those traffic loads.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I've been holding back on this one but ... OK, that's it.
shavedteenasiancamwhoremyspacediggxenisucks.com is now for sale.
Bidding starts at $500,000.
If you buy and hold a domain name for more than a year before selling it for thousands of dollars, do you pay the U.S. IRS long-term capital gains tax? =)
And now, thanks to Slashdot, they've got tons of extra traffic plus a one-way link from a PR9.
bort.
Free, Anonymous surfing: Pagewash.com.
Domain Names Worth Their Weight in Gold Again
So how much exactly does a domain name weight? I'm thinking those that paid half a million dollars got ripped off badly.
Oh no... it's the future.
Yesterdays news was showing how someone got shopping.eu
According to the report an independent institute valued the name at 300000 €
-- ubersonic Kfz Versicherung
"Why can't .com administrators apply the same rules instead of going for a money grab"
Don't you hate it when land developers buy up all the land and refuse to sell it to you at the price you think they should?
That last link Jasmine.com is definitely not safe for work. Slashdot linking to porn on the front page without a warning. Nice going. Oh, wait, no one even reads the F'n articles.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
I used to laugh at people that said we are experiencing the Dot-Com Bubble all over again, but after reading stories like this... Should those people be dismissed so quickly?
-William Brendel
First, why did the price of registering domain names get so cheap? I mean, how much are these companies paying now to register domain names? $1 each? Less? Where does this money go? Does it go to the people who have to maintain these DNS servers with bogus parking domains? If we think about how spam got out of hand, you could imagine that someday 90% of all domain names are "spam".
Why did we have to make registration so cheap to begin with? I don't see what's wrong with charging $50 for a a year for a domain name. If someone needed it that bad they should pay up. Now with the ultra low cost anyone can buy up a bunch of domain names and sell them back for an excessive fee.
So... when will legislation be inacted to prevent domain parking? It's obvious that parking a domain can bring no benefit to the economy or society, it's just an unecessary middleman tactic. Also, registering a domain name and a copyright are two seperate things. If you own the copyright you should definately be able to sue these domain parkers for infringement.
It's just absolutely ridiculus that we got into a situation where every imaginable word, phrase, or typo is now registered.
WTF? What does this mean? They drive vertical and local traffic by redirecing 90210.com to local Beverly Hills companies? Sure they do...when I want to perform a search for Beverly Hills (90210), for example, I type in the Zip Code instead of the city name. Dumba$$es. Let's test their theory of driving vertical and local traffic when I type my zipcode plus .com into IE and Firefox....
15 seconds later...in both Firefox (with Adblock) and IE 6 SP1...I get NOTHING but blank screen. Maybe Spysweeper is blocking whatever I see or is preventing a redirect to some sort of shitty ad or malware infested site. In either case, as long as users continue to implement antivirus, anti-malware/spyware and anti-spam software, squatters like Marchex will not make much money and eventually won't even be able to afford the domain renewal fees, even from Bob's Domains-R-Us type of registrars.
"That was to expected from a company that went public and reports to their shareholders. Lots of money and values don't go together."
Yeah! Just look at the Catholic church.
Charlie?
Here's a few of the names I registered and never made a cent on:
BudgetDSL.com
BudgetDSL.net
Artoo-Detoo.com
See-Threepio.com
InstantOnPC.com
NoBootPC.com
EarnPage.com (wow that's dumb!)
DSLCheap.com
DSLCheap.net
MartianSprings.com
19x.net (I let it lapse, but I'm thinking I should have kept it... even for email, a 3-letter domain is cool.)
PeeRat.com !!! (yes!!! Pee Rat! Actually I was thinking Peer At. Shows what registering names at 4 am can cost you.)
I regged a bunch more, some of them probably ok (something with fix.com in it... I forget... hmmm.) I regged at least 50 over the years, and only one has turned out to have any value.
This space available.
Borrowing some figures from another post, I get a value of $1357.15 per kilo.
The mass of a single electron is 9.1x10^-31. Putting these two values together gives a value of $1.23x10^-27 per electron. Not something you want to plan your retirement around.
Of course I feel I must point out that this neglects binding energy and such, but hey, it's late, I already feel like enough of a nerd for working this much out.
Okay. New rule
No.... No new rules. We have enough, thanks.
People who have no idea HOW SOMETHING WORKS, are no longer allowed to use Slashdot as an outlet for their ignorant ranting.
You do have an ID in the mid 600000 range, so you have not been around here long, have you? Slashdot is one of the biggest rantspaces on the Internet. That said, I understand exactly how the process works as explained below.
Those domains displaying domain parking pages are OWNED. That means someone exchanged goods, services, or currency for property. The property was the registration of the domain name. Still with me?
OK, that is perfectly understandable. Do you have any idea of how these companies "OWN" these domain names? Of course you do as you are trying to use/justify this same model to make money for yourself. For others here that may not know, they buy them up in bulk and find any and all possible relevant combinations of names in the hopes that someone will find a need for that name and then exchange again, more money to buy that domain name at a later date. Simple parasitic business with no real contribution to anything other than lining their own pockets.
1. After registering a domain, your nameservers typically default to some that the registrar provides.
Yes, and that drives more revenue to the domain name registrar who can then run statistics on how much traffic that name gets which then allows them to "valuate" that domain name for cost increases for ownership.
2. These at-the-moment "unused" domains, which number in the millions, get between a little and a LOT of traffic that would otherwise go nowhere.
See above explanation to 1.
3. An enterprising registrar sees this as an opportunity for offsetting costs, and profit (see: capitalism).
Yes, yes.... capitalism. I'm all for it, but hopefully that capitalism actually does something that contributes to society.
1. Someone registers a domain, and puts a program like the aforementioned on it to drive revenue - either while developing a site for it, or they simply are doing so well with it that it is "maximized". (Lingerei.com is an example)
Or.... statistically more likely and factually born out by the evidence, they simply sit on the domain and let it lie fallow until someone comes along that wants to buy it.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Then we had click-through, and advertisers paid for "clicks". Now we have "click glut", very few clicks lead to a sale, and the bottom is falling out of "clicks".
What we're going to end up with is something where advertisers only pay for actual sales. This creates accounting problems, but Yahoo Store and parts of the porno industry already have it working.
The main thing keeping the click trade going is Google. When the day comes that Google stops paying affiliates for clicks, others will follow and the domain spam industry will fall apart. This will probably happen right after Google gets a payment system in place.
Just recently, I learned *far* more than I ever wanted to about attempting to claim a domain after a previous owner lets it expire. It's amazing what a racket that whole thing has become!
One of my clients paid a consultant to set up a web site and some email hosting for his daycare centers a couple years ago. Well, recently, that consultant ran into some personal problems (divorce, etc.) and became very difficult to reach/unresponsive. So finally, the daycare owner decided what he needed to do was redirect the registered domain to a new location, build a new site, and have it hosted elsewhere.
Problem was, the consultant registered it under his info, and we had no real way to obtain the password to make the changes needed.
Luckily, I noticed the domain was just about to expire, so I decided to keep an eye on it and planned to buy it upon its expiration. Now, the *traditional* rules say domains are back "up for grabs" after about a 30 day grace period, after expiration. But nowdays, it seems most registrars don't play fair. Instead, many just transfer the domains to their name, and sit on them indefinitely - charging an inflated price to re-purchase them. (I guess the line of thought is, if a name was good enough for someone to pay to register it once, then it's got an above-average chance of having some value to someone else - or even to the same person if they just let the renewal slide....)
In other cases, the expired domains automatically get put up for auctions to the highest bidder. (Some registrars like GoDaddy let you bypass this step by paying a $25 or so fee while the domain you want is still in their "grace period", but of course, that still means you're paying about 5x as much as you would have if it was some random name that was never registered before - AND, you're forced to become a captive GoDaddy customer in order to get it.)
The ones in auction can *really* turn into a money-grab, because companies have been formed to do nothing but automatically bid and re-bid on your behalf, for a stiff up-front fee, promising they'll guarantee to get you the domain you want. (Basically, if you're a normal human following manual bidding procedures, you're absolutely going to lose to their mechanized system.) You're fine if you're the only one bidding on the name you want -- but if it's a reasonably attractive/popular name, it can escalate into a very expensive bidding war involving 3rd. party services really quickly.
Question: Do you actually own the domain name Microsoft registers "for" you? Microsoft says you can transfer in a domain if you so choose, but funny enough, they mention nothing about letting you transfer the free domain out if you are unsatisfied with their services.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
No, what he's showing disdain for is people who profit at the unwilling expense of others, through no effort or cleverness of their own. And i'm sorry but i think there are probably a good number of people who agree with him (myself included)
Besides, using "yeah well they did it first" doesn't mean that it's right, or that other things should be modeled in the same fashion, even if one was to accept that land development is a suitable analogy to domain squatting.
There are lives at stake here!
So being a "timeless trade" makes it okay. Like armed robbery, white slavery, "protection", etc. And the term "development" is misleading. A parked site is not developed like land; land is usually developed by providing access and services. Nothing in a parked domain is useful except the name itself. Youi'll notice hte other "timelsss trades" I mentioned are illegal. Though domain speculation shouldn't itself be illegal, it should certainly not be encouraged.
I mean seriously, I constantly have customers coming in fretting about domain names. One chap sits at the visitor PC and spends hours (literally) trying different iterations of common words, and combinations. This is just silly. I tell them to relax, the name really isn't important. Content is king on the internet, the name doesn't matter a damn.
Lets take our favourite website, slashdot. What exactly does that have to do with technology or news? Nothing, and yet its one of the most successful sites out there. Google is a verb, for gods sake, and its domain name has exactly zero to do with searching. If these guys had their way, it would have been called simplysearch.com or something. One of our most successful websites LIreland the domain name doesn't mention anything to do with driving or driving schools.
This domain name hunting fad will be consigned to the murky annals of bankruptcy before too long, as more and more useful, content rich sites gain a reputation and a following. Meanwhile, trust me, the name doesn't matter a damn.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Does it seem like Books.by.net and Music.by.net or adult-oriented content addresses like Porn.by.net would be valuable?
.com names are worth considerably more than .net. But consider a marketing campaign for a company that is selling cars online, by web or by net so to speak. A TV ad could say, "Shop for a new car at Cars by net," while showing "Cars.by.net" on the screen.
It is generally the case that
Sure, "Cars dot com" works as well or better, but that one's taken, and so is almost every other "Product dot com" domain. So the question is, would "Cars.on.com" be better than "Cars.by.net"?
Which is the more valuable domain space?
I'm asking sincerely, even though I have a self-interested motivation in doing so. I've literally been told by some appraisers that By.net should be worth 10-25% of what By.com would be, and it just doesn't make any sense at all.
Peace and love, y'all
First domain - 5 dollars
Second domain - 20 dollars
Third domain - 50 dollars
Fourth domain - 100 dollars
Subsequent domains - 1,000 dollars
Sure, you have the problem of people registering things under other people's names, but that can be solved.
Essentially, your e-mail and personal identity domain should be basically free, your first and second hobby domains should be reasonably priced, your third and fourth domains should have a lot of motivating factor behind them, and if you need 5 or more domains you're probably a very large company with a lot of people working for you.
The ______ Agenda
I want a Firefox plugin that blacklists parking domains the way Adblock blacklists ads. So that if I try to go to one of those pages it just warns me that it's a parked ad trap and allows me to choose not to go. Better yet, let the search engines screen the blacklisted sites out for you.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
You do realise that the period character exists for a reason other than as a separator in domain names? Although, credit where credit's due, you did use a comma. In the wrong place.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
They've created a bunch of TLDs - that no one cares about. People want the classy .com and they won't settle for anything else. It's not the control of the names that causes these issues, it's the desires of the consumer.
Most of the posts on this article can be summed up as "I hate when someone makes money."
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Are surely much more valuable domain names than amazon.com, google.com, and ebay.com? The thing no one has explained to me yet is are these idiots making money squatting on all these domains? Or is this like all those "work from home" things, where none of them really make any money, but the meme of the multi-level marketing thing is infectious and spreads prolifically? Same question could be asked about spammers, how many of them make any real profit, and how many more are either spamming at a loss or at a rate less than they could make the kwikky mart per hour? Seems to me if these things are all as usually un-profitable as I imagine we could educate away at least some of the annoyance caused by spam and domain spam etc.
The name does have something to do with the content.
/. = inverted ./ = path to the current directory in unix.
Slashdot =
I think that matches "News for nerds" quite well.
Check out this "definition" of cybersquatting from LinkUWant.com, a link farm who is holding the URL of the name of my company.p
http://www.linkuwant.com/website/cybersquatter.ph
"This term is used by envious corporate world executives and attorneys."
Feel free to slashdot them.
http://www.CelloFourteGroupie.net