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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.
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? =)
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
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.