pizza.com Sold For $2.6m

f8d noted a beeb bit on the fact that the pizza.com domain name was sold for a ridiculous 2.6m bucks. Can there be a bubble and a recession at the same time, or do the two cancel each other out like Penn & Teller?

Comments

Awareness

[Firas Zirie]

To those who are talking about how 2.6 mil is nothing to a pizza chain I ask: How are you going to get the public aware of the fact that pizza.com even exists? Personally, if I wanted pizza I'd type dominospizza.com or pizzahut.com as a first guess at anything pizza related online. Even as a computer literate person I can draw from experience that most generic domain names are link farms and still not go to pizza.com. Maybe the pizza stores have to advertise their new site on tv for another 2..... oh wait

Re:Awareness

[teh kurisu]

For a while, British Gas were advertising their website as house.co.uk. Now, call me crazy, but if I was looking for the British Gas website I would probably type in britishgas.co.uk (which is what house.co.uk redirects to), or I would type 'British Gas' into Google.

And if I was typing in house.co.uk into my address bar without knowing who owned it, I probably wouldn't be expecting to see the website of a purveyor of piped fossil fuels.

Re:Actually, it really does make sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, we have not quite tipped into a recession yet...defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth. But, with the recent jobs report its is looking more likely. But really only the mealy mouth politicians are saying we are in a recession right NOW.

Second, the debt you mention is of course the sub-prime business. Which was encouraged by the Democrats whining about the loan industry not loaning enough to those with bad credit. Of course they were more than happy to make the loans, collect the up front fees, then dump the bad debt to the large funds. And since they lent out huge sums of money without proof of legal residence, proof of income, etc. it was all doomed to fail.

Third, the President has no control over this at all. It is all controlled through congress via the laws and regulations they pass.

Slashdot may think the Prez is a giant bogey man plotting to destroy the earth and listen to your phone sex calls, but the housing bubble/bust was the product of a free market, a politically correct environment that didn't want to deny anything to anyone and laws that allowed it.

d'oh!!

[Lxy]

Back in 1995, my friends and I were looking for domains to register. One of the domains we considered was pizza.com. We decided to skip it, as we didn't want to invest $35/yr on a domain we would probably never use.

*bangs head on desk*

Two Americas

[Doc Ruby]

A recession and a bubble at the same time? Of course. When oil and bank corps, and the people who own & run them are bathing in record profits (above the records set every year for the past decade and a half, above the records set every year except maybe one or two of every twenty for the past few centuries), but literally millions of people are getting their homes foreclosed, millions more are always 6 weeks paychecks from losing their homes, income has shrunk over the past 25 years while prices have doubled, tripled or more (especially oil/gas prices and bank fees)...

Of course there's a recession and a bubble possible. Where do you think that bubble money comes from? And do you think that when it pops, everyone loses their shirt? Or maybe the rich people who run the country (*cough* Bear Stearns *cough*) will never see any real risk, while the poor are as free as the rich to sleep under a bridge.

The biggest lie about "the economy" is that it's "the" economy. There are separate economies for the rich and everyone else, shunted and fed back into each other separately. Except the rich economy has a siphon into the other economy.

Re:Two Americas

[Doc Ruby]

and why is this? millions of people took on a loan they couldn't handle. It has to do with the fact that many banks were forced to give out loans (by the government) to people that they knew were not making enough to pay it back.

No, that's not why.

Yes, millions took on loans they couldn't handle. Banks weren't "forced to give out loans". Unless you mean that they were forced by their shareholders natural profit motive to take near-0% wholesale loans from the government, which government eliminated requirements that the retail borrowers be able to pay it back, then mark it up to several percent, and jack that up to a dozen percent or more after the borrowers were committed to the loan (because they'd lose their house, and whatever they'd already repaid).

Yes, there were millions of people who took out loans they couldn't afford. I never said they shouldn't lose their houses, or otherwise take the hit. There were many people who got loans on fraud, too, though most of those frauds were encouraged by banks that didn't ask even for documentation - just asserting on a single form that you made $X a year was enough.

Hell, we just lived through the age of "NINJA" loans: No Income, No Job or Assets. Given happily by banks, hand over fist.

Why? Not because "the government forced them to". But because the government made them a delightful offer they couldn't refuse: make $BILLIONS on these stupid loans, marking up loans from the government, and then when lots go bad, the government will bail you out. The problem is that "the government" meant "politicians bribed by the banks" when it came to deciding to hand out the money, but "the government" means "taxpayers" when it comes to actually paying for it. Taxpayers who were themselves bribed by those politicians with "tax cuts" and even tax rebates, all so the entire cost could be put onto the public debt, which means it cost even more interest atop what the mortgage interest cost.

If you'd asked about what to do about the people who took loans they can't repay, you'd have found that of course they should bear the damage from failing under their risks. People who were sold loans by fraudulent banks should still have to repay the principal to those banks, and pay an interest rate set to the median fixed rate their neighbors paid in the financial quarter they all were issued their loans, but to a government liquidity fund rather than to the defrauding bank, from which fund new loans can be made if necessary and creditworthy. If they still can't pay, they foreclose like anyone else. People taking loans on true terms they signed should also have to pay, unless they go bankrupt like anyone else - at which point the judge can redesign their mortgage debt, along with all their obligations to creditors, just like anyone else. And everyone in the country should be allowed to tap their IRAs and other separate funds ordinarily unavailable to keep their homes from foreclosing. But since you were too busy inventing what I think about risk and consequences, you didn't bother to find out.

Blah blah blah about "rich vs poor is a lie". The fact is that the rich have every privilege. I didn't say that no poor people can get rich: some can, especially if they can help the rich get richer (helping the poor get richer makes practically no one rich in this country). I personally came from a middle class family, worked regular jobs starting at age 13, and made myself rich by working like a slave starting up my own company on my own savings and brains. I even helped some kids who'd grown up poor by training and employing them, and they're at least upper middle class, and some are rich. I don't say anyone should get extra privileges and opportunities because they're not rich, just that the rich have enough extra opportunities and privileges they can legitimately buy, without being subsidized in risk and profits by the taxpayers when they go wrong, more than everyone else gets protected. Being rich ha

Re:Two Americas

[Doc Ruby]

I live debt-free, and always have. But if these people who bought homes too expensive to afford get to keep them, if the flippers get to keep all their profits, if the banks get to keep all their profits after mismanaging the entire catastrophe, but I've got to pay to bail them out, then I look pretty stupid for not getting in on the action, don't I?

Which lots of people "smart" enough to have stayed out will also see if that all comes down. And so the next time, the rolls of the exploiters will be full, and the rolls of those left standing to bail them out, to keep the whole system going at all, will be empty. Now that sounds pretty stupid. Almost as stupid as remaining among those who will not have benefited, but will be asked to bail out the even more extreme next catastrophe.

Bubble & Recession?

[Anna Merikin]

Can their be a bubble and a recession at the same time, or do the two cancel each other out like Penn & Teller?

Of course there can, and that's exactly what is happening. There is too much venture capital out there and few good places to invest it. There is a recession because oil and other commodities have cut into corporate profits and a bubble because billions of VC funding is available, due to GWB's tax cuts for the rich.

Reagan's trickle-down policies caused a simiilar bubble (in derivatives) in 1987, A decade later, more easy Fed money caused Venture Capitalists to invest in high-tech stocks, causing the famous dot-com bubble and bust.

A recession is when lots of poor and middle class people lose their jobs; a bubble is when a few VCs all decide to put their money in the same place at the same time, driving up prices but not value or production.

Which is what's happening now.

Re:Why is that so ridiculous?

[kesuki]

you jest, but seriously Even In a Recession People Need To Eat. why do you think most of the small independent millionaire/billionaires founded their own regional food chain. consider, for instance, Wendy's founder Dave Thomas. Do you know ANY Other Way for a HIGH SCHOOL DROP OUT to become a billionaire? do you really? really? I'd like to know, because I have one year of college, and I'd like to be e billionaire too...

Re:Enhance Your Sausage!

[WaltBusterkeys]

When I'm traveling for business I couldn't care what pizza place I get so long as they deliver to my hotel. If pizza.com had a standard order form for all the local pizza places (just enter an address and it'll give a map or something) then I'd be quite happy to pay them a $0.50 or $1.00 convenience fee. Maybe I'm an isolated case (traveling for work is a weird venture), but there are business models here.

Re:You kidding?

[jonadab]

> Just think of the marketing budget of any of the standard delivery
> places (Pizza Hut, Papa Johns, etc). This is not even a blip on that radar.

They still have to advertise the domain to get any real value out of it. But it's a fantastically easy domain to remember, so if a major pizza chain wants to introduce online ordering, the purchase might make sense. An extremely easy-to-remember domain like that means you don't have to expend nearly as much of your advertising space/time/effort/whatever getting the domain name to stick, so you can spend more of it on connecting with the selling points (see the available toppings at a glance, view the specials, order in two clicks, free breadsticks for ordering online, whatever). You only have to say "pizza dot com" about three times for people to be able to remember it.

So yeah, a major pizza chain could maybe get significant value out of this.

I don't know about "a steal" though. I mean, they could always do more or less the same thing with an "order now" button on pizzahut.com or littlecaesars.com or whatever. Having pizza.com is better, maybe even better enough to be worth the 1.6 mil, but it's not insanely valuable.

Re:Enhance Your Sausage!

[Odiumjunkie]

Apparently it's not that common.

Re:Enhance Your Sausage!

[ultranova]

Domain names are more or less useless when billions of sites, many which capitalize on mistyped or abandoned domain names, exist.

Domain names are very useful because they, unlike IP addresses, are location independent. This means that the Pirate Bay can move their servers from Sweden to some free country, and no one needs to care, since the old address keeps on working despite the packets now traveling somewhere else.

You could have completely randomized domain names and they still would perform a useful service, simply by abstracting and separating logical Internet addresses from the physical ones. Heck, Tor has a system of in-Tor anonymous servers using the pseudo-domain ".onion", so you can run a Web server and no one knows where you are.