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Buying a Domain From a Cybersquatter
Nevo writes "A partner and I are in the planning stages of a business. We've decided on a name that we'd like to use but the domain name is already registered. The owner has a single 'search' page up (similar to the one at www.goggle.com)... clearly not a legitimate business interest, but since we don't own a trademark on this name it doesn't qualify as bad faith, I don't think. Does anyone have any experience buying domains from these operators? Do you have any advice on how to approach the owners of these domains to get them at a reasonable cost?"
When I've accidentally typed in an address wrong, I've been brought to a page with "premium" domains that a squatter is sitting on listing the prices for them. They were all pretty bland and stupid sites like a000.org or MedicMan.net but they listed the prices anywhere from $100 to $5,000. Unfortunately what you have to realize if you're going to make this offer is that they're doing this for those few times a year they strike it rich so it's probably going to be closer to $5,000 or more. If the site is like two last names or something readable, it's probably going to be pretty high cost. Far less than a court case you probably wouldn't win though.
The last thing you need to realize is that whatever money you give this guy is just going to fund him to buy up more domains and keep his hands on others longer. If you wanted to do the most conscious thing for the community, you would just find another domain and not give this scum one red cent.
My work here is dung.
If they are a squatter they will have contact info on their page. If not you can find the registered owner with WHOIS. I would make them a reasonable offer and stick to it. Remember that there may be available alternatives ( .org, .net, .us, etc.)
I was at a wedding over the weekend and one of the people at our table was talking about how their son runs a fairly profitable business in providing capital specifically for the purchasing of domain names. I can't recall if the business model involved a fixed interest rate, or a percentage of income, but it's the sort thing i never thought you could finance. I wonder how long before they start packaging them and selling them as securities on Wall Street :-)
-Chris
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
Don't sound too interested when talking to them, mention possible alternatives. Lower your offer if the negotiations drag out - cybersquatters are in this for the money, and not selling the name means that they're not making any.
If your business plan depends on owning one specific domain then your business plan sucks.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I would suggest finding another Domain that they own and first asking them if you could buy that one. That will give you a high end price. Tell them no thank you. Wait a day and say you also like the real one. Then offer to buy it at 1/2 the price they gave for the first one.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
One option already noted is giving a reasonable offer and sticking with it.
Another option is simply asking for a quote, but don't for the love of god tell them you're planning a business. Rather just send an informal message in the style of "I think $domain is a cool name, yadda yadda...".
Personally I'd opt for trying to figure out a name for the business that's not taken. Nonsense words that are easy to learn and not profanity in major languages are good bets.
.: Max Romantschuk
Surely the process is pretty simple,
Send the guy an email asking if the domain is for sale. If the owner is a *pinky to mouth* "One million dollars", kind of guy, it is unlikely that there is any approach you can take that will force him away from a ridiculous price anyway. The only advice that seems valid is, "Don't make the email sound like you are both wealthy and desperate".
Personally, I would make it a short one line email, "Is this domain for sale? If so, please respond with your asking price", then just take it from there. I like to believe that there is nobody that is still stuck in the late 90's when it comes to cybersquat domain prices, but you never know. If the price you get back from him indicates that he is acting like a 90's squatter just email back with, "Ok, thank you". Keep it terse, and keep the ball in his court. Most of all, don't get attached to this particular domain until *your* name is on the whois!
Murder in the first. ;)
within the past year, my company went around purchasing the .net, .us, .biz, etc TLDs for our domain. none of them were taken except for the .net version. we called the guy up and said we were interested and asked what his asking price was. he said $2000, to which we said that was way too high. he came back to us with, "well how much do you want to offer for it". i think that our final buying price was between $300 and $500.
in that experience, i realized that some squatters are just one or two guys that sat around and registered a ton of domains for a couple of dollars a piece. they are going to use the car salesman mentality by "hit em really high... then scrape them off the ceiling so you can get the price you want to sell for". so they slap you with the $2000 as their asking price knowing that you won't pay it. they know that you won't come back with a $50 offer since their first offer was so high. if they had first said $500, then you probably wouldn't offer them as much. if you really want to play their game and you are just getting started, it might be safe to just kill your webserver while you are on the phone with them so that they can't see what type of company you are or if you has the money bags.
anyway, just go into it like you are buying a car. don't seem too interested or you will pay way more than you should.
stephen
Many of the successful internet companies make up their own name. google, hulu, reddit, slashdot, etc. Make up a word that doesn't exist and go with it.
news.google.com is just as good for google as news.com would be because browsers autocomplete from left to right. I type news, the google site comes right up.
So if you want greatsite.com but thats taken then register blah.com and create a subdomain greatsite.blah.com
Down the track you may be able to snap up the domain you originally wanted, or you may have a better idea by then.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
My boss received an e-mail from a cybersquatter that sought to sell us a URL that was very similar to a URL we currently owned. My boss, being the URL hound he is asked me to purchase it. I offered the squatterâ(TM)s auto-bid website $50, which it automatically turned down and told me I had to offer a minimum of $500. I walked from the deal, only to receive an e-mail an hour later from the squatter, agreeing to my $50 bid.
Just wait until it expires, then swoop in and register it. /then email the squatter and ask them if they want to buy it back
Here's a quick warning: there's a lot of scamming in the domain marktplace. It's easy for scammers to get you to buy, then never transfer the domain.
1. Set your PayPal account to draw against a credit card, not your bank account. You have both your credit card's consumer protections as well as PayPal's this way, the difference being you can actually get someone on the phone at your credit card company. When they yank the money from PayPal, suddenly PayPal will care.
2. Use an escrow service. Buyer puts the money in, you transfer the domain, and then you get paid. Most scams happen when people do direct purchases. Lots of domainers use escrow.com. It works.
3. Make sure you are dealing with a legitimate business or a real person. A little due diligence goes a long way.
-- $G
Give us the address, we'll give his server so much traffic he'll be begging to give the domain away.
Telling the actual URL in question would be a bad idea as it may cause the current holder to up their asking price since it was linked on slashdot.
We buy a lot of domains where I work--a big honkin' national enterprise--but we never use our work email addresses when we approach a squatter. That way we don't tip them off to how much money we have. So, my advice is to be aware of how you present yourself, and be careful not to give the squatter the impression that you're anything more than a casual buyer. Don't mention that you have a partner, for example, and don't reveal why you want the domain.
First of all what you are describing is not cybersquating - it's no trademark, not a domain typo - there is no bad faith. The domain has been registered by a domainer - a domain trader that buys premium domains treating them as an investment.
When you type in the domain name you will see a domain parking page - a website filled with some adds in order to earn some money to finance the cost of domain renewal plus sometimes a few bucks extra. The domain is not indexed by google - it's a mutual agreement between large domain parkings and google - not in index, yet with google ads.
As the domain is not registered as a clear example of cybersquating (and so is not getting a lot of traffic) you can be pretty sure it's for sale - that's where we earn money.
The domain value is based on (in no particular order): .com is the most expensive
1. domain length - the shorter the more expensive.
2. tld -
3. the acctual domain name - if it is just a bunch of unpronaucable letters it will be cheap, if it's a word it will cost ya, especially if it means something. some random examples ghdn.com < geen.com < geek.com
If you want to buy the domain make an offer, but a fair one or you will be added to ignore list after the first message. We get loads of offers which are too low by two-three orders of magnitude and reading all off them is not really an option.
Once you agree on the price do use one of the domain markets that offers escrow - sorry I can't really point you to a speciffic site, as I deal exlusively in eastern european tlds and we have some local markets.
First lookup the owner of that domain. Then, there are many sites out there that will tell you which domains that person owns. The way you handle this will be very different if he owns 10 vs 10 thousand domains.
Do a search with some of the "Buy this Premium Domain" sites to see if he has listed any of his sites to see how reasonable he is. Those prices are usually 1-2x's a real max bid starting point.
When you do ask for a price, ask him for the price of several of his domains at once. Act like you are not specifically interested in just of those domains and any would work for you. Maybe pretend to be another reseller interested in building your portfolio.
Some of the other advice above is also good. Don't be desparate, and the first email should be very short.
I offered to cover a squatter's registration costs, $10/month hosting costs since he purchased the domain, and a 10% premium for the domain. This worked out to $120-ish.
He laughed at me and said he got that much profit a year out of letting the domain just sit and serve ads.
So we went and bought .band, .info, and .net instead for less than $120.
-Pope Peter Porker, S.O.W., K.M.K.R., U.G.O.A., F.S.G.S.D.
They will not type in your company name in the URL bar and add .com. They will type your company name into google and click on the result. If they're recurring customers, they will bookmark your page.
URLs are no longer really important. I know people who have no idea what that funny bar on top of their browser is for that displays some funky random characters whenever they click on a link and a page loads.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Hi,
I had to solve such a problem once for a customer of us. A domain expired by accident and fell into the hands of a domainsquatter. The poor ex-owner had already advertisement material printed with his domain name on it. Damages would have ranged at about 10K$.
The problem: If a german company tries to purchase the domain, the prices tend to skyrocket (probably the same for US companies). So we created a fake russian student (not very rich) who wanted to use the domain for his private web site. He had a russian email address, had a small home page with his russian ISP etc. This way with a little negotiation, we managed to purchase the domain at a very reasonable price.
You have to be careful to become the owner of the domain. At first they tried to "lease" the domain to us by just setting the records. But it was completely in accordance with our virtual pesonality to display some paranoia and insist on a complete domain transfer.
Sincerely yours, Martin
It doesn't matter if it's bad faith or not, ICANN wants the domain to have a useful purpose. That's why people put the "search engines" up. However, the likelyhood of them showing up to defend their useful purpose is slim to none. The problem you have is that in order to file with ICANN for ownership of a domain, you need about $3000.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=icann+domain+dispute&l=1
Last time I had to do it, it took about a month. This was last year. We filled out the paperwork, then our "dispute agency" (ICANN itself delegates to an agency) contacted us for MORE paperwork, then the other guy didn't reply because he had used an "anonymous registrar" so we won by default.
If you buy domain names on speculation, you're a cybersquatter - someone who reserves space for no reason other than to occupy the space a resell it. There is no legitimate reason to hoard domains, except to capitalize on the scarcity.
Now, since you appear to be a cybersquatter, I can see how you are a bit touchy and are looking to legitimize your business plan. That's fine. That's why houses are called "resales" and not "used." A "Domainer" (aside from sounding like something out of Waterworld) is just a nicer name for a cybersquatter - but you do the exact same thing.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
That's the real tricky part though. If you change your web host (and thus change IP address) all the work you've done to improve your Google ranking (not to mention links from other websites, bookmarks, etc) is gone and you'd have to start over again. Having a URL is still a necessity (though having a memorable URL is not as important as it once was).
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
Use the Microsoft approach (see MikeRoweSoft.com). Make a large offer for the domain. Once they accept, withdraw the offer and forward the paperwork to ICANN. The agreement to sell can then be used as evidence in arbitration and the anti-cybersquatting rules mean that they can have the domain taken away from them.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
In meatspace, if a business sets up in a poor location, it affects their traffic because it is a PHYSICAL business. More importantly, no land = no business. On the internet, very few people even type URLs anymore, they google everything. All that domain registration does is place a few letters in the address bar of people's browsers.
Of course, the name does enormous things for your placement in google. Just do a google search for "buy flowers": at least half the results have the search the search terms right in the domain name. This is not a coincidence. If the name describes what you do and is also your branded name, your success in google is almost guaranteed.
Having a domain name that describes your company is tremendously important for a variety of reasons, not least of which is google ranking. Further, with modern browsers, the address bar searches your history. If you have your name or your product in the domain, this helps people find you a second time. Google Chrome is even better: search and address bar are the same. While I despise these people who park pages, their price is usually worth it if you are a company and the name is good.
So, in the cyber-world, picking the name actually does make a big difference in the amount of traffic you get. Having "widgets.com" really is the equivalent of being off of the highway, while "example.com/widgets" is really miles down the road.
Also, giving up domain names means completely abdicating your surfing to search engines and people who know SEO. Not a good idea.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
Without getting all commie, people who have a lot of money, or opportunity, or options, always whine "It's nothing personal, just business." When you have the option to buy domains and sell them for 100x-1000x the price, why wouldn't you? Legally, of course, it's totally legit. Ethically, it's totally not. And I'll tell you why.
When you buy a piece of land, the law assumes that you are doing your bit to maintain and develop that land. In fact, most property law revolves around that idea of having to put work into it. You pay taxes on it, and you are generally expected to be doing something to maintain it's value. When a property falls into total - or dangerous - disrepair, they come to you with the fines. If your sidewalk is hazardous, you can get sued. This is all considered the price of ownership.
With domains, there is no such cost associated. In fact, all that buying up domains does is suck money from actual wealth-generating sectors of the economy. If I start a business called AwesomeWorldChangingWidgets, I can't get that domain if you're squatting on it without first paying you way more for that domain than you did. Now, if you were society at large, and that additional value was being spread across those people who help to bring value to the domain name itself (such as the internet routers, the municipalities that maintain fiber, ICANN, or any of the host of other sectors that make the Internet viable), that would be fair. But you're just taking the money and running: you're taking the money for someone else's work.
The only complaint anyone ever has with capitalism is the 'I got here first' problem. When you start out with resources others didn't have a fair opportunity at, and then exchange them for disproportionately large sums of money, you're playing into this. Yes, it makes your life easier, but you've only helped yourself - and at the expense of literally everyone else. That makes you unethical.
[Ego]out
sitting on a domain name unproductively with the intent to hope someone will come along and pay your ransom is not what most people consider legitimate business. while some URL's sell for high premiums because of the website behind it, or simply the value of the name itself (consider systemax's acquisitions of circuitcity and compusa URL, trademark, logo, etc.), this is not the case of many URL squatters who simply buy up every domain in sight, hoping one will make a payoff when a corporation takes interest.
If the owner hopes to invest in domain names, they should be expected to work the value of the name. but i disagree completely that a business hopeful with an actual use for a domain name should happily pay the extortion of a common domain thug.
Strange, then, that speculating on land is considered reasonable.
especially since there's a lot more domain-name space than useful land.
Yes it is.
It's the same idea behind buying an undervalued stock, doing nothing with the stock (except owning it) and selling it later.
It's the same idea behind buying a house that you feel is undervalued, renting it out/doing nothing, until the price goes up, and selling it later.
It's the same idea behind buying lots of gold because you feel it will be worth more in the years to come.
Buy low, sell high.
This, please God, this.
sentence
Bow-ties are cool.
Unlike the above, squatters also clog up my search results, and pretend to be some sort of resource in their own right, feigning relevance to whatever search I did. That's more difficult to make an analogy, but I'll try...
It's like buying thousands of houses that you guess a few might be undervalued, putting a sign outside that says "Bed & Breakfast" or "Ye Olde Antique Shop", and when people come in looking for something entirely different, you either refer them to someone down the block who paid you for it, or you try to sell them the house.
It is generally quite dishonest.
Now, there may indeed be some cybersquatter rule that I can use to hurt them, but either way, I absolutely refuse to support their business model. If it's some kid who bought a personal domain and isn't doing much with it, fine -- but if it's yet another "What you need, when you need it" bullshit site, they can rot.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Ticketmaster is guilty of this. Bruce Springstein did a series of concerts and wanted his regular street-level fans to be able to attend. Ticketmaster and Bruce's management agreed upon a range of ticket prices.
Ticketmaster operates a few subsidiary companies that also sell tickets. These companies bought the Springstein tickets at face value and turned around and sold them with a scalper's mark-up. The common folk were then priced out of the Bruce Springstein concerts and the Boss didn't see any of that premium pricing in the form of additional revenue.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Domains aren't land. There are some analogous aspects, but it's not the same thing, so we shouldn't expect to treat them exactly the same way as real property.
But as long as we're doing it, lets stretch the analogy a little bit. The law (IANAL) protects the property owners rights, but the law is also vested in seeing that land is actually *used*. This is why there are "adverse possession" laws. Also known as "squatters rights". In essence, the domain resellers are the property "owners" and people who want to use that land are the "squatters". Squatters (people who want unused land) in the real world actually have rights, unlike in cyberspace.
Squatters rights typically work like this: if you can squat on a persons land for a certain amount of time (say, 7 years) without them kicking you off it, YOU OWN THE LAND, because you were actually using it. Part of this law means that owners actually need to "regularly" walk their property to make sure that it's secure, etc., that nobody is squatting on it. And if you can use and occupy the land, and the other owner wasn't using it, you get to keep it and they lose.
The point here is that good use of limited resources (such as domains and land) is of value to society and thus to the law.
But adverse possession law doesn't work in cyberspace, for at least two reasons. First, the domain "property" owner can "walk" his property 3 billion times a second, even if he's not actually using it, because it doesn't occupy any physical space. Instead, its "size" is more a function of how useful it is within cyberspace. "buy.com" is the Louisiana Purchase compared to "xvlskdjf234235.org", which is like the one-room "garden" apartment you rent. So this unfairly supports domain resellers because they can be everywhere at once.
Secondly, there's no (legal) way to adversely possess a domain. Even if the reseller isn't using the domain to serve ads, you can't go and squat on it (to prove that you'll use it even though the owner isn't), because you'd have to hack his gibsons to do it.
Even overlooking the impossibility of adversely possessing a domain from a reseller, the issue is complicated by the fact that it's difficult to determine what legitimate use *is* in cyberspace. For example, just because there's no website doesn't mean it's not serving email. But what about ad sites or search portals? Is that a legitimate use? In the real world, you might buy property to put up a billboard, or more likely, you lease space from an owner to put up a billboard. (The owner uses the land, and you pay the owner for the right to place an advertisement there. Like *normal* Internet advertising.)
But a great domain doing nothing but serving ads might be analogous to buying Nebraska in order to paint the whole thing as a billboard for transcontinental flights. The owner of Nebraska probably makes money off it, and in some sense is "using it," but not really in the way that we understand land is meant to be used, and not in the way that is most obvious or suitable for the land in question.
So what does all this mean? Speculation can be appropriate, but it only works if it is practically limited by how long you expect to sit on the property, and by how much property you can speculate on. Instead, all domains cost basically the same no matter how good they are -- this is completely unlike real property where the initial and continuing costs (such as taxes, insurance, etc.) to the owner are based on some preexisting market cost. We also need to be able to define what it means to actually use property in cyberspace if we want to design a system that supports good use of cyberproperty.
Unfortunately, as things stand, we treat domain resellers as property owners, with all of the advantages and none of the disadvantages. They have all of the leverage, so the system naturally breaks.
The cybersquatter doesn't want the domain. He wants your money. Contact him and ask how much the site is going to cost. Don't be surprised if it is ridiculous then send an email back telling him your not interested at anything close to that price. I wouldn't be surprised if that price decreases rapidly to something quite more realistic. The guy is looking to make money and as long as its above cost he would be willing to sell. I don't get why people don't barter here as much as they do in Europe. Its a good skill to have.
This is a perfect example of a situation where the first person to throw out a number loses.
In our cases the client had their .co.uk and needed their com too. This was back in 96 so even though they were a publicly-traded company with trademarks in multiple countries it wasn't clear that it could be enforced. The board of directors got together and established something like a $15k budget to get the name back.
I emailed the guy and he threw out $350. I literally ran to the bank and did an international wire transfer from my personal funds.
Worked out well for us, but what a fucking idiot :)