10 Opinionated Jumblings on a Tuesday Afternoon

It’s Tuesday.  Since I work the weekends at the nursery I try and get some stuff done at home but I never actually do.  I usually catch up on my sleep do a little pondering.  Here are a few of those thoughts

1. Sahar Sarid believes his portfolio has grown in value over the last 5 years and is now worth over $100 million.  I haven’t seen the portfolio so I really don’t know what the domains consist of ,but Sahar was the guy I read every day when I started investing and it’s nice to see he has a nice nest egg. I also enjoy that he invests in anything that he thinks will make him money.  People think he’s gotten out of domaining but it’s quite the contrary. He’s going strong, just doing, not writing about it

2. I had a person that I like and respect email me and had a good lead on a solid domain name but would like a commission if I bought or flipped the name.  I, of course agreed.  Only to find out it was a name listed on Sedo.  A category that I already go through all the time to see if new names come up.  First time I’ve ever been given a lead from a public sales location.  Next lead will be from Namejet I guess.  I gave him a hard time, really didn’t take it too seriously, but I don’t think he liked my sarcasm.  Speaking of sarcasm

3.  In my opinion, DomainGang needs to choose whether they are satire or real news.  Can you imagine if The New York Post and The Onion decided to merge. Letting you guess if it’s real news or satire until you see a button at the bottom? It is absolutely confusing and misleading to anyone who is not a regular reader.  There are a lot of keyword loaded articles that are taken from the general news section that are forced to be domain related.  I can’t see no other reason to write on top general news other than for Google.   Those attracted readers have no idea what the 100% button means and I’m sure many assume it’s real news.  When a new reader comes and sees an article stating that Uniregistry has purchased Moniker they probably think its true.  Because the site carries the confusing mix of real and satire I don’t know what I am reading.  Often I don’t even see anything that is humorous and don’t realize it’s fake until the button. I saw four or five articles about a virtual trade show half thinking there were going to be a joke in there.   I can’t be the only one. You could say that I have no sense of humor or don’t have the intelligence to understand the articles, but then you would be wrong.   If the articles are written to “get me” then well done.  Because I saw no reason to not believe them. They could have happened.  I’m not very hard to get when I am reading through a domain news feed.  Neither are the people that are searching Google for information.  In short, I think mixing satire and real news is a bad idea. There is no lack of hard work going into the site.  It’s lack of division.

4.  Once Godaddy figures out someone is using their auctions to gauge the value of domains by letting them come close to expiration, watching the auction, and then renewing, they ought to close that users names off from the auctions.  It is probably easier said than done ,but it is very bad for Godaddy auctions to have what Adam Dicker has been doing lately come across the auctions.  Adam did nothing wrong.  He has every right and why wouldn’t he. It’s Godaddy’s problem that they are trying to sell names they don’t have ownership of.  So if they want to do this, they need to shut off the names that they know are most likely to be renewed.  All in an effort to improve the quality of their auction platform. Because they already have enough problems with non payers and regular renewals.  They might as well flag the regular renewers and clean it up.

5.  I use a little system to determine the value of dot nets but I recently changed the algorithm .  To the point that I now feel that dot nets are worth 5% of a dot com for most domains.  I still have them closer to 10% on the highest quality names.   I still like dot nets because I think they present a good value.  Value because prices have dropped like a rock but will eventually find a base.  A base that I think is higher from here.  And faster than the new gTLDs

6. Domain Name sales “minimum offer” is absolutely worthless.  Anyone can submit any offer that they would like and it goes through. Why even have a minimum offer?  What does it do?  When I asked customer service I received the answer of this nature. “We can’t filter out offers. But just to let you know we have turned many low offers into big sales.  If you want thoselow bids you’re more than welcome to hand them to us and give us a shot at them ”   I was kind of hoping that I could at least filter out the “hello, how are you?”  offers or the “I didn’t get my product last week, when is it coming?”  offers.  Those haven’t converted very well for me.

7.  Transactions in this industry happen as fast as the two parties want it to happen.  I’ve had some recent Escrow.com transactions complete in a day.  And that’s with Godaddy having to call me to confirm a domain is moving out of my account (a security measure they offer that is a pain some times but makes me feel safer).  But then the other day I had a guy that didn’t tell Escrow.com that he had the domain.  Delayed the transaction 3 or 4 days.  I’m sure he was just busy but he could have done a better job.  Not a huge deal because he had paid but it was just one more thing I had to pay attention to.

8.  It is a MAJOR pain in the ass that both my banks have no Swift code. You would think that a bank as large as Capital One would be able to take International Wire orders but they don’t.  No Swift code, no direct wires from overseas.  I am doing more and more work with China and Europe and giving them an intermediary bank often confuses them.  But so far I’ve gotten my money every time.   It’s just taken longer because of the explaining on what’s going to happen.  I had the same issue when getting some money from 4.cn from a domain I sold but they got it perfect.  My money hit my account in 48 hours.  Per usual my account rep Michael had to do a little translation but he always takes care of it.  Nothing more valuable than having someone you can rely on when dealing with a company.  And yes, I could change my banks but I really like my banks.  I’ve been with my banks for years.  To the point where I can get everything I need done quickly and directly because of established relationships.  I hate to break them.

9.  Speaking of help.  I hear people having troubles with Godaddy all the time but I have nothing but great experiences with Godaddy because my account rep takes care of everything.  Patrick Reynolds is my newest rep but when I have a question or problem I just call direct or email and it gets taken care of.  Usually no questions asked.  When I had affiliate problems. The head of affiliate emailed me constantly to take care of the problems. Even problems with 3rd party companies.  Maybe I’m receiving special treatments because I have a blog. Maybe I receive special treatment because I understand how terrible customer service can be and understand how to ask and treat someone on the other side.  Not saying others have been rude to Godaddy, just saying that someone like Konstantinos of OnlineDomain.com   absolutely has enough names to get an account rep.  He might be in a circle where he doesn’t have enough names to get a rep so he has to wait forever on the phone and he doesn’t put many domains at Godaddy because he has to wait forever on the phone. I realize that anyone should be able to get good service, regardless of whether they blog or have hundreds of names.  I’m merely saying that there are plenty of things I dislike about Godaddy but their customer service to me has been solid.

10.  5 years ago I met a guy at a tradeshow that had the singular and the plural of one of the most popular plants I sell.  I offered him $2K on the spot.  I told him he could just rebrand to his company’s name and make a little money .  I didn’t lie and say that would be better for him, I just said he could. A few days later he emailed me and said he wanted $5K for the names.  I told him that I would pass and he could call me any time he wanted to sell and he had a standing offer.  Fast forward five years.  You can see where this is headed right?  Nope.  I was perusing through Namejet and saw both names were up for auction and had expired.  Got one for $69 and the other for under $500.   I would have had it for $69 as well except one other person liked it for a few hundred dollars.  I feel bad because the guy was pretty old and may have died.  No way he would have let them go.  I’d dig deeper but I’m not sure I want to know.