8 Monday Thoughts About Domaining and Maybe a Few Other Things

I think too much, here are a few I’ll share

1. While I enjoy hearing about all the nice sales of the big boy domain investors I am much more interested to hear what they are buying. You hardly ever hear about what domains they are adding to their portfolio. Nobody seems to write articles about “I bought this or I bought that”. Usually it’s merely what’s for sale or what has sold.  I realize why most people don’t share because, like me, it’s not to my advantage to have all my purchases made in public.  It’s also the reason I use various accounts and companies to keep my domains hidden when I want them private, but 99.9 percent I could care less if anyone knows.  I use WebBoar.com and Whoisology to check on new names of people just for fun, but it’s only good for names they want seen or don’t mind being seen. It’s easy to hide names if you want. On a side note I’ve noticed an inverse correlation between quantity of porn names and number of children the owner has.

 2.  Contrary to what you think or read, if your company doesn’t need outside money it is NOT in your best interest to take outside money.  Giving away your company is never a good thing.  They only way you give away your company is to add an adviser or talent that can take you to places that you can’t go yourself. Or for the obvious reason, you need the money to keep operating or to take it to the next level.   Venture capital money is there to get payback.  Their interest is themselves and only care about your company enough to make sure they get their money back.  The Internet, and the recent stock offering of Twitter gives the feeling that everyone is making millions and billions on all these new startups.  Many do, but as a guy that goes to meetings at a local incubator here at the University of Illinois, I can tell you there are thousands of companies that fail or become a “boring” business. One that is profitable and everyone makes their money by taking a piece of the profit at the end of the year.

3.  I’m addicted to Orange is the New Black on Netflix.  Netflix should pay Julianne Hough  for dressing up as ‘Crazy Eyes’ in blackface because I have to admit I was curious who she was dressing up as after all the controversy.  I watched an episode and now I’m like a crack addict, sitting in the theatre downstairs in the dark for hours at a time.  And ‘Crazy Eyes’ is one of the best characters on TV in the last 10 years.  It’s by far my new favorite show.  This is definitely the future of programming.  I would pay for independent programming that is this entertaining.

4.  Namejet is being very smart in becoming the auction house to the new tlds.  Regardless of whether you think the new gTlds are going to be successful, we can all agree that Namejet is going to make money on them. They auction names and the thousands of new tlds are going to want to auction names.  XYZ and College start it all off.  The HUGE problem is lack of information about what these early auctions get you.  The buyers don’t even know the renewal cost of the domains they will be buying.  Hell it could be $150 a year per name.  And they can’t even guarantee you’ll get the name.  This early in the game you’re merely getting an option to buy the name. To quote CEO Daniel Negari on DomainIncite

the buyers at auction are not buying the domain names as in a normal auction. They are buying an option to force us to allocate them the domain after the Sunrise Period for the auction price assuming various contingencies are met — such as us being able to allocate the name in the future, the name being available after sunrise, the name not being blocked-out because of name collisions and so on.

That being said, I actually like some of the names but since I’m not sponsored by XYZ I’m not going to discuss it any further 🙂

5.   As much as Five percent of domain articles are “paid posts“. This is a very informal number that I tallied and does not mean anyone was paid to write the article.  I counted articles that I thought were written to help an advertiser or friend and wouldn’t have been written if that relationship didn’t exist.  I certainly don’t think it’s wrong. Even I throw in some commentary at the top to help my friends on my daily lists.  It’s how business works.  Even the biggest publishers in the world write articles to help their clients.

6. I think the Heritage Auction of domain names is great for the industry (No I do not have any relationship with Aron or HA).  Getting the auction in front of other types of money is always good.  Possibly adding more domain investors or merely letting end users know the value of good domains.  Public domain sales data is always helpful to our industry.

7.  Owen Frager’s post on what domains have been sold by Domain Name Sales contains a lot of bad data or incorrectly list domains as being sold.  There are certainly sales in the list that have been made, but a perfect example is this week.   It says that Uniregistry.net was sold.   I was pretty sure that Uniregistry is not going to sell the dot net and after looking it up, it’s still theirs.  I also saw myself credited for a bunch of sales in past posts and although I made some of them, half of them I never sold.  Not sure where the data is coming from but I would take those posts with a grain of salt.

 8.  Turns out Protrada actually purchased the domain DomainsCon.com years ago.  Before Namescon was a twinkle in Richard Lau’s eye.  They just recently decided to try and make it a go.  I incorrectly said they were jumping on the bandwagon and created a name to mimic the newest announced conference.  I still agree the timing was wrong but so was I eye about their intention

9. I’m officially announcing Hangover II:  Shane takes his Mom to Vegas………..Again.  I took my Mother to TRAFFIC in Vegas last year and looks like I’m taking her this January to another conference.  It turns out her 65th birthday is on the same day that Namescon starts on January 13th and I’d hate to miss either.  So she’s going to drive in again and we’re going to have Hangover II.  I am going to try and get my wife to come as well to at least one night so I can at least get back some of my street cred.  I am going to need to sell a couple more domains before then because I just got through paying for my last meal at PRIME.  Who knew you could get $30 au-gratin potatoes.  PS if anyone of you young guys are looking for ladies to take with you to the club.  She is a good time (pretty strong dancer) as long as you get a private table and bottle service.