After 7 years of participating in this industry I’ve seen a lot of great things happen. I’ve seen a few not so great things happen. People have come and gone. Others have become enormously wealthy. And like all industries, we have awards and honors. I have yet to see any awards in any industry that is not questioned by some as to how the winners are chosen. It will never be perfect. But I do know one thing. An open voting system that includes allows anyone to vote is not a real award. It is merely a contest to see who has the most fans or clients.
An award is good for business. If you can post on your site that you were top in your field as voted by your industry then it is assumed that you are an expert and one of the best. An award yields economic returns. It is why I have received half a dozen emails in one way or another to vote for an individual. An email that makes it very easy to vote for that person. As stated above I completely understand why the emails are being sent out, its how this game is played. And it truly is a game. A game Adam Dicker won last year which tells you that the rules probably need to change.
I am going to try something different. I am going to try and put together a panel of 50 people. From ALL areas of the industry. I think the panel needs to be 50 deep to make sure all areas of the world are covered and all different segments of the industry are covered. I’m going to ask people who they think should be on the panel of 50. If there are enough I would make it 100. The bigger the better. Then I will have a public vote similar to the current awards that is 10% of the final vote. I’m sure people will have issues with this way of coming up with awards. But right now we have The People’s Choice Awards and I think we can have the Oscars of Domain Investing.
And this is nothing against Howard and Barbara. Barbara is one of the sweetest people I’ve met and her family has done an incredible job putting on shows and without them we would have no awards. All good things have to improve and all the emails and the results of last years’ awards prove they have to change to give any value our awards.
No doubt many domainers will not like their vote being removed but if the awards are to have any real meaning this change is long overdue. Time for the domaining award process to grow up.