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Domain Squatter Tries New Business: Running Websites

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Re: Domain Squatter Tries New Business: Running Websites

#11

Post by ajm »

brk wrote: post #9
pchristensen wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users? Trained!?!?!?!? Someone needs to stop hanging out with geeks :) These domains ARE valuable - both for income generation and resale potential. http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-05-09-domainers_x.htm http://www.google.com/search?q=domaining

You're going to cite a USA Today article as some sort of conclusive proof of your argument? The "value" is perceived, often by people who have no idea what they're doing (much like the examples in your USA Today article). This is a lot like the "value" of various antiques, where antique dealers constantly buy and sell pieces amongst themselves. Did you hear the joke about the 3 antique dealers trapped on an island wi…

Jakob Nielsen found that only 76% of people who wanted to do a search could actually do so. See http://www.useit.com/alertbox/designer-user-differences.html -- it's quite long so search for "Getting to Google is hard"

Re: Domain Squatter Tries New Business: Running Websites

#12

Post by brk »

henning wrote: post #10
brk wrote: post #6

Interesting, but I think he's way too late to that party. These short, generic domain names (like perfume.com) had some value 10 years ago, when Internet search was still much more of a chaotic crapshoot. Today, you could practically run a thriving ecommerce site from just a static IP if you spent a little bit of time on SEO. People go to google, type in "perfume" or "buy perfume" and go off to either the text-ad sit…

Every SEO person I've talked to or read from always says good domains are the foundation for making money online. Those domains are still quite valuable.

Yeah, well a lot of SEO people are just parrots who repeat what they've heard.

Does "Amazon" equate to a massive multi-product marketplace somehow? How about "ebay"? "Flickr" is so much like "photo hosting" that you can see why they're such a popular search result. And so on.

Having key search terms in your domain name lends a tiny bit of weight to the overall result ranking. The link text, page title and H1 tags will do more for you though. So will text in the url itself (www.foo.com/these-are-my-keywords).

Re: Domain Squatter Tries New Business: Running Websites

#13

Post by brk »

ajm wrote: post #11
brk wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're going to cite a USA Today article as some sort of conclusive proof of your argument? The "value" is perceived, often by people who have no idea what they're doing (much like the examples in your USA Today article). This is a lot like the "value" of various antiques, where antique dealers constantly buy and sell pieces amongst themselves. Did you hear the joke about the 3 antique dealers trapped on an island wi…

Jakob Nielsen found that only 76% of people who wanted to do a search could actually do so. See http://www.useit.com/alertbox/designer-user-differences.html -- it's quite long so search for "Getting to Google is hard"

Although it didn't break it down further, the article said that the other 24% of people trying to get to Google "...either completely failed to get to any search engine or ended up running their query on a different search engine". So, some of that 24% were able to execute a search, just not on Google. Let's be generous and say 10% used something else (like the MSN search that comes up by default in IE).

My personal non-scientific experience is that users who are so internet-clueless are also e-commerce-phobic... They won't put their credit card and personal data "into the intarweb". So, the value to a retailer of this group of folks that can't master ANY search engine is probably much less than the cost of developing and promoting these sites based on such great domain names.

Re: Domain Squatter Tries New Business: Running Websites

#15

Post by pchristensen »

brk wrote: post #9
pchristensen wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users? Trained!?!?!?!? Someone needs to stop hanging out with geeks :) These domains ARE valuable - both for income generation and resale potential. http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-05-09-domainers_x.htm http://www.google.com/search?q=domaining

You're going to cite a USA Today article as some sort of conclusive proof of your argument? The "value" is perceived, often by people who have no idea what they're doing (much like the examples in your USA Today article). This is a lot like the "value" of various antiques, where antique dealers constantly buy and sell pieces amongst themselves. Did you hear the joke about the 3 antique dealers trapped on an island wi…

[Sigh] I didn't feel like digging around for the better articles out there that I've read so I grabbed the one linked to in Wikipedia. Serves me right for being lazy.

Monetization techniques are improving (Auctomatic might be the next step?) but even just with AdSense they still bring in a lot of money. Factor in the minimal effort required to milk them for cash and increasing resale values and they become very attractive investments.

Re: Domain Squatter Tries New Business: Running Websites

#16

Post by pchristensen »

brk wrote: post #13
ajm wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jakob Nielsen found that only 76% of people who wanted to do a search could actually do so. See http://www.useit.com/alertbox/designer-user-differences.html -- it's quite long so search for "Getting to Google is hard"

Although it didn't break it down further, the article said that the other 24% of people trying to get to Google "...either completely failed to get to any search engine or ended up running their query on a different search engine". So, some of that 24% were able to execute a search, just not on Google. Let's be generous and say 10% used something else (like the MSN search that comes up by default in IE). My personal…

Now that's a good point I hadn't thought of! Hmm. OK, now I'm less optimistic about the Auctomatic deal. [that wasn't sarcasm, that was sincere]

I think the Plenty of Fish model (lots of traffic, high priced sponsorship ads and affiliate links to more targeted or efficient sites) is a better bet for high value domain names, given that characteristic that you pointed out about the people unable to find a search engine. They might not know what they're doing, but you can be darn sure they click on ads!

Re: Domain Squatter Tries New Business: Running Websites

#17

Post by axod »

dstillz wrote: post #14

Don't call us domain squatters. We're domain farmers. And you're just jealous. :-)

A farmer creates something. What do you create? You happened to be the first person to think of registering a certain domain name, and won that lottery. Well done.
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