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How Microryza Acquired the Domain Experiment.com

priceonomics.com

11–20 of 89 posts

Re: How Microryza Acquired the Domain Experiment.com

#12
post #11

> [...] but their budget was $12-15K [...] > .... > After weeks of gentle negotiating, they came to an agreement: $54K in cash for the domain. Yikes. That's 3.6x the max budget they were hoping to spend. I really do hope that in the long run it pays off.

It's a strong-enough name to be considered an asset. Worst-case ... just resell it.

Re: How Microryza Acquired the Domain Experiment.com

#13
post #9

All domains should really cost $1000/year from the registrar at a minimum to stop this idiotic "I'll buy thousands of them and sit on them forever until someone offers me enough for one of them to make the whole enterprise worth it".

So the average person can no longer afford to have a website on a domain they own? That sounds much worse to me.

Re: How Microryza Acquired the Domain Experiment.com

#14
post #9

All domains should really cost $1000/year from the registrar at a minimum to stop this idiotic "I'll buy thousands of them and sit on them forever until someone offers me enough for one of them to make the whole enterprise worth it".

Expensive domain registration would make it cost prohibitive for average people to start a website. The better thing to limit is how many domains you can own, or at least how many domains you can park.

Re: How Microryza Acquired the Domain Experiment.com

#15
post #7

"The broker would help them find the owners of domain names, negotiate the price, and handle the transaction in exchange for a 10-15% commission of the price of the domain." The incentives there seem misaligned to me. The person negotiating the price for them gets paid a higher commission if the price ends up being higher?

They also talk about setting a budget. It's easy to imagine schemes where there is a fixed fee plus a percentage of the part of the budget that is saved.

Re: How Microryza Acquired the Domain Experiment.com

#17
post #2

I like the Experiment.com brand name so much better, as cool and quirky as Microryza was. Congrats on a good find and sane price!

Mycorrhizae are pretty darn cool. Two kingdoms of life abandoning a history of distrust to form an intimate partnership and solve a Hard Problem. It's symbolic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbuscular_mycorrhiza

"experiment.com" sacrifices the neat science and the symbolism. The only appeal I see is utilitarian. Given their difficulties with "Microryza," I understand that this is enough to motivate the change, but it seems like the opposite of cool and quirky.

Re: How Microryza Acquired the Domain Experiment.com

#19

Am I the only one that likes the name Ryza more than Experiment? Experiment just sounds so bland to me and will be harder to rank high with.

Rank high for what? The term Ryza? It's easy to rank high for a made up word, but if you're ever in debate over whether to use a domain with ambiguous spelling or a standard word...go with the standard word.

Re: How Microryza Acquired the Domain Experiment.com

#20
post #9

All domains should really cost $1000/year from the registrar at a minimum to stop this idiotic "I'll buy thousands of them and sit on them forever until someone offers me enough for one of them to make the whole enterprise worth it".

Expensive domain registration would make it cost prohibitive for average people to start a website. The better thing to limit is how many domains you can own, or at least how many domains you can park.

Limiting number of domain registrations per-person probably won't work, because one can get thousands of sockpuppet "shareholders", each having registered a sole domain.

And parking domains is indistinguishable from using them. Unless under "parking" you mean explicitly stating this domain is for sale. But with imposed restriction squatters will just remove those and park domains with "this domain is... well, you get the idea".

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