It’s time to Quit Domaining
By Alan on Jan 17, 2009 in Industry
2009 is here and its officially time to stop domaining.
That’s right – pack up your bags, let your names expire and move in with your parents. Economies are collapsing, ppc is revenue is dropping, domain buyers seem to be in caskets and people still have no idea about the difference between a browser and a url.
To some this would sound like a good idea but in reality we all have to give ourselves a kick and quit domaining as we know it in its current form. The term “Domaining” itself has yet to be really defined.
Is it the business of buying and selling domains? or is it the business of developing domains? flipping domains? or is it every aspect of owning, developing and selling domains?
The word is too broad.
Even Ford, Chevrolet, Wall Street and the rest of the clowns lining up begging for our dollars on Capital Hill have an industry term such as Car Markers, Auto Makers or Banks. When you refer to a company as a “bank” or an “auto maker” people know what you mean. Define yourself as a domainer and 9 times out of 10 you will get the “what do you mean” expression that starts with a clock ticking forcing you to explain the industry before interest is lost.
The problem is not in the word itself per say – Domaining is quite catchy when you think about it – but in how you define it when speaking to others and how we, as an industry, work together to further develop the word as a brand.
Domaining.com is a great start since a top level domain which is clearly used to promote, aggregate and showcase the wealth of knowledge “from” and “about” the “domaining” industry can quickly start building some street credit however how many people outside of the industry actually learn about this word every day, month or year? Additionaly, domaining.com is held by a single private company so (with no disrespect my good friend) its not the be all or end all solution for promoting the industry but rather another great tool the community has to add credibility to an industry still in its infancy stage.
I know some are still hesitant to explain they “domain” for a living for fear of explaining the word domaining itself.
How many times does a football coach want to tell people about his big win Friday night when he has to start explaining the game of football to begin?
We are all ambassadors whether we like it or not but it’s rare that we ever bond together other than to try and sell each other a domain, complain for a moment or share a laugh for a fleeting moment.
I’ve seen products come and go. Books about domaining that get off by selling 200 copies and then quickly fade away since its hard to get people to learn about something so simple and so new. Many examples of products exist that have had such great promise but could never realize their full potential because the makers did not realize how to tap new people to this industry.
Why do I suggest for you to quit domaining?
Easy.
Up until now it’s being done all wrong. Sure, there are lots of success stories but the true growth – the story yet to be told – are the end users, the public love of this industry as much as the late night commercials for buying foreclosures (which ironically are probably more popular than domaining and they only picked up airtime around 2 years ago).
You see, I’m not a “domainer” (at least in my definition) like many of you although I am proud to be part of this community. My story started with development and as the business took off we picked up domains for investment or to complement existing projects but from the get go the plan was to develop and develop we did selling many successfully sites to corporations, publicly traded companies and individuals over the years.
Did you ever tell somebody you want a Porsche and then feel blank inside when somebody responds with – great, how are you going to do it?
Sure, the usual vague answers like “I’m going to work my ass off” or “I’m going to start a business” but if you have the luxury of speaking with someone who respects you enough to actually ask how and not accept the silly vague answers everybody has with a dream it is a compelling experience that leaves you almost speechless.
Only then do you realize … shit, I don’t have a plan. All I have is a dream.
Making a good living is not hard if you have the right tools in any business but doing something great takes more than a dream – it takes a plan.
Where is our plan I ask?
Who is trying to work together and promote this industry in a coordinated effort outside of the existing domain world?
Is anyone talking about the industry on TV, trying to get articles published about the industry in general and NOT just to sell your ineedamillion-today.info domain?
Where’s the joint agreements to work together and dual promotion between the Monikers, Domaining.com’s and SmartName’s of the world?
If the industry succeeds we all succeed.
Oversee is building a powerhouse and using synergies to complement one another to build something great. Remember, these guys have street credit and I mean $150 million from Oak Street is real street credit – not street credit from domainers but from investment bankers. Who else is doing anything else beside their day to day functions they were doing years ago?
So the question of whether or not to quit domaining is not as simple as it sounds.
Of course, you want to make a living so you are probably not going to let your names expire but are you going to help build the industry?
Got Milk commercials are great – nothing short of an incredible example of an industry promoting its industry.
We are online, some of us even own the traffic – where is our industry campaign except for Bob Parson’s flashing the breasts of GoDaddy girls everywhere (which I will not complain about).
Move forward, quit or get out of the way.
Have no idea who said this but what will we decide to do?
If anybody wants to start a campaign with a plan – a respectable agency and a real plan then we are in.
Should you quit domaining?
Not really – but we all should quit domaining without a plan.
—————————————————-
Enjoy and remember to sign up for the PrivateNames.com newsletter
David J Castello | Jan 17, 2009 | Reply
Good article.
As this industry expands it will become apparent that the key to future success is partnering. I can walk into any domain convention and divide the audience into three sections: 1) Those who own great domains, 2) Those who are great developers and 3) Those who are great salespeople.
Properly combine these three forces and you have a license to print money. The problem is that too many are trying to go it alone because, up until this point, they’ve been able to get away with it – especially if they possess two of those qualities such as great domains and salesmanship or great domains and development.
Of course, domainers can simply do nothing and keep parking their names. And it will be a slow death that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Everyone domainer I’ve ever met has a specific talent. The time is now to partner for success and survival.
Wanna Develop | Jan 17, 2009 | Reply
Nice write up.. Can’t say I agree with everything, but for the most part you are spot on.
Domaining is in essence buying/selling the domains — the word development should not be associated anywhere or within the same sentence with domaining. It doesn’t do it justice.
People who own many websites, just so happen to own many domains too, so they developers running online businesses.
Individuals/companies with many parked domains are speculators, involved with flipping names, nothing much is going on with this type of “business” although many like to make it seem like there is.
Development was never part of the “bigger plan” that any of the bigger players had in mind when they snapped up tens of thousands of hundreds of thousands of domains. It was always about “Yea.. Domains are valuable… I need to secure as many as possible so my competitor doesn’t… So I can get a tight grip on things and drive up the values”
Simple supply and demand.
You don’t have to be a genius to figure out what the domain industry is all about and what to make of it.
Best,
Mike
http://www.wannadevelop.com
Alan | Jan 17, 2009 | Reply
David. Spot on – the real talent pool that exists within this small industry is quite amazing and many combinations could have endless possibilities. Hopefully in 2009 we will see some of these put together.
Alan | Jan 17, 2009 | Reply
Mike,
I like your quote “You don’t have to be a genius to figure out what the domain industry is all about and what to make of it”
It’s true but its also a deduction from knowledge gained by being in this industry. Once you know how to make money with domaining / developing than its not really that hard.
Remember when you first logged into a registar account – I’m sure it was probably overwhelming to see all the account options but once you learned it – yep, no rocket science degree was needed.
Domaining is like anything else – take buying or selling real estate – scary at first but once you’ve done it a few times than “it doesn’t take a genius” to figure that out either.
Few industries require rocket scientists and brain surgeons to understand but most are still well known by the mass population.
The simplicity of the industry – in fact, the industry itself – is not conveyed to main street and that’s one piece of what I am suggesting should be done more by members of the industry.
Thanks for the comments – some good points.
David J Castello | Jan 17, 2009 | Reply
Thank you, Alan. My brother Michael and I will be speaking about this topic at DomainFest.
Alan | Jan 17, 2009 | Reply
No problem. You said yourself “the right combination is a license to print money” – someone has to start talking about this and I can not think of 2 better people to start a discussion … or start printing money.
Enjoy DomainFest – I will be in LA for another project but will probably drop by at some point.
Randall | Jan 17, 2009 | Reply
I know what you mean in some of the article. I tell people I work online and they ask what do I do? I tell then I am a “domainer” and “Developer” they look like I just said something in russian.
You have to explain what exactly you do when you try to tell someone what you do. But in the same reality, Ask you self what you do online and that will define what you are besides a Domainer or a Developer or either. I like to call my self an Internet Activist and people ask what I do. I tell them I work on Website. Then, they understand a little more.
Love the Article.
Terence Chan | Jan 17, 2009 | Reply
I agree. easy money from domaining is dead. Domaining in the past years were driven by monetization opportunities of clueless advertisers using PPC.
The advertising industry has wisened up, today there are just too many adsense ads, the novelty has gone a blind spots have developed.
Domainers used to claim the power of type-in traffic – today we know much of it came from typo traffic. If people want something, they use Google, not the address toolbar.
PPC were seen to be a logic proposition of measurability and advertisers actually believed someone clicked on domains with honest intent and interest – today we know that it was actually botnets and human farms that created a lot of those useless clicks, by people masking the illegal system with virtually hundreds of thousands of domains pinching little bites to avoid detection. PPC rates have fallen dramatically sine webmaster started studying their logs and found the majority of click into conversion useless. The early players who got away with these were the lucky ones. Today Google will force you to pay back if they find click-fraud generated revenue even if it was months after it occurred.
Laws governing the use of domains has changed to the point where domain speculators have to watch their backs so carefully we are peceived to be criminals rather than speculators, as a result the once priced market of 2, 3 and 4 letter acronyms have had their values decimated because of the potential risk of ligitation always lurking behind.
The chances of striking it rich is far worse than buying a state lottery ticket.
imho, I agree domaining is no longer what it used to be. The spin stories of domain salemen has become worn and thin. And 70% of the world’s financial book wealth has just evaporated forever, far worse than in the dotcom 1 bubble burst. The money laundering days using domains as innocent instruments have died, many domain organizations are just trying to keep their operations afloat.
I don’t think, and I agree, that when you see companies like industry icons Oversee.net retrench continuously, it doesn’t take rocket science to see that the domain industry, just like the rest, is not immune to the global economic collapse.
The good old days are gone, rest in pieces. The early players are the ones who creamed off the real fruit. New commers have only cherry pits to base their hopes on. I honestly think we should stop using the word ‘domainers’ to describe our hobby (or livelihood for some), to something like ‘Ontrepreneurs’. It’s still incredible after all these long years of industry leaders trying to convince the public (and themselves) that domaining is a profession, to most of the people in your public community its just cybersquatting, TM criminals and the market of the shady click fraud underworld.
I agree that the best thing to do moving forward is to find professional partners (not other domainers) to develop your existing names out. Just a few because it will take all your time, throw the rest away cheap. Good luck guys.
Its going to be an interesting new era…
Google is
Stephen Douglas | Jan 18, 2009 | Reply
“Domaining” is the verb, and “Domainer” is the noun.
If you are “domaining” for a living, then you are a “domainer”.
A “domainer” is someone who invests in domain names in order to monetize them in a variety of ways, and does it as their main source of income. If someone is just buying/selling domains as a side job, they are called “domain investors”.
It’s true, PPC is sucking bigtime, but that doesn’t mean most of the domainers are scheduled for the guillotine. In reality, most of all domainers’ had the “80/20″ rule in effect, meaning, 20% of their domains financed the other 80% that were making nothing.
With the advent of several content development companies such as AEIOU, EVO LANDING, and WHYPARK, domainers now have to become “smart businessmen” and invest some money in creating a real piece of online property for their PPC non-performers. People get tired of coming to a website that is just a “parking lot”, but they will make a decision of whether to stay and patronize a domain website that has content and prodserv that matches their search interests.
The new direction is with content development for your domains. There’s no other way around this. All of us have domains that are great generics, but not enough of the consumer/business sectors understand STILL the “typein” or “direct navigation” process. The answer to this problem is to get relevant content on your domains as inexpensively as you can, and start a domain-by-domain review in building out what will sell on your property.
You don’t see many geo-domain owners wasting time with landing pages filled only with adlinks. They are BUILDING PROPERTIES.
Even with thousands of domains, it’s fairly cheap and easy to convert those domains to content producing websites relevant to your domain name niche, especially if you own a large amount of ccTLD’s or SLD’s that get no typein traffic. Take your .pro, .name, .mobi, .travel, .biz, .info domains and put relevant content on them. Get them indexed in the search engines ASAP.
Every day you delay, you keep your domain’s value at bay.
Nice article, and great responses by the gallery.
Stephen Douglas
http://www.successclick.com
RegFeeNames.com | Jan 18, 2009 | Reply
There is no such thing as easy money no-more!
Great post – Your right about what is a domainer?
Trying to explain this is so difficult!
We all need to have Elevator Speeches which define what we do!
Regards,
Robbie
Too Many Secrets | Jan 18, 2009 | Reply
Alan,
Great insights! Thank you for sharing.
Hello!! from a fellow Canadian, btw.
- Richard
Dutch Boyd | Jan 18, 2009 | Reply
Enjoyed the article. Well put.
Duane | Jan 18, 2009 | Reply
Great job!
This post is one of the best I have read about this topic.
Also the comments! Absolutely great!
Regards
Duane
DomainBuilders.com | Jan 25, 2009 | Reply
Nice Read. Good Points. Enjoyed That! – Thanks!
Joel