Business 2.0 Magazine has a fascinating article on Kevin Ham, one of the top “domainers”. He reportedly owns about 300,000 domains that generate an estimated $70M per year in ad revenue.
Sheesh. No wonder I can’t find any good domains anymore.
Ze Frank did a nice piece on waves.
It reminds me of this New York Times article about Friendster, and why it failed to capitalize on its early lead in social networking.
For best effect, read the NYT article first.
Mike Davidson, CEO of Newsvine.com, tells the story of how he got the newsvine domain and in the process found out a lot about how to grab a soon-to-expire web domain. A useful and quick read if you are domain-hunting.
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This morning I received an email from LinkedIn asking me to fill in a customer feedback survey. If you haven’t heard of LinkedIn, you’ve probably been living in a cave. A nice quiet hermetically sealed marketing-free cave. LinkedIn is a social networking tool that connects work colleagues and old classmates for business networking purposes. I signed up a few years back and have been using it — grudgingly, reluctantly — since then. The survey reminded me why.
In theory, LinkedIn should be a really valuable tool, the kind one would willingly use on a regular basis. In practice, LinkedIn and most of its brethren have a fatal design flaw: they fail to request sufficient permission before opening you up to inbound communications and sending outbound communications on your behalf. And that violates customer trust.
Seth Godin evangelizes a related concept called “Permission Marketing”. In short, if you want to market to somebody, first request their permission with some sort of intellectual bait: discounts, samples, etc. If you get their permission (i.e. they accept your bait), game on: you can begin a dialog, and that dialog will be welcome. If you don’t get permission, leave them alone, because your message will fall on deaf or even unfriendly ears.
Where LinkedIn goes wrong is by over-reaching at signup time. By default, it automatically broadcasts any profile updates you make to everyone in your network. By default, it makes it easy for people you don’t know or barely know to send you email. And by default, it makes your social network visible to everyone. Yuck. It’s a good way to scare off your friends and colleagues, who implicitly trust you to guard their privacy and protect them from spam.
I’ve tweaked my LinkedIn settings to tone down the noise and protect privacy, and I may use it a while longer. After all, staying connected is work, and LinkedIn does makes it easier to track email address changes. But I really only use it as a glorified address tracker. For anything beyond that I revert to my trusty old standby: email.
Hmm… which makes me wonder, when will someone do a good job connecting permission requests with email? That would be a useful tool.
I’m tired. I need help. I’ve been looking for available Internet domain names recently, and I’m finding it’s a desert out there… all the good stuff is gone.
What I need: given a set of prioritized naming requirements from yours truly, spit out candidate Internet domain names that are known to be available for registration. And make ‘em good, not silly names that nobody can spell, speak, or remember.
I’ve stumbled across a few products that claim to help, but they only offer crude syntactical options like prefix/suffix generation. The same goes for Network Solutions, GoDaddy, and other name registrars I’ve run across: their simplistic alternate name suggestions are a waste of time.
I would love to know of good software for this. Is Net Promoter worthwhile? There must be something passable out there… plenty of companies hold thousands of domain names, and surely they don’t pay staff to just sit around and dream up names all day. (Although I must admit that reminds me — painfully — of some branding exercises I’ve been through. Perhaps the truth is uglier than I think.)
Dennis Forbes just wrote an insightful and entertaining analysis titled “Interesting Facts About Domain Names” on exactly this topic. He downloaded and analyzed the .COM namespace, publishing findings including distribution of name lengths, availability of 2, 3, 4 and 5-letter names, and joins with the US Census list of popular male and female names. He also promises a follow-up, which I’ll be looking for. It’s nice work. Now if he would just package it as an online service….
Seth Godin writes:
There isn’t a market. There are a million markets. Markets of one, or markets of small groups, or markets of cohorts that communicate. …the idea of monolithic marketing messages to monolithic markets makes no sense. The race is now to be the first mover in the micromarkets where attention matters.
Yes. Wise. I have two riffs to offer on that: one on software, and one on writing.
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