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.
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.
See also:
Tired of boring old .COM domains? Thinking of buying a .CA domain as a gift for that special someone? Look no further. I just spent 20 minutes hunting through the official list of .CA internet domain registrars trying to find the cheapest ones. In the process I picked about 25 at random and noted their prices for your reading pleasure.
These are prices for a 1 year basic domain name registration, in Canadian dollars. (Which are, more or less, just about the same as US dollars now.)
$10.45 http://www.10dollar.ca/
$10.50 http://www.trillium.ca/order/
$11.50 http://www.bigdomains.ca/
$12.50 http://www.canhost.ca/
$12.90 http://www.budgetnames.ca/
$12.95 http://www.domainsatcost.ca/ (”Canada’s Price Leader”. Not.)
$12.99 https://swww.baremetal.com/
$13.45 http://www.sibername.com/
$14.95 http://www.domaindirect.com/
$14.95 http://www.register4less.com/
$16.00 http://www.papa.ca/
$16.50 http://myid.ca/
$17.45 http://www.lowcostdomains.ca/
$19 http://www.cadns.ca/
$19.87 http://www.thinkprofits.com/ (This site was my favorite. It has a video track on its home page with a message from the eerily intense CEO. That is topped — but only just — by the picture of a rabid chihuahua on the domain names page. Sign me up!)
$20 http://www.canadanic.com/
$24.50 http://www.arcticnames.ca/
$25 http://www.domainsunder.ca/
$29.95 http://www.dotca.ca/
$29.95 http://www.fastwebserver.ca/
$34.99 http://domains.411.ca/
$39 http://www.easydns.com/
$49.95 http://www.caregistration.com/
$50 http://www.internic.ca/ (”the leader in Canadian domain name registration and was the first .ca accredited domain registrar.” Yuh huh.)
$50 http://www.canadanic.com/
$89 http://www.ontwebsite.biz/
For an interesting benchmark, the web host I use for MyOwnPirateRadio charges $6.50 USD per year for .COM domains. If I recall correctly they had a $3 special a while back. Unfortunately they don’t do .CA domains yet. I wish they would!
I stumbled across several more .CA registrars that I didn’t include because they were too expensive, forced me to submit personal information in order to get prices (err… I don’t think so), or didn’t actually offer domain registration services to the public, despite being on the official list. So, sadly, the median price in this unscientific little survey seems to be around $20, if not more. I guess many of these businesses are banking on customers remaining uninformed. Time-tested business strategy… banks, anyone? Insurance? Perhaps a mortgage?
Speaking of transparency and informed customers, are any journalists reading? This is good fodder for a nice little investigative article. Why is the price range so broad? Why are the prices generally so high, especially in comparison to the US? Who is getting the lion’s share of business here? And who really is the cheapest of them all? Inquiring minds want to know.
In the “Random but Useful” department, here is an interesting tips-n-tricks post on better ways to remember names.
That’s “IP” as in intellectual property, not Internet Protocol.
There’s a growing trend towards squatting on intellectual property purely for the purposes of speculation and extortion. And it stinks.
IP squatting comes in different flavors (fragrances?). The recent RIM / NTP case is a great example of the patent troll variety. Paolo Del Nibletto at IT Business echoes my sentiments exactly when he says, “I don’t like NTP. They do not make any products. They do not deliver any valuable service. Sure they have the law on their side, in this particular case, but that is it.”
What’s particularly sad about the RIM case is that they actually tried to fight it, and lost, badly. Many patent troll cases never see the light of day, because companies prefer to settle quietly out of court.
Stinky flavor #2: Domain Trolls. I wrote here about the frustrations of trying to find a good domain name. It’s hard. You’ll surely have noticed the growing number of sites out there that are essentially ad-funded domain name parking lots, sometimes masquerading as search engines. While I don’t have data to back it, it seems to me that it’s happening at a growing rate, making it more expensive and time-consuming to secure a domain name. A blog post by John Cook of the Seattle PI sheds some light on this practice:
Houston entrepreneur Marc Ostrofsky … is back with a new Houston startup called Internet REIT that has purchased more than 400,000 domain names. The competitor to Seattle’s Marchex also recently scored funding from Perot Investments and Maveron, the Seattle venture capital firm co-founded by former investment banker Dan Levitan and Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz.
400,000 names. That’s a lot. According to Dennis Forbes there are about 50 million .COM domain names registered. If Internet REIT’s names are all .COMs, that would mean it holds almost 1% of all registered .COM names. And that’s just one company. No wonder I’m left looking for table scraps.
As far as I’m concerned, the social impact of IP squatting is almost entirely negative. It lets a small number of people get rich(er) by imposing rents on those who have a legitimate need for the property, and frustrates would-be-productive enterprises from progress.
It sure would be interesting to see some stats on this: number of patent troll companies (see bottom of wikipedia article), number of patents held by such companies, dollar value of settlements with such companies, etc. And the same for domain trolls.
Here’s an idea: let anyone get a one-time lease on a domain name (or a patent), but terminate the lease after a reasonable time - 12 months, say - if they don’t actually DO something useful with it beyond attempting to sell the property or litigate.
I know, I know, not very free-market of me. You will not often hear me advocate regulatory policy. But if software has any area in need of a corrective change, IP squatting is it.
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….
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