What's your experience in all things WWW?
What's your experience in the domain name realm?
If you don't care to post this info please sticky me if you will.
As always, please keep things general, to avoid even the appearance of promoting your business here.
The intelligence of your posts, without specific promotional efforts, will do all that and more for you.
That last bit of rationale, of course, doesn't explain what I'm doing here as mod. Okay, I confess, I confess. I also had to spend a lot of mony on beer at PubConferences. ;)
Regards...jmcc
What's your experience in all things WWW?
Self employeed since '99 doing mostly ecommerce.
What's your experience in the domain name realm?
Experienced amateur. I have a small collection that keeps getting smaller (currently around 200 names). Most, but not all of my names are generic typos. I really enjoy finding a surprise typo that generates at least $5 per month. Multiply that by 200 and it makes a nice car payment.
I remember you from previous posts at OF (I go by a different nick there - as I do in all forums).
Online via dial-up since 1997.
Bought my first domain in 1998 for my professional practice. Actually paid someone to register my first domains for me: Read - paid for domain plus paid the person a fee for their "service" of registering the domains. The service fee was about the same at the domain registration fee, which back then was $70.00/domain. Ouch!
Realized there was something interesting about domains in the end of 1998 - start of 1999. Learned how easy it was to register them. (Remember that in the bad old days of $70 domains you could start by registering them for free and then later had to pay a bill.)
Registered my first 100 domains by February 1999.
Mostly, acquired domains for eventual development. I'm stuck in a state of perpetual eventual. ;)
My initial analysis suggested that certain markets would eventually thrive on the web: import-export, travel and tourism, online vertical search, online niche publishing (the world chose blogs whilst I was thinking zines), technology domains and a few other categories.
Sometime in 2001 I took an interest in dot org domains. I own a few. Fully intended for development.
I've bought and sold many domains in the aftermarket, a number in the 5 figure range. Turned down an even bigger offer for one of the crown jewels in my holdings. The ones I've sold fall mostly outside my areas of interest for development.
I've used all of the drop services and even occassionally managed to manually snag domains dropped in the off hours.
I still pick up a domain or two on the drops and have managed to make a few trades recently with domainers that I'm friendly with.
One of the nice side benefits of domaining has been communicating with people all around the globe. The domain crowd, for the most part, consists of intelligent, professional businesspeople, all with a common interest or passion: How to convert a domain property into a profitable business?
We're here to help guide you all through those many domain related issues.
In late 1995/early 1996 I put together what was arguably the first information site dedicated solely to domain names, Internet Goldrush [I get a lot of old-timers saying "hey, that sounds familiar..."]. Sold that particular site back in 2000, but I never really left the domain industry since then.
Currently, I have around 3,000 domains, split into .co.uk [50%], .othercctld [10%] and .com/net/org/info/biz [40%]. I took my own advice very late on the .com front, mainly due to a lack of funds in the "early years", so although I have played the drop game for several years I missed out on the really juicy stuff. Didn't make the same mistake on .co.uk, which is why such domains make up half my portfolio right now.
I rarely use the .com drop services any more, since I find I can get more for my money on the .co.uk aftermarket than on the .com drops. Still participate in .co.uk drops though. I've bought and sold domains for up to 5-figures each.
You'll find me hanging around various domain-related forums, and I have made a lot of virtual (and a few real-life) friends "inside" the industry.
These domains were registered back in the goldrush circa feb 1995 when registration were $120 a pop. A local fellow here in Vancouver spent his life savings registering words he found in the dictionary. (I wish he had more money at the time!) all his freinds thought he was nuts paying money for a word on some weird computer things.
Anyway - long story short. I came on board and the CEO, CFO and myself have steered the company in the right direction. We have also grown from just the three of us to about 25 employees.
We have sold many domains in the six figures. We own about 1000 domains but 25 count for 99% of the traffic. We awn many .cn's as we are speculating that China may become the next world power and gets the American gov't to settle down a little.
Most of our sites are on the OVTR/Y! XML Partner result pages but we are working hard at developing as many sites as possible and run several eCommerce sites selling in the millions.
[edited by: Webwork at 12:11 pm (utc) on July 25, 2005]
[edit reason] Removed specific domain / word references. ;) [/edit]
Before that, I was the Vice president of consulting for several different computer companies. I began working in computers in 1980, and first jumped on the ARPAnet around that time.
I own about 175 domain names and write articles, post pictures and create graphics for all of them. I've been doing that for quite some time, and have about 50,000 pages up and running. I run my own web servers and DNS servers.
I am recently widowed: my wife Claudia was a wonderful woman who had been critically ill for many years. She passed away in Feb. I've been traveling a lot (well, a heck of a lot) to stay sane. I love the Renaissance Faire and have purchased some prime faire-related domains.
In 1996 I remember throwing out the idea of domain names to a friend who was talking about a guy he know who sold 1-800 #'s and we said "all the good ones are probably taken by now...". Biggest mistake of my life.
In 1997 I registered about 50 names, mostly xyzforsale.com - a few good ones in the bunch. I sold 3 of them for $10,000 in 2000. Among these 50 names was a bluechip generic (in my eyes) for a product that gets about 40,000 overture searches per month with a top bid of $1.25. I turned it into a portal / info site and it does pretty well, and is also a hobby that I love.
Picked up some names along the way since then, usually with an idea for a site behind them...just not enough time! In the past 3 months I've gotten into the drop game and interested in .info's as well. Unfortunately I'm a bit late on the drop game. I have found some good generic .com's which are still available that bring in a few bucks per month which is fun but nothing groundbreaking recently.
Domaining is a bit addicting to me - I like the thrill of the hunt of finding a good name, just as I love to fish...
Everytime I say "why didn't i get more names in 1997" I try to tell myself we're still only about 10 years into the Internet, and in 5,10 or 20 years I better not be saying "why didn't I buy more names in 2005!"
My domain history, in more-or-less chronological order:
- registered first domain name with friend in early 1999, with intention to start chinese portal
- derivatives trader until 2000, then moved back to sf ba
- registered for $70 each and subsequently let expire alot of ridiculous names. Had I had a little more creativity, this would've been the golden period!
- bought an aftermarket name in 2004 and caught the bug
- found an unregistered 'money' term in 2005 and got addicted
- sold 3 domains on Sedo last month and got absolutely hooked
I remember you from previous posts at OF (I go by a different nick there - as I do in all forums)
I thought I knew of the other major dn forums. PM me with this please :-)
I was reaquainted with the net a few years later, or ca. 1990. At that time graphic browsers had appeared and so had irc. Irc proved as addictive as any illegal substance. There were all the eccentric chat rooms with pagans, wiccans and occultists, and on top of that all the free adult material of the world.
Some 10 yrs later I had my debut at creating and managing websites. My step father who owns a small company got the idea to register <some religion related domain names> and he asked me if I would care to make something out of them. I went totally overboard with it, talked him into buying more milestone <life event domain names> and hire me to develop them. Then came the dot com crash and I lost faith and the domains withered away and were lost.
Now a few years later I have gone full circle from giving up on the idea of making a career on the internet, doing various menial odjobs, deciding on a career as a librarian, going to school for a year and starting working at a library, to deciding again that making a living online as an independant webmaster is what I really want to do.
I´ve just bought 2 domain names, actually 3, <related to the travel industry.>
[edited by: Webwork at 2:39 am (utc) on July 25, 2005]
[edit reason] Per Charter no "the word(s) in the domain(s) are . . . " posts. [/edit]
A brief spell at Microsoft in 1995, with their PSS team, followed by a retreat to university to further myself, which is just a nice way to say that I spent four years eating junk and washing it down with alcohol; hey, it's a dirty job but...;)
Six months of independent web development work lead into a permanent contract with an established online business, heading up their support team; day to day work ranges from domain management, providing regulatory and legal advice, through to general development on a wider scale within my employer's areas of operation. It's a constantly changing role in a constantly changing environment, which isn't necessarily a bad thing at all, and, over five years on, I'm still liking it; some days more than others.:)
R.
