Web 2.0.11562 beta

I see signs that more sites are emerging to facilitate the easy buying and selling of domain names. It has been a very formalized process at sites like sedo.com. Buyers and sellers are protected for a small price. But now competition ensues and people will be able to sell domains that are not so valuable for small prices. You can register as a seller at a2ld.com for free, and sell a domain cheap, like this one. This lowering of barriers is significant, because it frees speculators to do their thing.

Let’s say you see a domain like foo.com for sale somewhere for some price, say $2000 and offer it for sale elsewhere for $2500 – without actually purchasing it until you have a buyer! What would help of course, is the formalization of this notion, in the form of options.

I want a contract allowing me the right to purchase foo.com anytime for the next 30 days at a $2100, for which I’ll pay you $100. Now I’m able to offer it for sale, with the prospect of making $300 profit, and my investment and potential loss is $100. If I do this a lot, and I’m smart enough to make it work half the time I’ll make money. The actual numbers need to be adjusted to make this lucrative, but the same idea works in other markets.

Apparently the 3-letter domains are gone, at least for .com .net and .org. So say folks who check into these kind of things. I say grab any 4-letter .com you can find, if any.

The real action these days is in the country codes domains. China’s .cn TLD, for example recently passed the one million mark. Here’s the top ten TLDs list. The trend would appear to favor China passing Italy and the Netherlands this year. Look for .in (India) to sell really strong this year too, since they’ve liberalized the rules about allowing foreign registrants, as have so many other countries. These things tend to gather momentum as speculators do the math. Get your names now!

How about speculating on upcoming second-level domains like .com.zz (subsitute your favorite country code) or .someNewTld ? Can’t we trade blocks of related domain names together as commodities?

Shouldn’t institutional investors fund the process of bringing a new TLD through ICANN’s process, be allowed to buy all of a custom TLD and sell the individual names off? This is a business model that makes sense because more TLDs are brought to market giving more choice to consumers and more opportunities for investors.

And finally, am I the only one that thinks the telco’s big push for .mobi is stupid? I like the idea of a single data source or service being served up in many forms depending on the type of client/device and the users’ role with respect to that data/service. Making multiple websites to serve up different versions of something means extra work, and leads to maintenance problems.

OK, I’m stuck on this theme for now, talking about stuff for which there’s definitely NOT a market yet. But there will be, and it should be just as lucrative and competitive as the current marketplace for real property. Yes I think online properties need experts to appraise their worth sometimes. If you’re pitching a business plan that is a web-based venture, you need to estimate many domain-related costs,including how much money it’ll take to acquire your first choice of names. How much should you pay? How do you know if you’ve overpaid? How many names should you buy? How will your portfolio of names perform over time?

Any good online venture should plan to acquire collateral names as well. Yes I know what you’re probably thinking – this guy sells domain names so of course he thinks you should build a portfolio of names.

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I switched to a new server and had some downtime as result. The lone subscriber surely dropped this blog, leaving me as the only reader. As soon as I get some free time there’s several more little posts I’d like to make. Stay tuned.