Domain Names Recession Boom is Flipping Madness
In the Winter of 1999 with the Millennium uncertainty around the world and Oasis & Robbie Williams blasting out on FM, a defining moment in Internet history was quietly played out.
The deregulation of the control of top Level Domains TLD’s.
Up until this point the control of the sale and registration of this type of brand new intellectual property the .com .net .org .edu and .gov, had lain firmly in the hands of one company Network Solutions.
With the establishment of the International body for domain names convention ICANN, the system was opened up that November. Coincidently the UK registrar Nominet opened it’s doors to the public at the same time……..
The Domain Name virtual land rush gold rush had begun.
Prior to the Landrush, back in 1996 we had paid £400 to Network Solutions through our ISP for our company domain name. That very same year I was going around the City of London trying to preach to the sheep that he who controls the names controls the product……….
John the effing Baptist or what – very few IT directors were interested and although they understood the vision they saw it as outside their remit. The marketing departments were just interested in Brand names!
So come the revolution of November 1999 when the doors opened, only those few techies in the know started buying like mad…
We stayed up for four days buying domains all night long. We bought 1500 generic TLD’s at around £25 each and spent the money for my new BMW M5………..
Then we sat back and realised that although we owned all this IP we’d just bought ourselves into a £40,000 per year recurring debt!!!
Fortunately or unfortunately for us as it turned out, Registrars started popping up everywhere around 2000 and the price of renewals dropped to around a third of the cost.
Not before we had been taken by a shark who owned a UK company called DiscountDomains who took our money didn’t renew the names and went into liquidation. We very nearly lost the names and it cost us double…….
But over the years it was a wise move to forgo the Beamer…
Certain domains have proved to be a very good investment, but even for top niche names you weren’t going to get the prices talked about in the press, that is until recently!
So what’s going on to have made generic domains the flavour of the month in the global marketing world?
Well in my opinion it’s the recession!
In a recession investors move their capital to ‘vehicles’ that are more stable such as gold, and to those investments which might bring a more long term appreciation, such as Art.
Domains fit both these investment requirements.
Furthermore because of the recession names can be picked up relatively cheap….. often very cheap and in some cases you get an established website with all it’s link juice as well!
I believe this is a good levelling factor. As more domains get sold from large collections they enter the cyberspace marketplace of the SERPS and increase the visibility and demand for generic domain names.
The recent flurry of interest in domains has been whipped up partly by the Internet Marketers who have all jumped onto the practice of ‘flipping’ websites to make virtually instant money.
Flipping involves buying a generic domain name, setting up some hosting and maybe a wordpress blog and some google adsense and selling it the same day on sites like Flippa.com for $100 or more. Leave it a month and drive some traffic and you might get $1000 or more…..
The practice is big in the States and is just catching on over here. This coupled with the easy transfer mechanisms that are on place today have created a whole new market
Just watch those Brands lose their rankings as more and more TLD’s like .co are released and more privately held Top generic domains become available!
Beat The System!
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