Expired Domains

Today I thought that I would share a conversation that I had with a fellow domainer in regards to the current state of the expired domains industry, and my predictions for the future.

clemzonguy: right now i would say ordering massive .biz at godaddy is risky
clemzonguy: because pool got some prime ones from me today
clemzonguy: and enom and others will only get better
Domainut: but with godaddy exclusive drops, it is different
Domainut: all registrars will move to the exclusive drops soon
Domainut: all
Domainut: there will be no public drops
clemzonguy: yeah it’s amazing how that this is going to go around the whole pool concept
Domainut: IMO within the next 6 months
Domainut: If I could roll back time I’d be rich
Domainut: I had the idea to start a pool model 5 months before they did
Domainut: I just never put it into motion
clemzonguy: i had approached a few snap partners myself mainly smaller ones
clemzonguy: having a connection now will be fruitless
Domainut: connections will not matter
Domainut: it will all be about who is feeding who exclusive drops
Domainut: the main registrar to go for now is register.com
clemzonguy: didn’t snapnames acquire them
Domainut: partner with them and a drop catcher will be fed for a long time’
Domainut: not to my knowledge
clemzonguy: register.com is holding some names hostage?
Domainut: they may catch for sn but i do not think they have an exclusive drop with snapnames yet
Domainut: register has thousands of great names on hold for years
clemzonguy: tucows also
clemzonguy: did they move forward with anything yet
Domainut: tucows is doing their own drop auctions
clemzonguy: so no one has basically spoken about it publicly?
Domainut: a little
Domainut: but tucows was the first to announce it, then hasn’t gone forward yet
clemzonguy: so i haven’t missed it?
Domainut: not tucows
clemzonguy: you can be talking to one person one day and then the next day they are working behind the scenes on something and not breathing a word. not sure who you can trust.
Domainut: yep, it’s a cutthroat game, but espionage is needed to succeed in this biz, sharing too much info can cut ur chances of surviving
clemzonguy: well i’ve been fed wrong information before and also had people screw me out of revenue from projects i helped start
clemzonguy: well i think there is still game to be played yet. i’m not out of it yet.
Domainut:
Domainut: yep many things will change in this year
Domainut: lol
clemzonguy: lol
clemzonguy: what would you say are your main predictions for the next year
Domainut: all registrars will go exclusive auctions, then all dropcatchers will be obsolete as registrars start to conduct their own auctions using only one main third party to conduct the auctions, all ppc’s will move to one click landers and give more control to the domain owners for seo, domain prices will continue to grow as all of this happens, auction prices will be double for the same names next year as a result of all this
clemzonguy: PPC benefits both the company as well as the domain owner
Domainut: yep
clemzonguy: do you make a distinction between PPC and CPM
Domainut: since advertising prices have been increasing all domains do better on ppc rather than paid per impression.
clemzonguy: well it’s rather interesting what Duke mentioned in the radio show last week. most companies are kind of venture capital companies are waking up to this reality and they are the ones with all the capital
clemzonguy: i do not think i am currently monetizing my domains as much as possible even with DS. but it’s hard to put value on domains which are brandable but yet do not make as much revenue without development.
Domainut: make time for development then, that’s the only way to judge true value, and even then u must have the perfect biz model to do so
clemzonguy: well even with good SEO now with PPC search engines will give more preference to people paying high amounts of money.
clemzonguy: so overall the little person will be lost in the shuffle. not only for good domains but ranking
clemzonguy: if this could be communicated to people at large, values would shoot up even moreso
Domainut: if they are paying someone to do their seo and that person is better than the little guy
Domainut: but the litle guy can still find a place by learning seo
Domainut: advertising results will still show on searches above normal results, but I think most users trust the top general results more than the paid listings
clemzonguy: it just seems things aren’t moving fast enough in some areas but too fast in other areas
clemzonguy: end-users = not willing to pay more than $5 for a website
speculators = driving up bid prices
Domainut: PPC search engines are struggling to keep up with the ever changing needs of owners of expiring domains, rising advertiser awareness of highly targetted traffic, and the ever changing serps of the search engines. Serps have started to panalize domains for having the same content as other sites, and generic landing pages are really starting to suffer. They just need to quickly implement these changes or I foresee a new search engine jumping in the claim the reigns
Domainut: endusers need to be educated more about the value of targetted traffic, but with the rising costs being paid for advertising I think this is happening
clemzonguy: well i feel kind of scammed as a college student using google thinking that I was actually using a non-profit thing that was invented for fun
clemzonguy: and now to find out years later it was all to create a money cow
clemzonguy: when people try to say will you meet me in the middle i double my price. i am sick of negotiating with lowballers
Domainut: how could they feesably afford to not have a way to generate funding to power the search engine with so many queries being sent through it every second?
clemzonguy: i used to find test answers on google
Domainut: I am not selling waiting for prices to reach what i know they will
clemzonguy: word for word
clemzonguy: are you a big believer in .INFO
clemzonguy: b/c all i see buying that is speculators
clemzonguy: the only high sales i’ve heard about or had are to other speculators or people who looked at overture rankings
clemzonguy: .biz & .us mainly end-users have bought from me
Domainut: all extensions will grow, the more that the public is made aware of them. Will they ever come close to .com? never. .com will always be king
Domainut: new tlds will continue to grow because many endusers would rather have memorable domains rather than spending thousands for the .com version
clemzonguy: well many domains i bought last year for $4.95 were sold for at least 2-200 times the value
Domainut: they may lose traffic to the .com but they do not feel that this loss of traffic will effect them enough to offset the cost involved in funding the purchase of a prime .com domain. Do I agree with this, no. The .com version is the way to go. (contengent upon a decent price for the .com)
Domainut: just be patient and you will see even higher returns on your overall investment, Don’t expect it to happen to your entire portfolio, but if you see an increase of 400% from 20% of your domains, you will still be working in the green.
clemzonguy: yes i think .com values will continue to rise as well
clemzonguy: every single domain that i drop is picked back up by someone
clemzonguy: there is a special thrill about finding a domain in the drop even if it doesn’t have type-in value
clemzonguy: i would imagine that i have at least one or two 5-6 figure domain that would sell in the next 5 yrs which would make this entirely worth my time in the end.
clemzonguy: but it would be nice to develop revenue streams moreso than depend on a big sale
Domainut: Actually, I enjoy the feeling of finding an available domain after the drop more than winning a domain at auction, and seeing that it produces better than auctioned domains.
clemzonguy: i only found those results much when actually eyeballing the list and spending several hours per day
clemzonguy: overall i would say that it takes a large amount of time doing this
clemzonguy: i don’t see how people could do it unless they did it full time or worked a job from home like i do
clemzonguy: even with programs i still find myself doing a lot of work
Domainut: Dropwatch.com assists me in cutting all my research time down though. When I first started I tried to research manually, and spent 8-10 hours a day, but now I spend no more than 2 hours a day researching and add at least another $5-20 a day average per week to my portfolio revenue
clemzonguy: but doesn’t that allow others to take revenue away from you by offering dropwatch.com to the public?
clemzonguy: why give them the same tools
Domainut: Because the more competition the more my portfolio is worth, the bigger the industry grows.
clemzonguy: but you do have to admit you get first look at the information
Domainut: no, I get access to the stats at the same time as any other premier member of dropwatch.com
Domainut: and usually am too busy developing other sites to even get to look at them until late at night, hours after other premier members have seen them.
Domainut: I haven’t even browsed today’s database yet or looked at any of the daily emails of expiring domains that were sent for the day.

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 28th, 2005 at 11:42 pm and is filed under About Sidney Parfait. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.