Threats to your Domains

Sun Tsu in the Art of War said: “Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril. When you are ignorant of the enemy, but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal. If ignorant both of your enemy and yourself, you are certain in every battle to be in peril.”

In the weeks ahead I will write a series of articles on the threats to the world of domain investing.  These articles will be targeted toward domain experts with a comparative look at “domains” vs. “competing services”.

Status Quo threats to be covered!

  • Social Media
  • Mobile
  • Search Engines
  • New TLDs
  • New Browsers

My goal is to make you more aware of sources of traffic which compete against your domain portfolio for end-user traffic or advertisement dollars.  The better you understand your competition’s strength and weaknesses the more confident you will be in pricing your domains.  Understanding competing services gives you the bullsyes to target with the messaging about your domains. It might also open doors to some new business opportunities. Your feedback and commentary is appreciated.

Upcoming articles will cover a number of topics I am interested in talking about, but I am open to suggestions from you.  I plan to share some research I’ve done on domain valuation.  I believe there are some solid statistical indicators that reveal the potential of a domain when used in certain ways. I would love to share the concepts and get your opinions.

Speaking of research, I am working on an article soon to be released that provides a comparative overview of competing Domain Portfolio Management Solutions.  These companies provide bulk domain development with SEO friendly pages and good monetization options.  I want to thanks the several companies in this space for being very helpful with getting answers to me for this article.  These competitors are collectively confident that their technology is an improvement over PPC network performance for most domains.  So what’s my angle?  My goal is to help you to know 5-10 companies competing in this space.

There are so many more blog and business ideas are in my head than I care to put in writing at this time.  I take heart in knowing there will never be an absence of things to talk about in the world of domains.

August 17, 2011
Posted in Archive

  • Victor

    Could you share your thoughts on Domain Portfolio Management Solutions?

    I’ve been looking at and tested several portfolio systems and alternatives to parking using scripts, hosted services, WP plugins, etc.

  • Sedo had one as well, but that closed reelctny due to lack of interest.Things seem to be quite dynamic. DNForum seems to have lost a lot of momentum lately. There seems to be an increase in the number of focus groups that seem to want to hang out at different venues, and there a lot of language specific forums out there including English specific ones.It is a bit like Darwinian Evolution. Many new species, but only some of them successful. A lot of evolutionary blind alleys, which result in extinction. The problem is, knowing or rather guessing which will succeed and which will fail. If I am wrong and dot Mobi does rise to challenge dot Com, then Namepros is about to become the largest force in Forum World. If I am right and the next big thing is IDN, then those that have treated these domains as irrelevant, will themselves be seen as largely irrelevant.TRAFFICS itself would be seen as niche convention for an investor group that lost touch will real market developments and direction, and would be superseded by the more dynamic that managed to remain in touch. It will be interesting to see how the competition between TRAFFICS, Round Table and Domainfest develops over the next couple of years.

  • Back around the late 90 s and thru the very early 00 s (circa about 1998 thru 2001 from waht I relacl) by far the 2 most important chats were Great Domains and Afternic (the old Afternic).I spent hundreds of hrs in both chats. They were extremely active 7 days/week, especially evenings from about 7 to 10. Often I had both chats running on my PC side by side. I clearly relacl many days where as many as 90 were chatting at GD and 60 at Afternic, at the same time! That’s about 150 plus in the 2 chats at the same times many evenings.That was the heyday of domain chatting and ever since then it has been sharply downhill since the domain forums such as DNF have taken over (for some odd reason chat is not too popular at forums). Anyone know why?I sadly relacl the day the corporate owners suddenly and without notice shut them both down. That also marked the beginning of the big decline in values for both of the firms. What was wrong with their thinking in shutting them down anyway? How stupid was that!***FS*** Hugely stupid, it was the pollen that attracted the bees.

  • Frank I first used namewinner.com on Nov 19 2001 a few days after you told me about it.Back then nbdooy would tell you anything, so I guess I owe you one. Anyway the forum was pretty cool mainly because people weren’t trying to sell junky domains. For example I remember STUFF was telling everyone how easy it was to sleep with super models in Finland or Norway. Mainly because all the girls there look like super models and will sleep with you after a beer or two.I think anyone who is anyone in the domain industry visited the namewinner forum at one time or another. They took it down shortly after DNforum opened. Probably because people were using the forum to gripe about all their billing and aution problems with namewinner. You might remember that their system used to crash during auctions.It was also the first place I saw serious discussion about issues such as WLS.

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