I-Sales Digest
"Data -> Information -> Knowledge -> Wisdom"
Published by: AudetteMedia www.audettemedia.com
Moderated by: John Audette ja@audettemedia.com
Monday, June 26, 2000 Digest # 1114
"Domain Hijacking?"
~ Rod Aries
From: Rod Aries <rod@innetwetrust.com>
--> TOPIC: DOMAIN HIJACKING?
I would like to comment on the topic of Domain Hijacking from the
perspective of someone who owns a few domain names.
We sorta' fell into the domain name business. Early in 1999, our internet marketing company <www.HowToInternet.com> owned about 500
domains that we had tweaked for clients. We found ourselves getting many requests to buy those domains. So we started another company
<www.InNetWeTrust.com> to solely buy and sell domains. We now own
over 6,000 domains and we buy 200-500 additional domains every month.
When you further consider that great/good names are gone and the remaining 'best available' names are almost taken immediately, it is
not a surprise that some people think that they had their domain name stolen.
If you look at the numbers below you will see there is quite a bit
of competition for domain names.
According to NetworkSolutions, 5 million domains were registered in
Q1 of this year. A quick bit of math reveals that:
- * 1,667,000 domain names are registered a month
- * 55,500 domain names are registered a day
- * 2,300 domain names are registered an hour
In the time it may take to read this posting, about a minute, 38 domain names will be registered; possibly one that may have been of
interest to you.
Here is an example: Someone new to the domain world has a home loan
company. They start looking for loan.com, loans.com, homeloan.com,
homeloans.com, ehomeloan.com etc and pretty much find out all these names are taken. They may even become a bit grumpy that someone
else has 'their name.' (A quick look at loan.com shows they took that name in 1994... and loans.com just sold for $3M)
A bit more research for then number of domain names that currently
have the phrase 'homeloan' with the domain names shows 4,488 domains
already taken.
Now assume someone must have a domain with 'homeloan' in it. They
finally find an available name that is at least passable and go to discuss it with their partners. They come back to buy it, and poof,
it is gone. Guess what? There are lot of other companies out there searching for home loan domains as well and they are scouring the
available list.
Furthermore, we run proprietary domain name checking software every
night across 8 computers, checking 50,000-200,000 domain names a night, to find the last few bits of gold left in the cracks. Last
month we compiled a list of about 1,400 available domains that warranted possibly buying. We bought about 300 domains, the rest we
didn't buy. I ran that list last night, and found about 30% of those names we passed on are now taken... in just the space of a few
weeks. I guess I should of bought a few more than I originally did...
The moral of the story... if it is a good name, take it on the spot.
At your service,
Rod Aries
http://www.innetwetrust.com
Business and functional domain names for sale.
Back to Tips Page
|
