A Biker's Domain

Behind a lot of it.

I was reading the news this morning as I always do cause I have alerts set up and delivered to my email box throughout the day. (self-imposed torture) It's incredible how so many things that are just wrong are going on today at the hands of profiteers. Profiteers being way too nice of a term for them, these acts not only just hurt the American people, it kills them. Not to mention so many others around the world. These scondrels are so blantant about it all as well, and have so many that voted for them fooled into thinking they represent them. I read about Halliburton (Cheney's company) subsidiaries double billing for soldiers meals in Iraq or charging $100 per bag of laundry. In addition to $Billions in Iraq contracts handed to them from Bush, they now will be profiting hugely from no bid contracts in the Katrina recovery. The new bankruptcy law (republican sponsored) that takes affect in October will no doubt crush the Katrina victins even further if that's possible. I have a Niece and a Nephew who are in the military and were sent to Louisiana shortly after Katrina and reported back that they were given orders to NOT take action to help. At least they're not in Iraq right now getting killed to support Bush's war profiteers. New Jersey is chasing down gas stations that go against the law and sell regular gas marked as premium and raise their prices 4 or 5 times during the same day. Ton's of bad stuff.

That led me to think of regging another domain (sheesh!) to maybe serve as a blog to just dump every article documenting whats wrong with stuff. It's these whims that drive me nuts (or entertain if I'm in a good mood to start). Anyway, I looked up WhatsWrong.com and of course I'm too late and it was regged 5 years ago in December, 2000. Going for a backup, I also tried JustWrong.com and that one was regged a year earlier in November, 1999. There was some recurring realization that came from this exercise though. Domains that end in .com and have meaning were all taken several years ago, so get on with development and quit wasting time checking whois records.

I came across a post in the "Websites for Sale" thread on DNforum where a fellow Domainer has his www.Cannabis.com website posted looking for offers. It's listed on Ebay as well now. He has current offers of over $250k and is looking for $500k+. Now that's a nice piece of change. He states that the site averages about 7500 visitors per day and grosses between $7k and $10k per month. Now if that's correct (he provides stats pages) then owning and running just that one site could be a very profitable job/career/pasttime. Much of the value is in the Domain of course as some success could be expected of someone using the same name for type-in url bar traffic and covering the same or similar topics that are on the site for sale here, or on several other sites covering marijuana. The content appears to include a VB forum in large part covering the various topics. How tough would it be to create a new website that covers the same theme and maybe make a couple $k after a while? Not that I have the background or intimate knowledge of the subject. I do own a Domain that would seem to have some potential for such a site though that I picked up in a drop a couple years back. It's www.MarijuanaForum.com and as you can see, I haven't done anything with it to date. With some hosting, a VB forum license (around $100 a year), some thought and research, and some time spent at promotion it might come to be. $2k a month in revenues might make that site worth around $75K me thinks. I wonder if my son would have an interest?

Lips courtesy of a forum friend "Prosperous"




Why I think the .US ccTLD Domain will drive the next frontier for the Internet.

I don't receive or read any newspapers. I check them online. I don't get the local news via my satellite tv connection. I check the local news online. The main hardware store is a round trip 1 hour drive, and I don't want to spend the $ on gas to find out they don't have what I wanted. I'd rather check out their inventory online. I don't have much belief in the future for the yellow pages directory and their high cost ads that provide little information. Nor do I believe in the status quo for the other media (TV and Radio) and their earning trends bear that out. (Can you say XM radio?) The Internet is eating their lunch a snack bar at a time. Google didn't get into local search just for the hype. Local search IS minimal now. but it won't BE minimal. A $ spent on a local TV commercial NOW does give small business pwners more bang for the buck now, but it WON"T in the future. That move forward is a big deal for the NET and what people do now to find information locally will not be the same thing they do in the future. The .US extension is afterall best used as a geographical qualifier. I see Rapid-City.US/hardware as having a lot of potential as an address.. I'm telling you these gas engines will be the new thing. They have that horse of yours beat hands down, and I'm telling you that you WILL change your mind along with everone else. The .US domain extension can be that engine.

I've cleaned up my desk -- see pic -- and it's time to get focused. I have way too many domains and I definately should take a different action than I have to date in dealing with names to let go. My routine was to just wait till the expiration date or just after and make a decision whether to drop the domains or renew. Now with the latest moves by many registrars to cut back the grace periods (the time afforded registrants after the expiration of a domain to renew) from the lofty levels of 42 days in the past, now down to 18 days by GoDaddy and others, I'm being pushed to look at this stuff earlier if I don't want to lose them. I hear Domainsite and other registrars that participated in the free info promo last year are sending the delete button on the expiration date now and providing NO grace period at all. Even worse, the rumor is that Enom is hitting the delete button BEFORE the domains expire and Netsol is marking ALL domain extensions as "expired" a day in advance of when they actually expire. The reason for a lot of this is the cherry picking of names by the registrars from their own customer's accounts and the sale at auction at higher amounts. Nothing done about it by ICANN or the registries as they don't appear to care about the registrants who are feeding this whole thing, but rather consider the registrar as their customer.

Besides, I should be running in advance of expirations to identify possible sales, so I could make a buck to help cover renewals. Kills me when I see names I let go getting picked up in the auctions at Snapnames etc. Like I said, I need to get focused anyways. So lining up all my names according to expiration date and selecting keepers that more fit my development plans will be the goal.

We'll see how it goes today.

My feeling is that the demand for the .US country code top level domain (ccTLD) and resulting price increase will come from a few different factions. *The continual rise in .com values will be reflected in prices paid by the cheap seats crowd for alternatives. Kindof a high tide lifts all ships thing. *Foreign corporations (all sizes) will increase their use of the .us extension enabling them to "buy" their way in cheaply to hopefully some level of acceptance during the coming push for isolationism by Americans. Globalism will continue of course, but Americans have a bad taste LEFT over from the Iraq/Afghanistan conflicts etc.*Increasing development focus and shift from drop catching by domainers, and an overall increase in development by the public.*Local search will have a big impact on small business website development. Less url-bar type-ins and increased search savvy techniques by the masses. The local hair salon cannot afford the com domain but would settle for the .us address, creating a ground up or grass roots movement.As for current .us domain sales levels, I would suggest that we not be so quick to judge a market based on "reported" sales to date. As we've seen lately in disclosures by Deal Jam and others in the com arena, there are also unreported .US sales that would turn a few heads. Four figure .us sales were going on right after the introduction years ago now and I know of quite a few five figure sales following those. There are reasons for non-disclosure including running silent when you're on the buy side. Sometimes the news gets out. A personal .us purchase by one of my partners recently was rumored bid to mid 5 figures before being pulled from an ebay auction. He bot Business.us and I'm sure Duke (DNjournal.com) will have some notes on that one this week. Doc

Local search -- Part Two


Like I said, search will go local. That means even higher demand for website addresses (Domains) for the small businesses in town that didn't think they could benefit from or need a website. As the population becomes more tech savvy, (meaning the old computer avoiders convert or die off) I think it will become common place to use search to research purchases from local vendors. I mean have you checked out the gas prices lately? It's a 1/2 hour drive (and the gas cost) for me each way to hit the "local" music store just to find out that they didn't have that C/D that my son wanted anyway. Would have been nice to go online to that shop, punched in the Title and not wasted the trip.

The BIG guys (Google, Yahoo, Amazon etc.) see this stuff and are pouring tons of money into local search and new methods of bringing the World Wide Web to your town. The picture at the top of this article was from the A9.com website http://maps.a9.com/?mapMode=m&mapBvr=&ypLoc=Boston%2C+MA&mapFrom=&mapTo= where they'll even show you a street level image of the local shop in some areas. They're expanding too.

In addition to the demand of Domains from local business, there will be the continuing demand for Domains that actually include the name of your town. That's due to the idea that someone who is transferring to your town, may start his/her search by typing in the name of the town in the search bar, and then using the links on one of the sites to view that house for sale next door to you. Or, with the public becoming more savvy on search, he/she might type in something such as "Homes for Sale in Minneapolis MN" and bring up results including a website address such as http://www.minneapolis-minnesota.us/ Of course the purchasing of these location Domains already started a couple years ago, and you'd be hard pressed to find one available now at the cost of a new reg fee. There are a small number for sale to speculators or end users now in the secondary markets though that appear to be at reasonable prices. For the time being anyway.

Pic: My window on the world and lunch at Howard Johnson's NY Times Square
from: A9.com




Local search Part 1 -- Where's the menu?

I really believe that a good part of the future for search and the advertising revenues will come from small businesses. That means 'Local" search, like you looking up the phone number for the pizza place 6 blocks away, or going online to check out their menu again for the millionth time because it's not on the fridge where it's suppose to be. Why use that dumb yellow book that is so bulky and the ads hard to read? They don't have the menu in there anyway. Instead, you can go online, type in your own address or zipcode, and the keyword "pizza" and boom there you have every pizza joint within a selected distance from where you are sitting right now. Not only do you have an address listing with a phone number, you have a map pointing out their location, directions on how to get there if you forgot, and in a number of locations you can click on a Satellite image and see the frickin place right there. Still more, you can zoom in and see the delivery guy's truck parked outside. That's all fun, but you wanted the menu. That means that you'd have to go to the trouble of clicking the link to the Pizza shop itself right on the screen there. Someday soon I'm sure you won't even have to bother calling them. You'll just select what you want there on the screen, and tell them to deliver it and hurry up.