Thursday, November 17, 2005
There will be a story in the November issue of Business 2.0 (out on the 28th) titled "Master$ Of Their Domain$" and the slug line "Forget condos and strip malls. Domain names, the real estate of the Web, have been delivering far greater returns. How some of the savviest speculators on the Net are making millions from their URL portfolios."
Should make interesting reading. Ron from our industry trade publication "DNjournal.com" had this to say about the upcoming article "I think it will draw a tremendous amount of attention from investors because it talks about this previously unknown industry where tens of millions of dollars are changing hands every year. The writer (Paul Sloan) details how the whole PPC system works (complete with a diagram) that makes it very easy for non-domainers to grasp. A lot of mainstream business people will be slapping their foreheads when this comes out, going "how did we miss this!"
I think we haven't seen much in the way of covergae of this industry from the main investment publications for a couple of reasons. First, the domainers make their living thru advertising that might otherwise go to those same publications, so why would they want to draw attention to a competitor? Second, the investment industry has yet to slap these new types of investment into packages that they can then resell to the general investing public thru a hedgefund or some other traditional vehicle. With public companies now spending hundreds of $millions on domain portfolios and the introduction of venture capital firms, this could all change very quickly.