The MediaWizard’s Blog | mwzd.com

There are quite a few approaches to domains and domaining that domainers take. Its like the stock market or real estate market to a certain extent, everyone has their own strategy and most of them pay well for their proponents. I’ve pretty much seen most of the types and will try and enumerate them to enable you to follow what you’d rather be doing.

The Investor
These are the sharpest of them all. Buy good quality when prices are low, hold long term, sell high. These guys hold onto assets, maybe even develop them, ensure that they’re hot and in demand when the market is totally ripe, then sell them. The advantages of emulating this type is that you can afford to sell 1% of your portfolio each year and still manage to pull in the major bucks. The downside is renewals, unless your portfolio generates enough revenue, this cost needs to be factored in. People like Frank Schilling, Rick Schwartz, Sahar Sarid, Adam Dicker, Michael Goldman and probably most of the other big ticket guys will be found in this group.

The Flipper
These guys live to make a fast buck and sometimes the ‘buck’ can be a hundred thousand dollars or more on great buys. They know exactly which domain they can sell and to whom and for how much. If they can buy domains that they can sell immediately (1hr to 3 months) for higher valuation, they’re very liable to take the deal. This kind can be equated to the floor traders of yore. They’re fast, nimble and never hold large portfolios, in fact some only have the one domain they want to sell, right now, before moving on the next big deal. There is a lot of money to be made this way too, however its short term, here and now. So if you don’t sell, you don’t churn. I’ve seen some huge success stories in this lot too, Derek Giordano and Reece Berg are top of the mind here.

The Developer
Theres one more breed of domainer who makes money by doing something with their properties, hand regs, niche domains and the type. They take the domain, develop it, add content, do seo, market it and voila, eventually these low value domains become decent value properties. So $20 on a domain + $500 developing could easily lead to a sale, a few months down the line, in the $5000 range. Guys who do this have substantial skills in development, seo and promotion, without which this is just not possible. You could outsource development but then that could also kill your profit margins here. Guys who do this with some success include Adrian Allen and Lord Brar.

The Builder
A lot of people build websites on domains for their own selves. They are not looking to sell the sites or even would even with good offers, simply because the sites normally create more opportunities than can be equated into the bottomline as credit. These type of domainers are actually a major credit and can be found among all the types listed above. Top names that come to mind include Justin Allen and Tan Tran.

The Monetizer
These guys are only interested in the traffic revenues. They’re happiest buying domains that get traffic and make money via parking or similar. In fact some of the biggest deals in the past have included portfolios of well known monetizers. Now of course this particular breed has been overrun by big time players with hundreds of millions of dollars invested and go under the guise of ‘media companies’. This is probably the holy grail of domaining, whats better than pointing a domain to an automatic page and let clicks get you revenues? Kevin Ham, Yun Ye, NameMedia, DemandMedia and others fit into this group, as they do elsewhere but a vast majority of their revenues probably come from this.

The Broker
Usually unsung, rarely known and generally dealing on the QT are the domain brokers. These guys have a huge network of contacts and know whats moving, how and when. I don’t really have much experience with these type of people but Rick Latona is instant recall.

The Provider
A lot of domainers have some skill which is monetize-able and fairly useful for the non-developers. This can be writing, design, hosting or a wide variety of web development and promotion activities. I know this is not exactly domaining but I know enough people who do this to make money for domains. Popular people include Peter Mark and Leland Fiegel.

There are a few more kinds but I’d rather not go there right now, but if you’re interested in knowing drop me a comment and i may put them up in a different post.

This of course is by no means a complete list of the type of domainers out there. I hope that people whose names have been mentioned do not take umbrage at being categorized, I’m just trying to get a recall factor in by name dropping.

I’m sure all of them would have certain activities in other categories. I can see myself in about 3 too.

A new bill currently seeking passage in the US senate is trying to surreptitiously change the face of the domain industry and extend American ‘ownership’ on the web. You and me stand to lose any domain we own, developed, undeveloped, tm-ed, non-tm-ed, geo and generic… I kid you not.

Be prepared to protect or lose your domain names, generics or any others, specially if they’re .com or .net as those are controlled by Verisign. The bill goes way beyond its brief… if it becomes law, a lot of small business will be hurt and badly.

As I understand it… if you own a developed domain with an international tm, yet an American company manages to get a tm or even uses the term as a ‘mark’… it can file a civil suit against you for the domain name - bypassing udrp and wipo completely.

Straight for the jugular… backed by the rich daddies at Cadna.org - A straight attempt at ‘reverse domain hijacking’ by the big companies themselves, trying to make a buck of the work of small investors and entrepreneurs worldwide.

Specially when you consider the title of the bill and then read the fine print.

Really hope that US representatives read before they vote, this could erode almost $10 billion of wealth from individuals and companies, mostly in the US. Not to mention huge losses of business for the pillars of the internet, registrars, developers, ad companies, service providers and even ISPs.

Foreign domainers / registrars are not exempt in the case of the two tlds under threat - .com and .net for the simple reason that the registry Verisign is a US corporation subject to US laws.

What can you do to fight it?

Join the ICA

Join the discussion at DNForum

Join the discussion at NamePros

Digg the article

Make people aware - We need lots of people to send letters to organizations, grassroots movements, and media making them aware of this issue. If we can get more organizations to pick up the fight the better chance we have of getting this bill revised or shot down entirely. (by NameCharger)

Here’s the meat of the story -

Another factor would be whether the person had offered to sell the domain name to any third party “without having used…the domain name in the bona fide offering of goods and services”, a provision that appears to be aimed directly at “parked” websites consisting solely of advertising links.

Again, despite the bill’s title, none of these trademark-related provisions contain any requirement that the domain name and website had actually been utilized to facilitate a criminal “phishing” scheme. They address essentially the same harms for which the UDRP and ACPA already provide remedies, but in a more expansive manner with the registrant at greater legal disadvantage and subject to harsher penalties.

In cases filed by the FTC, FCC, and state officials, cease and desist orders and injunctions could be obtained without any requirement to allege, much less prove, that the domain name registrant had actual or implied knowledge of likely misleading effect.

For those of you who’d rather do their own research -

Here’s the bill

And the ICA reaction

And an interesting article by dnw on the ramifications (read the comments too)

Here’s what C|Net has to say about it

And one more article

As the domaining world wakes up to the phenomenon, we have more reactions -

By John Levine at CircleID

TheDomains article explains with Enom’s ‘cuba’ domains example

Jaikumar Vijayan for ComputerWorld

The kind of letters you’d be receiving if this became law

A sad day for the internet if this gets passed as it is. Lets hope and pray not