All the Good Names are Gone... NOT!
| Tanggal: | 13 Jun 2000 |
| Sumber: | Kevin Ham |
NamaDomain.com, With over 12.5 million domain names registered to date and over 30,000 being registered daily, it is very difficult to find a good dot com name. The price tags attached to domain names have been astounding. $3.35 million for Altavista.com, $1.03 million for Wallstreet.com and a record setting $7.5 million for Business.com. Cool.com was reportedly offered a price of $38 million just last month! It was turned down.
Why are these domain names commanding such a high price?
Firstly, domain names are very important to a company's image. With the number of businesses and people flocking to get online, they need to establish an Internet presence. The first step is to secure a name that is easy to remember, short, and marketable. Most of all, it should be one that can bring brand recognition. The reason companies are buying domain names for millions of dollars is to give that purchased name marketability and instant brand recognition. With any sale in the millions, you get endless press releases, not to mention the news on all the domain name related sites.
Secondly, it simply follows the law of supply and demand. By now, all the words in the dictionary have been registered as a dot com name. You now have to resort to combinations of words, numbers and dashes to come up with a reasonable domain name. There is a high demand and a low supply. Even with the country top level domain endings, such as dot cc and dot to, they will never measure up to the dot com ending. Also, other top level domain endings, like dot firm and dot store, are not likely to be implemented in the next couple of years.
Lastly, people are buying up domain names, speculating that in a few years, their domain names will be worth millions of dollars. Let me tell you right away that not many names will command such a price tag. However, many people are making hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars buying and selling domain names. You can see evidence of this by searching for domain names on auction sites, such as eBay.com as well as the Yahoo! and Amazon Auctions. GreatDomains has over 500,000 domain names listed to be sold and Afternic has over 100,000 names listed. Afternic has only been in the domain business for just over a year.
So how can you cash in on this hot market?
It is very similar to a hot real estate market, except the investment is substantially less. While investing in real estate may cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, investing in a good name can cost as little as ten dollars. Some webhosting companies will even pay for your domain name registration if you host with them for a year.
The problem lies in finding domain names that are available for you to register. Domain names are being purchased at a furious rate each day. People pay their two year registration fee, hoping to proclaim their Internet existence. Two years later, they have done nothing with their domain name or have given up on their website after a few months. They disregard the notice to renew their domain name. So what happens to these domain names that are not renewed? These domain names are available for anyone to register. For as little as $10 per year, you can register these expired domain names.
There can be over 200,000 domain names that expire every day. A majority of them are not worth looking at, but out of these daily dropped domain names, there are hundreds that are desirable. Some domain names available last week were freefranchises.com, shopmillenium.com, ecommercemonitor.com, commercerewards.com and affordableshops.com. Last month, pcclassified.com, commerceideas.com, ecommerceseek.com, netboomer.com, affiliateshopper.com, shopandseek.com, and freeplanet.com were available for you to register.
Anyone can search the WHOIS database for available domain names, but it is a matter of luck and time to come up with a list of hundreds of good domain names. There are more efficient ways to come up with a good list of available domain names, but we spend a significant amount of time putting these lists together and offer them for free to our newsletter subscribers.
While registering any old domain name not bring you a profit, if you know how the real estate works, you will figure out that a good domain name can go a long way and be an invaluable investment. There are still a lot of good domain names out there to register.
