When you’re investing in a speculative domain name, keep in mind that you could have your money on the sidelines for a long time. If you are paying registration fee, it’s not a lot of money to worry about. However, if you buy dozens or hundreds of domain names at registration fee, or if you buy a domain name for a lot of money, it could be burdensome.
This morning, I was reading an article in CNN about researchers at Florida Atlantic University who are currently in the early stages of attempting to generate power from the Gulf Stream. The project uses ocean turbines much like companies harness wind power with wind turbines, and if it’s successful, there could be many ocean turbines installed underwater throughout the world. Fellow domain investor had learned about this potential power source and registered OceanTurbines.com nearly a year ago. Smart thinking!
The only downside is that the article said “If the pilot program is successful, it could take another five to 10 years before the technology can be implemented.” In speaking with Stephen, I know he has a number of similar domain names – like SeaTurbines.com, and his company is all over the solar business. Stephen knows his names won’t be worth big bucks for a few years, but his well-capitalized company is able to hold out and wait for the value to increase.
If you are buying speculative domain names or an expensive speculative domain name, it’s important to realize that your money could be tied up in these domain names for a long time. You need to figure out whether you can afford to hold out or not. I know a lot of people own portfolios of these names, and each year it becomes harder to renew, but they do it because they’ve already figured the previous years are a sunk cost and don’t want to lose their investment.
If you are going to need the money in the short or medium term, perhaps it’s not a smart investment – even if you think it might be the next big thing. Every days something new is the “next big thing,” and you can go broke pretty easily if you are always trying to register everything related to it.
Here are some quick thoughts on this nice Sunday. I hope you enjoy the last day of your weekend! Rest up for a successful week.
I learned a great way to make money with a generic domain name by forwarding your domain’s traffic to an affiliate url of the website that may be the intended target of some of your domain name’s traffic. I don’t want to say where I learned this because I didn’t ask permission from the domain owner I saw doing this, but I’ve seen it many times and it’s fairly common although I haven’t done it yet myself.
Some of the best domain names I have ever purchased came after receiving a notice with the subject “Delivery Status Notification (Failure)” meaning that it was not received by the intended recipient. This tells me that inquiries from others went unreceived as well, and acquisition attempts probably ended there (or a phone call, which generally goes to a non-working phone number). Without having received many offers, a domain owner may be more inclined to sell his domain name to me if I can just get in touch and make a fair offer.