Daily Poll

I read Matt Serlin’s article on CircleID discussing the future of .com pricing and think it’s worth a quick read. On occasion, domain registrars and other industry companies send out a survey asking people to share how much of an impact domain name pricing has on me/my business.

From my perspective, it has very little impact. I own around 500-600 domain names at any given time, so even if the registration and renewal fee for .com domain names increased by $1/year, it would have a negligible impact on my business. Of course I don’t want to spend an extra $500 – $750 a year on fees without getting anything additional, but it wouldn’t be all that harmful to my business all things considered. I would never want to spend more money than I should spend, nor would I want friends and colleagues to be impacted, but I am wondering how others feel about this.

I am curious how much of an impact it would have on others. Vote in the poll below and share your thoughts.

I left a corporate marketing job in November of 2007 and never looked back. I have been buying domain names since graduate school (circa 2002) though. I probably got serious about domain investing in 2006 or so. It has been pretty thrilling to build my business. Lots of ups, plenty of downs, but overall, it has been a great decision.

It would be interesting to know how long readers have been buying domain names as investments. Participate in the poll below to let us know how long you have been investing in domains.

The Winter Olympics started last week. In years past, I tuned in to some of the events but didn’t go out of my way to watch beyond some of the feature events. I know there are people who are avid viewers of the Olympic games, and I am wondering where you fall.

Today’s poll is unrelated to domain names. Are you watching the Olympics?

A few years ago, the Chinese market was on fire. “CHiPs” (Chinese premium domain names) sold for huge amounts of money. Numeric domain names appreciated even more, and people were registering somewhat nonsensical domain names (7, 8, and 9 numbers) because they speculated the China-based domain name buyers would buy them and drive the values up.

Over the last couple of years, the Chinese domain market has faltered a bit. Numeric and 3-4 letter domain names still sell for a considerable amount of money, but they remain off the high water mark set when the Chinese domain market was in its heyday.

Today’s poll question: Will the Chinese Domain Market Rebound? You are invited to vote in the poll below and are welcome to share additional thoughts in the comment section.

Marketplace.org published an interview with Jen Sale of Evergreen.com discussing domain names, domain name acquisitions, startup branding, and domain name investments. In the interview, Jen discussed what she does as a domain broker and also discussed what kinds of domain names she focuses on selling. One thing I appreciate is that she explained the difference between domain name squatting (cybersquatting) and domain investing, which I think gets a lot of people confused.

The article title is The dot-com URL is still king, and I thought I would ask in today’s poll what you think of that. Readers know what types of domain names I buy, and I am probably in a bit of an echo chamber when it comes to those investments. I am curious what you think.