Although I don’t always agree with Francois’ industry viewpoints, I think he started a great website with Domaining.com. The site makes it very easy to see when domain blogs/news outlets have updated, and it’s very easy to navigate to those sources. I have a few industry resources in my RSS feeder, but Domaining.com makes it much easier for me to get domain industry news quickly from sources that I don’t necessarily read daily.   Thank you to Francois!

In the financial trading world, there is a term called good news/bad action, which means that good news causes a bad action for the price or market. An example of good news/bad action would be the orange crop report scene in the movie “Trading Places,” starring Eddie Murphy and Dan Ackroyd. With the crop report expected to be bad due to the weather, the price of orange commodity futures rise tremendously. Once the report is released, and the crop damage is less than expected, the good news causes the price of futures to rocket down.
The domain world can also offer a similar phenomenon. Yesterday in Britain’s Guardian, a positive domain article was published, called “Trade in Web Names Worth Millions.” The article cited the story of domain investor Neil Stanley, former banker at Goldman Sachs, and now owner of the domain names bridalfashion.co.uk, onlinecareers.co.uk, schoolguide.co.uk, sendingflowers.co.uk and impotency.co.uk. The crux of the article was the amount of money Stanley and other domain investors earn from parked domain names, and the relatively little work that is needed to profit in this manner.
From my viewpoint, the article’s purpose was to tell people the good news about how easy it is to make money by owning domain names, and it would seem to be good press for domain investors. The idea is that savvy “dotcom entrepreneurs” earn plenty of money because of the clicks of others, and if the dotcom entrepreneurs want to cash out, domain names are like liquid gold and can be sold for hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.
The bad action from this and other similar articles that make domain investing seem easy, is that domain investors will become even more of a target. People want our domain names and will do what it takes to get them. Scammers will continue to pop-up, attempting to steal or sell stolen domain names. Laws will continue to be proposed in an attempt to take our domain names. Now is the time need to support the Internet Commerce Association more than ever.
Our industry isn’t a get rich quick scheme. The people making good money with pay per click advertising on great generic domain names either spent a considerable amount of money acquiring them, spent countless hours in front of their computer screens researching domain names, or went out on a limb and invested in domain names when few even knew what domain names were. While a domain name may make a mint in PPC advertising, buying these domain names wasn’t and still isn’t a simple task. I love the domain industry, but there isn’t any truth to the stereotype that this is an easy business.
The really good news is that if you do your research, you will be rewarded.

Congratulations to Clark Landry and his team at Hecta Media on their recent portfolio acquisition. According to a news release on Forbes this morning, publicly traded Hecta Media (AIM Exchange) purchased a portfolio consisting of approximately 60,000 domain names for $1,450,000. They also retain the option to purchase two additional portfolios for $1,900,000. According to the release, the company expects revenues of $750,000 annually, which is important because the renewal fees will be over $400,000 per year (assuming they are all .com names). Based on my back of the napkin calculations, this is just over a 4 year revenue multiple.
I had the chance to meet with Clark Landry, CEO of Hecta Media, several months ago in New York, and he is a dynamic person, with an entrepreneurial spirit. When we were initially speaking, I had thought most large portfolios for sale with good names were significantly more expensive than what Hecta was able to pay for it. My advice to Clark would be to get pare down the portfolio of non-producing, poor names to save on the renewal fees. Sometimes you have but a bucket of rocks to find some gems.

Received this email from Mike Mann this afternoon:

“First off I have never done domain tasting, nor did BuyDomains.com when I managed it, and our new domain trading and building platform, DomainMarket.com, doesn’t either. When we and others first began thinking about it around 5 years ago it was bad protocol at best, and really considered a Denial of Service (DoS) attack against the Netsol/Verisign registry system since robots slam the systems to buy thousands of name at once; so it was against NSI/VRSN rules and possibly illegal too.
However once Verisign realized how many domains would ultimately be registered to their benefit (eventhough I imagine 99% of the inventory is never paid for and is re-deleted back to the unregistered pool of potential new domains) they decided domain tasting for 5 days to measure the PPC traffic and value and buy the statistical gems was OK.
However domain tasting is indiscriminate and buyers end up having their robots purchase other peoples’ clear trademarks, as well as a lot of lewdly suggestive names, or names that once resolved to questionable content. So again its nothing Id want my team to take part in.
In the past I thought nobody should do it. Today I think it should actually be done by others carefully for one simple reason: It’s good for the economy. People are typing in and clicking on legacy domain links for expired domains, and if they get a 404 error it’s a waste of time, energy and bandwidth – and nobody gets paid, however if it lands on a tasting speculators PPC page or monetizable site then someone is getting paid, and they can pay their employees, taxes, and tips at the local restaurant, etc. So domain tasting while lame in most respects is still good for the economy.
I’ve rethought this subject and I think it’s good for others as long as they don’t buy trademarks or domains that they deem offensive. Outside of moral considerations they need to be concerned about being sued or harassed somehow, which could have negative financial consequences, balanced by the value of the trickle down economics accidentally applied to attorneys and their caddies.
Thats all, LMK what you think. Cheers“