I think many people within the domain industry (and outside of it) were taken aback when Paul Sloan reported that Mike Mann hand registered nearly 15,000 domain names in a 24 hour span in 2012. If you haven't read the article from Cnet, take a moment to read it and learn more about Mike and his background.

Since the publication of that article, I have been curious about how Mike's investments have paid off. Registering 15,000 domain names would cost approximately $120,000 annually with renewal fees about the same each year (assuming an $8 cost). In February of last year, I asked Mike about whether he could share his ROI for these domain names, and he told me he didn't have that information.

In a tweet this afternoon, Mike reported on the sale of one of the domain names he registered during that registration binge in 2012: (more…) → Read More

I had a Twitter conversation with George Kirikos about ICOs in the domain business last week. He mentioned that "a domain drop catcher is doing an ICO for domain auctions." It seems that ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings) have been very popular this year, although my knowledge about them is very limited. For those who have the same amount of knowledge about ICOs as I have, TechCrunch has a good article, WTF is an ICO, explaining the utility behind them.

One thing I wondered about was whether an owner of a high value domain name could do an ICO to fund the development of a business on that domain name. Since ICOs seem to be done to fund businesses, it would seem plausible that domain investors would have an interest in this space to get business funding for their idea. I am going to speculate here, but in my opinion, there are going to be some ICOs in 2018 to fund the development of domain names.

From my perspective, only a few domain investors I know (more…) → Read More

We have all heard about the devastation in the Greater Houston, Texas area from Hurricane Harvey. Over the next days and weeks as the media focus begins to shift to helping people from Houston begin to recover from the disaster, I think we are going to hear about various scams and schemes that try to take advantage of the vulnerable as well as the generous.

Unfortunately, domain names are often the gateway to these scams. Some people register disaster related domain names to either sell them to others and some people also register disaster related domain names to try and scam others. PBS already published an article that mentioned domain names related to Hurricane Harvey being registered:

"On Wednesday, the government-funded Multi-State Information Sharing & Analysis Center reported more than 500 domain names associated with Harvey had been registered over the preceding week. The majority of those names, the center reported, used words associated with philanthropy and aid, including “help,” ”relief,” ”donate” and → Read More

The domain name business is a specialized field, and there aren't a whole lot of qualified people who are able to offer expert domain name insight and advice. As a result, I think domain consultants can earn hundreds of dollars an hour for consulting fees.

Domain consultants can be engaged for a variety of tasks by many different types of companies. I want to share some thoughts on how a domain consultant can be engaged for businesses of different sizes and in different fields.

Large companies (Fortune 500) that don't have a Domain Name Manager on staff can hire a domain consultant to work with the IT department on the following tasks:

• Create a domain name acquisition strategy to ensure domain names are acquired before a product or service launch.


• Establish a protocol to keep domain names secure and renewed,


• Draft an RFP process to hire a domain name broker to acquire or divest domain names.


• Review domain name portfolio to ensure the domain names are being used optimally.

Cover is a free app that tracks insurance rates and allows people to "cover" (aka get coverage for) items like cars, homes, pets, jewelry and electronics after taking a photo of the item using their phone. Cover uses CoverInsurance.com for its website, although the company has also been using UseCover.com to forward to CoverInsurance.com. Smartly, it looks like the company secured the Cover.com domain name.

This morning, I noticed a Whois change on Cover.com. The domain name was previously owned by Digimedia, and it is now privately registered. When I visited Cover.com, it forwarded me to CoverInsurance.com. Because Digimedia doesn't generally comment about its deals, I am not certain if the insurance app acquired the domain name, and if the company did, I couldn't speculate about how much the domain name cost with any certainty. I could see this domain name selling for mid six figures though.

Cover was founded in 2014, and it looks like the app is (more…) → Read More

Someone posed an interesting question to me, which I thought I would pose to readers. Is it ethical to price a domain name based on who is inquiring about purchasing a domain name rather than based on the factors associated with the particular domain name?

Essentially, the person was questioning whether it was ethical to give one person a price of $250,000 for a particular domain name and a price of $25,000 to someone else when the domain owner is able to ascertain that the first person is a marketing executive at a Fortune 500 company and the second person is a small business owner.

I try to be consistent when pricing my own domain names. The prices I quote tend to be expensive, but that is due to the inherent nature of domain names being one of a kind Internet real estate (more…) → Read More