General Domain Information

We all have crappy domain names in our portfolio. Maybe we were a bit buzzed when we registered them, had spelling problems, or there were other reasons for registering these crappy domain names.  Well, now’s your chance to make $50 from your most terrible .com domain name.

Here’s how it will work:

• Everyone is entitled to submit just one horrible .com domain name they own
• Submitted domain names must have been registered prior to February 1, 2011
• On Friday morning (3/4), I will pick out the 5 worst domain names (in my opinion) and set up a poll
• People can vote in the poll, which will close on Sunday night at around 10pm (one vote per IP)
• I will then pay $50 via Paypal for the worst domain name, as voted by blog readers, and the winner will push the domain name to me.

So, look through your domain portfolios and select your absolute worst .com domain name and post it in the comment section (No trademark infringing names). If you post more than one bad domain name, you will be disqualified because I don’t want to have to sift through your bad names and pick the worst one!

When was the last time you made $50 from your crappiest domain name?

If you have any questions, post them here.

I know Theo’s post on DomainGang this afternoon was probably made tongue in cheek, but I wanted to touch on the topic of “regurgitated” domain news since the DG article didn’t allow comments.

I can commiserate with Theo, because I know it can be  aggravating  to read an article on another website after writing an article on a similar topic, especially if it isn’t a “hot” topic and the author didn’t link back to the source. As a blogger, I often put a considerable amount of effort into researching and writing articles, and it can be annoying to see a similar article, especially if there are more comments on it than my original post!

That being said, I must say that I don’t spend a lot of time reading other blogs and websites. I check in on Domaining.com frequently, but I don’t have a lot of time to read other sites. I get Google News alerts related to domain names and companies in the industry, and if I see a news story covering domain names, I may write my analysis of it.  Similarly, I use the same sites as others, so if there’s a breaking news story that will impact my business, I will probably write my take on it.

In addition to Theo, I, too, wrote about Godaddy not providing Whois lookups on DomainTools. I was on vacation when Theo wrote his article and didn’t see it until today, and I saw Mark Fulton’s article just after I had written my article. I had it set to publish very soon after Mark’s, but I pushed mine back a couple of days because it wasn’t a breaking news story but was interesting enough to cover (and I didn’t want to purge an article I spent time writing). I also felt it was appropriate to publish because I wrote about a different aspect of the article, discussing the fact that Godaddy is essentially monetizing the Whois results pages.

Similar to the regular news world, there will always be more than one news outlet that finds a topic interesting to cover and to discuss. In my opinion, it’s a good thing to have multiple articles with various opinions about a similar topic…

except if I wrote about it first!