It irks me sometimes when I hear people refer to domain investors as cybersquatters or other nasty insults. The general impression about what we do seems to all negative, and people assume we monetize trademark domain names, sit on valuable domain names to hold them hostage, and we do other things that are blights on society.

Some of this may be true for some people, but the sad thing is that this behavior is not limited to domain investors. I think a lot of this reputation comes from regular people who happen to own domain names.

Every year during the election season, many political campaigns turn nasty. This happens at every single level of politics – from small local alderman elections to big national campaigns. Inevitably, some dumb politicians (or their lackeys) thinks it’s brilliant to register the domain name (or something similar) with an opponent’s name in it.

They may only be doing it for political gain, but somehow this cyberpirating makes domain investors look bad. Sure, many politicians have slimy reputations themselves, but it doesn’t seem fair that these people get put into the same bucket as domain investors, making us look bad in the process.

Let’s now discuss the perception that domain investors horde good domain names and hold them hostage when some other parties could be using them better. First off, this is complete and utter horse manure. Nobody with any intelligence would say this about someone with undeveloped prime real estate or beachfront property.

What irks me about this perception is that I’ve  tried to buy plenty of domain names from people who registered them 10+ years ago and still haven’t done anything with them. They aren’t domain investors, and many of them aren’t even monetizing these names.

When I make an offer I think is decent, I often get crazy price quotes in reply. Are these people holding domain names hostage? NO! They are capitalists with similar goals as me.

I do realize that there are domain investors who monetize trademark domain names, do nasty things with sensitive domain names, and do hold some domain names hostage. However, I believe that given many circumstances, almost everyone would do the exact same thing, whether they were identifying themselves as domain investors or not.

It’s been a really great day today, and I want to share a bit about why it’s been so good… BTW, it has nothing to do with St. Patty’s Day, although I plan to celebrate later on tonight.

– While writing this morning’s article, I tried to find my friend’s obituary. Sadly, I not only didn’t find his, but I did find his mom’s, who passed away last year. Using information in that obit, I was able to connect with my friend’s sister who lives in Austin, and we had a nice chat over Facebook this morning. First time we ever connected, and I hope it was able to make her feel good.

– The auction for 2 hours of private domain consulting ended today, and the high bid was $700, all of which will be donated to Ronald McDonald House by the bidder. This surpassed my expectations, and I was excited when that bid was made. In addition, over $300 was donated to my RMH fundraising page today… thank you. Almost there!

– This morning I finalized a deal I’ve been working on since December. I was able to buy BikeTours.com, which goes along with a name I already own – BikeTour.com. The reason it was difficult was that the owner had his registrant email @BikeTours.com, which had no hosting, so the email bounced. Since the owner had semi-retired and was spending his time traveling, I had to do quite a bit of research to track him down. Since he has limited Internet access and had never used Escrow.com before, it took a long time to close the deal. I now have the name in my possession. It always feels good to close a deal.

– I have two advertising deals in the works on a couple of different websites, and I had three paid listings for another website today. These might be small deals in the whole scheme of things, but it shows that the sites are working and people want to be a part of them. It’s almost as exciting to get a new sign up as it is to close a big domain deal.

Hope you guys are having a good day today.

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!