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

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 “victims.””

Sadly, my bet is that this is just the start of domain name registrations like these, and many more domain names related to the storm and recovery will be registered – some by people whose intentions are bad. Many will be bought by people with

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.

Small to medium sized business (SMB) can work with a domain consultant on the following tasks: