Generic Domain Names

Rick Schwartz has been discussing the requirements to be eligible to participate in his new JointVentures.com venture. When you look at them as a unit, it’s essentially category defining .com domain names that are eligible.

Here are the requirements that Rick listed:

• Must be a dot com.
• Must clearly state & define the product or service being sold.
• Must be easy to pronounce & therefore pass the radio test.
• Must not be longer than necessary, the shorter the better.
• Must be about a product or service that is in demand & being searched for.
• Must be easy to remember, in fact it must be a no brainer to remember.
• Must be a domain a business could be built on.

I don’t know whether some people don’t understand what a “category defining” domain name is, or if they are hoping for the best when they submit them, but I am wondering what category defining .com domain names you own. If you own any and they are for sale, I welcome you to mention that, too.

In case you’re wondering, here are a few of the category defining domain names my company owns right now: ContactManagement.com, BrandManagement.com, EventPlanner.com, HomeStorage.com, and DogWalker.com.

There’s an audio interview with accompanying article currently on BBC News with David Roche, the President of Hotels.com Worldwide. According to Mr. Roche, the Hotels.com domain name was originally acquired for around $11 million in 2001.

From the article:

“Speaking to Today business presenter Simon Jack, the entrepreneur explained how the company took control of the market using the internet.

In 2001 the company purchased the name Hotels.com for around $11m and at the time this was thought to be “a crazy sum of money”.

“Now we look back we look back and think, what a bargain,” he added.

When you listen to the audio interview, it seems like Mr. Roche couldn’t recall the exact price, but the $11 million region is the approximate price that he remembered.

Of course, Hotels.com was acquired many years ago for $1.1 billion.  Clearly, the $11 million acquisition was a good decision for the company.  I often use the Hotels.com story to potential buyers of my domain names as evidence for how an exact match domain name (EMD) can also be used by a company as a standalone brand.

Should this domain name sale be added to various top ten domain sales charts, including the one maintained by Domaining.com, it would rank as the second largest domain sale of all time. The highest value sale remains Sex.com at $13 million.

This figure was an interesting tidbit from an interesting interview.

I always find it interesting to see who owns what domain names in specific verticals. With Halloween coming up in a couple of days, I wanted to see what companies own Halloween-related domain names.

I think holiday names are great, but of course, they are seasonal and probably only make money for a couple of months in the year. If you can grow a thriving business on one of the domain names, though, it can be well worth the investment.

Here are the 10 best Halloween domain names (in my opinion) and the owners of these domain names. Whois lookups courtesy of DomainTools:

In doing due diligence, I’ve come across domain owners and companies that are impossible to contact. Further research has led me to various articles and forums where others have mentioned the difficulty in contacting those companies, so one can assume the company has no interest in discussing their domain names.

There are many reasons why a company might not reply to emails or phone calls. Here are a few reasons I could think of that might be applicable, and you should consider them the next time your email goes unanswered: