You Know You’ve Been in the Domain Business a Long Time When…

You know you’ve been in the domain investing business a long time when…

You or people you know made a living from PPC advertising.
You regularly read the Seven Mile Blog.
You know what Deanfest is.
You know what Rick’s Board is.
You visited the Playboy Mansion… several times.
You have eaten shrimp as big as your fist.
You remember when there were 50+/- articles a day on Domaining.com.
You remember reading Paul Sloan’s “Masters of Their Domains” and “The man who owns the Internet”
You visited DNForum every day.
You know about Halvarez.
You know Bonkers.
You’ve heard about Yun Ye.

When you have .com domains that are older than your girlfriend.

Happy sunday everyone.

When your ultimate goal is to make the Top 100 of DNJournal.com…

When you and your wife are trying pick a baby name, and your main concern is if the matching domain is available.

You remember when .biz was a new domain name, when you could count the number of non cc TLDs on your hands, and if really old remember when ..com domains were free! Thanks for great question, Elliot!

When you go to check who owns the domain only to find out its yourself.

When you sold some domain names already three times and snatched them back on drops.

Also you sold some domain names and then had to renew for five years already as the buyers did not bother to collect them.

When you read about a million dollar domain sale and feel the pain remembering this was the domain name you were too lazy to renew 25 or 30 years ago.

watching flowers.mobi sell for $200k

You are a freaking old domain investor if you know what day in 2000, when network solutions started to drop domains again, after not releasing any domains starting January 1, 2000. They couldn’t figuring out how to make premium money on drops with the ICANN contract, remember Verisign and NetworkSolutions were the same company at that time.

Jan 1 Verisign/NetworkSolutions stopped releasing domain into pending delete UNTIL August 10, 2000 maybe a day earlier.

DVDUSA.com I keep around to remind me how companies were.

Verisign wants to get the premium on domains, that is there beef with domainers, they see it as there money not DOMAINERS. premium .club domains that expire go back to .club registry to be sold again for premium money, I believe most new gTLD’s operate that way currently (correct me if I am wrong please)

Verisign wants to get that money $100, $250, $1000 per domain after that drop, HISTORY repeats its self.

ICANN didn’t let them do it then, now maybe they will.

You assume everyone knows what a good premium domain is. 🙂

When Exody.com was the only source of drop list

When after every drop you get into great domains IRC chatroom and show off what you got

When you have people with nicks likr joshbond, safesys, mmmcow, digger and others

When almost everyone invested in .web and lost money

When findwhat.com was the ppc king

– You can remember when “the overture tool” was still around
– You can remember faxing in renewal forms
– You can remember when there was only one place to buy a domain name.
– You know who bonkers, ben franklin, hip hop, and saggy dimes were
– You can remember when chats on afternic were preferred over forums
– You can remember when drop times were a well-kept industry secret.
– You have attended more than two domain conference in a year
– You have had legionnaires disease
– You have gone to the physician to check on your carpal tunnel, back/neck or eye sight issues
– One of your colleagues in the space has passed away.
– You made money before parking/PPC with domain name landers.
– Cupcake Factory

When you “named” your first business “Credit Claims, Inc” while in college in 1968
When you started, named and hand registered; ContactUSA™ in December 2000
When you hand registered MakeSomethingHappen™ Sept. 1, 2001 and still own it today
When you hand register National1099™ September, 2005 and re-registered it March 3rd, 2015 (still in biz)
When you hand registered InquisitorInvestigatiions™ in Oct. 2007 and re-registered it in 2017

I’ve been in the NameGame business longer than anyone here, yet I hadn’t heard of Flippa, Sedo, Uniregistery, Epik, Afternic, Donuts etc. until just a little over a year ago. Yet I had heard of Network Solutions, Verisign and Go Daddy. I know this all sounds nCredulous™, but feel free to check it out.

Every since I discovered this secret industry, every day is fun Sunday for me. Now back to football!!!

Bulloney

If you remember pool.com opening.

– You remember bidding on domains at NameWinner.
– Someone asks your name and you add “dotcom” at the end.

-When DomainInvesting.com had another name.

When 3 and 4 word domains were in demand.
Now they look like a paragraph. Lol

…when you paid “Great Domains” to provide a value to your domain name, kept the certificate they sent and held on to it for no reason at all!

– Pageseeker, ROAR & DDN
– GeoDomains in San Fran
– You snuck underage domainers into clubs
– You attended “Bubbles & Squeak – Domainer Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”
– 6-8 domain conferences in one year
– NEXT!

– When you registered your sons name 3 months before he was born. And he’s now 16.
– Had to register a domain with an email template…
– Remember running a whois lookup on an entire dictionary and printing out all of the .coms that were available and it was over 75k that were available.
– Who needs a Yahoo contract, when you could have an Overture one, or even a Goto.com contract.

Here are some of mine:

-You didn’t do domain parking. You did ‘MFA’ sites. Made for Adsense sites!
-You’ve eventually used parking sites like ParkingPanel and RevenueDirect.
-You realized some of the largest companies in the world now use an existing domain of yours as their brand name.
-You realized if you held onto 1 domain and asked an insane price, you would’ve gotten it eventually, and had a higher net worth than the 10 years of hard work that followed.
-You remember Overture tool.
-You’ve used/watched/bidded on domains on GreatDomains.com
-You’ve walked into a local branch to do a wire for a domain purchase and they had no idea what that is (still don’t).
-You’ve regged/built out .tk domains since they were one of the few free ones.
-You’ve used SitePoint forum to buy/sell domains!

Few more

– When there is a 5 day grace registration period, and you forgot to delete unwanted domains
– When Staples offer a $1 domain registration (limited to 1 domain) but everyone registered plenty during that period.
– When newly registered domains take a full one day before resolving.

– When your main source was the golden age of Ebay domain auctions. Lots of good dot coms were available. $9.99 was frequently the asking reserve, but 99 cents was also common to encourage the bidding.

I won a good one word .TV domain for 99 cents, because only I bid!

None of this five minute extension nonsense. So it was genuinely thrilling to sometimes see a frenzy of bidding in the last 20 seconds.

Sold a domain on Uniregistry Market this month for $8K that I won on Ebay for $40 :o)

– You partied with Lana Del Rey when she was just Lizzy Grant at a TRAFFIC domain show with her father
– You participated in the mad rush to register as many free .info’s as you could
– You paid someone who knew someone to get overture with extension data on the whole .com zone file

When you purchased a 4N/Com for $350 on ebay

You regret not paying that paper invoice that verisign sent to your mail box for those short-word .com’s that you registered a month ago.

– you had an account at fabulous .com when they were called domainintellect .com
– you loved it when john zuccarini finally got busted but felt he deserved a much longer sentence.. (same with gary kraser )
– you couldn’t make it through a day without spending at least a couple hours on each of these sites… dailychanges .com, exody .com, mydomain .com, erealestate .com
– you knew richard kirkendall when he was still driving an american made car
– you still refer to the overture suggestion tool as goto tool
– if you’ve ever registered a h-y-p-h-e-n.com
– you knew who ha-ha joe was
prolly more if i thought about it harder but suffice to say going on 20 years here and still loving every minute of it!

cheers

You registered .com domains by emailing in an email template form and received the registration fee invoice by postal mail.

You’ve had Yun Ye, Kevin Ham and Frank Schilling to your house for a backyard bbq.

You know you’ve been in the domain investing business a long time when…

You look at your portfolio of 400+ domain names that are over 20 years old and think to yourself why did I spend so much time searching for good domain names when I could have just bought 400 nnnn.coms and cashed out today for several million.

-You participated in both the Afternic and Great Domains chat rooms.
-You have a signed copy of The Domain Game
-You attended ‘internet conventions’ to learn about domains, long before there were ‘domain conventions’.
-You could buy dropping domains for $60 on Great Domains.

– You look at the registration date again on the first domain you purchased and still own it.
– You no longer have to research to answer most domain related questions.
– You visit Namepros daily.
– You start getting hundreds of free appraisal requests via eMail.
– You stumble across an old article or interview in Google from almost a decade (or longer) ago that you forgot about.

– You participated in domaintasting at zero cost

I remember when customers shunned the newly introduced extensions as the dredge of the internet. Oh wait was that 2001 or today? Ha. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

You registered some great never-before-registered .com domains such as TVSeries.com for $70 when Network Solutions was the InterNIC.