Domain Squatter Tries New Business: Running Websites

http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/3/domain_squatter_tries_new_business_running_websites

by drm237 • 18 years ago

17 19 18 years ago

greyman• 18 years ago

What that man does is not domain squatting. He was wise enough to invest into (now) very valuable domain names, which he plans to develop.

attack• 18 years ago

Buying up vast amounts of prime real estate in an extremely overcrowded town and then wasting the property just to earn pennies a day while others desperately need it is not squatting either, huh?

Harj• 18 years ago

the domains were bought almost 10 years ago. Geoff has only just joined and immediately y stopped the trading/squatting and started putting together a team to build products that leverage the domains. Hence the re-branding.

brk4• 18 years ago

Interesting, but I think he's way too late to that party.

These short, generic domain names (like perfume.com) had some value 10 years ago, when Internet search was still much more of a chaotic crapshoot.

Today, you could practically run a thriving ecommerce site from just a static IP if you spent a little bit of time on SEO. People go to google, type in "perfume" or "buy perfume" and go off to either the text-ad sites, or the top organic results.

Users have been trained on the idea that "domain guessing" is hopeless, and more than likely to land you on a pr0n site or ad site (like those domains are currently configured).

Also, for many of these e-commerce related sites, there is a large percentage of people who are looking to buy perfume+something else. If your site is so tightly optimized around 1 product class, I think you'll lose a lot of business to people who want to buy 3 products from 1 vendor, not 3 products from 3 vendors.

IMO, the majority of these domain squatters have so thoroughly skewed or ruined how people find products of interest that they have no hope of suddenly turning things around by turning these domains into what they should have done from the beginning.

pchristensen4• 18 years ago

Users? Trained!?!?!?!? Someone needs to stop hanging out with geeks :)

These domains ARE valuable - both for income generation and resale potential.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-05-09-domainers_x.htm

http://www.google.com/search?q=domaining

brk4• 18 years ago

You're going to cite a USA Today article as some sort of conclusive proof of your argument?

The "value" is perceived, often by people who have no idea what they're doing (much like the examples in your USA Today article).

This is a lot like the "value" of various antiques, where antique dealers constantly buy and sell pieces amongst themselves. Did you hear the joke about the 3 antique dealers trapped on an island with a single King Louie VIII chair? They all managed to make a living...

henning• 18 years ago

Every SEO person I've talked to or read from always says good domains are the foundation for making money online.

Those domains are still quite valuable.

brk4• 18 years ago

Yeah, well a lot of SEO people are just parrots who repeat what they've heard.

Does "Amazon" equate to a massive multi-product marketplace somehow? How about "ebay"? "Flickr" is so much like "photo hosting" that you can see why they're such a popular search result. And so on.

Having key search terms in your domain name lends a tiny bit of weight to the overall result ranking. The link text, page title and H1 tags will do more for you though. So will text in the url itself (www.foo.com/these-are-my-keywords).

tyohn• 18 years ago

"each site will cost him between $1 and $3 million a piece" - are you kidding me? Just to build it out? Wouldn't you build a "test" site first before you invested a million dollars?

p.s. Congrats - to Auctomatic...

dstillz• 18 years ago

Don't call us domain squatters. We're domain farmers. And you're just jealous. :-)

axod2• 18 years ago

A farmer creates something. What do you create? You happened to be the first person to think of registering a certain domain name, and won that lottery. Well done.

Hexstream• 18 years ago

What's next, calling spammers postmen?

pchristensen4• 18 years ago

Hex, axod, :-) means it's a joke!

axod2• 18 years ago

hehe never can tell for sure on the intraweb

Domain Squatter Tries New Business: Running Websites

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