Risk In .CO – Blind Faith or Informed Decision?

How was it for you? For me, I’m coming from a standpoint of constructive feedback based on an assessment of RISK. People appreciate that. Why? Because its not “blind faith”, which is what we have seen from many people (aside from greed).

It’s easy for people to be critical about .co – after all, they have been burned by other extensions. On the flip side, most people are ignorant. They just dont know the facts before they jump in. That may sound harsh, but its just reality.

Risk is something 99.9% of bloggers and domainers don’t talk about. I believe its largely because they dont REALLY understand it. Yes, its easy for me to sit back and say that, particularly with many years of Risk Management experience…. but its true. Sure, buying domains has an element of risk; as such many people are exposed to it. Whether they realise or not is another matter.

In terms of .CO – Francois summed it up perfectly in a comment – “People play lottery when they know their sale chance is almost null“.

Many .co buyers are now saying that they are just speculating and are prepared to spend their $$$ on buying .co. That’s completely fine! Good on them. They deserve the rewards.

What Is .CO Anyway?

1. Its still Colombia. The bottom line is that you can put lipstick on a pig, but its a still a pig. Perhaps in this case a flying pig? (Twitter joke)

That’s not to say its bad. It is what it is. IF I was to register a .co – it would be something relevant to the country. eg: coffee.co. This is because Colombia is a major exporter of coffee. Get the idea?

2. Using .co for company is a “domain hack”. Just like Tonga is .to. Ultimately, its whatever the public thinks it is! That is where the advertising $$$ will help to shift public opinion. Watch out for this.

3. Unfortunately, .CO presents an opportunity for typosquatting. This is something I really DONT support. Its not a sustainable business; if you are doing this, you will end up in a lot of trouble.

I’d also note that typosquatting is not unique to .CO. We have seen it with .cm for Cameroon and .om for Oman.

Changing The Way People See .CO

The money spent on marketing .co has not been disclosed, but it has been described as unprecedented.

The really interesting thing will be IF search engines decide to change their algorithms to reflect .CO being global and not just for Colombia. We haven’t seen that for any other ccTLD, so why should we see it for .CO ? I wonder how much $$$ is being spent on that? How many lobbyists have been descending on Mountain View? How many are still to come in the next few weeks/months?

There have been some rumblings about changing algorithms with a Google spokesperson saying:.

“We will rank .co domains appropriately if the content is globally targeted. Webmasters will soon have the functionality to be able to specify this by using the geotargeting options in Google Webmaster Tools.“

Its still early days, so lets wait and see. If the search engines do change (and there is no precedent to indicate that they will), then .CO might just be the landgrab people have been wishing for!

If you bought a .co, good luck with it! Seriously. You took the risk, you deserve the reward.

If you have a .CO, I’d love to hear from you. What do you have planned? Flip, develop, hold? Feel free to post a comment and let me know.

You’re Not Seriously Buying A .co Are You?

Over the past 24 hours I’ve personally received emails and private messages from people asking about .co. It seems everyone is asking one of two questions:

Question 1 – Am I buying .co ?
Question 2 – Should they buy .co ?

Instead of replying to everyone individually, I thought I’d post this.

Answer 1 – No I am not buying .co
Answer 2 – That’s up to you and your appetite for risk.

The reality is, people make mistakes. We saw it with .mobi .me .asia and other TLDs.

What I’m about to say isn’t going to be popular, but it’s the reality check that most bloggers and other companies simply aren’t going to give you.

Where The $$$ Is

The people that make REAL money from these new extensions (most of which are over-hyped), are the Registries and the Registrars. In other words, the companies that sell them to YOU. There is only ever a small number of premium generic keywords that sell upwards of $200k. When you look at who is buying them, its often large corporates with the marketing $$$ to spend. Having worked for many global brands, I can honestly say that when it comes down to it, they do this for two reasons: 1. Fear and 2. Protecting their trademarks (brands).

Marketing

Now onto .co – its really no different from any other TLD we have seen. The method is quite simple; get a huge marketing budget and buy advertising.

As a domainer, you may be reading through blogs and press releases saying to yourself “I have to get in on this – everyone is buying”. In reality, what you need to do is have a look at WHO is supporting .co and WHY. Let me give you two examples:

Example #1 – Blogger

• Is their blogging site plastered with .co advertising? How can they be objective?
• Is it “cash for comment” ? Do they have a policy or statement on their blog about how they handle conflicts of interest?
• Are they a full-time domainer or is domaining just a hobby for them?
• Perhaps the only reason they blog, is to sell advertising on their site?
• Do they work full time for a vendor? Perhaps one who is involved in selling .co domains?

Example #2 – .co Founders

This is a great marketing initiative for people who want to register .co and get in first (before everyone else). Seriously, I think its a great initiative – my hat goes off to the .CO Registry.

Here is how it goes…. .co founders come up with an idea, submit an application and “develop, launch and market your .CO domain per your proposal and our agreement“.

I’d also note this clause: “During the license period, you must agree to actively market and promote the .CO domain in a manner that is likely to produce widespread awareness of your site based on industry best practices.”

So – you promote .co as the biggest, greatest thing in the world, to as many people as you can. During this time, the .co you selected is being wiggled over your eyeballs, just like a hypnotist with a pocket watch.

Risk

Many of you know that my background is in Security, Fraud Prevention and Corporate Risk. This is the lens through which I often view my own domain investments. What is interesting is that nobody is looking at sovereign risk / geopolitical risk. Call it what you want – .co is for Colombia. If you are going to invest $$$ into multiple domains (no matter what the extension), then you need to know the risks associated with that investment.

Conversion

We have all seen TLDs like .jobs and .pro; so is the general public REALLY going to use .co ? Sure, everyone knows about .com, but not .co. That’s only going to change with time, but how much time? Months, years? How does .co rank in the search engines? Can your business afford to wait?

Cash

Each dollar that you invest in .co (or any TLD for that matter) is money you are taking away from your business. That’s money, that you could be spending on something else. I was thinking about two of my most important food groups – chocolate & coffee.

Usability

When I start my iPad or iPhone and browse the digital interwebs, there is ONE button on the keyboard that I use all the time. Its a .com button – not a .mobi button. I think you get the point.

Look, I know this is a bit blunt and its not going to be popular. Honestly – the intent of this post is to help educate the marketplace. Hopefully it gives you something to think about when you are deciding whether to register a .co or the next “landrush” that appears on our doorstep.

Feel free to post a comment and let me know what you think. Are you buying .co ?

Brief Introduction To Domainer Income – Video

Over the past few days, people have written to me asking for two things.

1. A brief overview of Domainer Income

2. Specific details on different parts of the system.

The reality is, Domainer Income has so many advanced features, we simply cant squeeze into a short video. So I’m going to do a series of videos, focusing on specific features and how YOU can PROFIT from them.

I have just posted this general overview up on Youtube.

I love hearing your feedback, so please leave a comment and let me know what you would like to see.

Domainers Go Wild

Two days ago we went public with our Domain Investment Platform. The response was more than we could have imagined. People have been pouring in – signing up day and night. In fact, I stayed up to 3am just answering emails and talking to people who called us on the telephone or jumped on Skype to have a chat.

The great thing for me personally is knowing that people are already reaping the benefits from Domainer Income. I’m not going to mention names, but I thought I’d share some things:

This morning I spoke with a guy who develops domain names in a particular niche. He wanted to know how to use Domainer Income to find specific keyword domains. e.g. weight loss. When I told him he could search our database of 1 million+ domains that are for sale/auction, and showed him how to do it in just 2 clicks, he was blown away. “OMG – there is nothing like this – LOOK how fast THAT is!“.

Last night I had a call from someone who couldn’t believe he could find and buy domains with high PageRank. He went crazy – REALLY over excited – it sounded like he was jumping for joy! He just couldn’t believe it! In Australia, we call it a eureka moment.

As I type this, its 6pm on Friday night – I just got off the phone with another customer who has 5,000 domains – he wanted to know if Domainer Income could help him track his portfolio. Absolutely! Excel spreadsheets are a thing of the past – we keep track of expiry dates, DNS records – the LOT! I think I just got him his life back!

I was also appreciative of the kind comments offered by people on Facebook and Twitter.

Over the past couple of days, *many* people have reached out and shared with me their stories and frustrations with existing tools. The thing is – I agree! We created this investment platform well before anything else was out there. Now the cat has been let out of the bag. We have raised the bar considerably and we are going to keep raising it!

Out of all the people I’ve talk to, chatted with and received emails from, one common theme has emerged. Its the the lack of information sharing in the domaining industry. People just can’t believe we have published the information we have on Domainer Income. In fact, pretty much everyone I’ve spoken to has said “thank you”. One prominent domainer (who will remain nameless) cautioned me that many domainers might feel threatened that we have “levelled the playing field“. My response was “too bad, so sad“. I used to have the scarcity mindset, but not any more.

One final example: one of our Free Members emailed me personally to say he would love to upgrade to the Professional membership and get all the analytics and metrics from domain auctions, as well as the portfolio management tools. In the email he said thanks for creating the Free membership as it gave him access to our Expired Domains database (which we update daily). He said that he is going to work his way up to participating in larger auctions. That was really nice to hear because I know $$$ can be tight for some people.

To see which membership is right for you, go here.

Domainer Income Goes Public – What It Means For Domainers

About 3 years ago I made one decision that dramatically changed my life for the better. Just like the butterfly effect, that decision is going to change other peoples lives for the better too. Before I tell you what happened, let me give you some context.

As some of you know, I’ve been using the Internet for a long time (I started in 1989), before Mosaic, Netscape or the even the web. For the technical people, back then it was all about Bitnet, ftp and gopher, but that’s another story…. The fact is, I didn’t buy my first domain until the mid 90′s and I didn’t sell a domain until 2002! Why? There was simply no way of monetizing domains like there is now.

When I first began investing in domains, I tried and tested everything I could get my hands on. If there was:

A product – I’d buy it
A service – I’d subscribe to it
A forum post – I’d read it.

To cut a long story short, there wasn’t anything on the market that did what I wanted, so I developed my own system to help me find and buy, the RIGHT KIND of domains, but on a massive scale! It ended up being so big, we built a farm of dedicated servers at a top US Datacenter just to run it! It was a system that “plucked needles from haystacks” over, and over again!

But that led to another problem….

I was buying great domains and hording (stock piling) them. My behaviour was like Gollum from Lord of the Rings – my precious domains yesss….owww dot com….so beautiful. They were mine, mine MINE! In what seems a complete contradiction to many domainers, ego wasn’t a big a part of it. Why? I simply didn’t talk about it. I didn’t go to conferences. I didn’t have a blog back then either. It was “head down” and a hell of a lot of hard work! Then something changed. From a personal standpoint, this was the “tipping point” that changed everything for me….

One afternoon I was talking with my wife, Anna; I’ll never forget this conversation. Our system had identified a lot of high quality domains the week prior and I’d purchased all of them. Ok, I admit, I was actually complaining about the number of domains – there were too many good ones! Of course – I wasn’t going to let them drop or go to someone else for THAT price! If you buy at auction, you’ll know what I mean. Anyway, Anna said “Well why don’t you give this system to other people then?” I burst out laughing and said “Are you crazy? This is making us $$$$ – I’m not telling ANYONE about it”. Lets also not forget that domainers are a very secretive bunch. After a very long, somewhat heated discussion, Anna convinced me to release our domain investment platform to the public. I ended up showing a few domainers what we had done (under strict, non-disclosure agreements of course) and they were completely blown away. There was, and still is – nothing like it.

But that was 3 years ago! What happened I hear you ask? Well, I’m a perfectionist. If I was going to put my name to something, then it better be “the best in the industry”. Those that know me personally, know that I have a professional / corporate background, and have a firm belief in customer support. As such, we spent a lot of time and money making the interface more user friendly. We produced “how to video”s, created detailed online help, a customer support desk, we added all the trimmings a professional investor would expect. Of course, redesigning the site three times with a team of designers doesn’t help either. The fact is, we have been working day and night, making this happen. Its consumed late nights, weekends, kids school holidays – even Christmas afternoon (I should have been sleeping off lunch).

Now its done.

Would I change anything? No way! I still believe that there are MORE than enough domain names for everyone.

I also know this – Domainer Income will:

a) Help many people to generate passive income – making a HUGE difference to peoples lives from a financial standpoint.
b) Take the Domaining industry to a new level.
c) Create a level playing field, by making information available to everyone.

Today, YOU have an opportunity to be a part of that.

So – here is the result of many years of hard work – an enterprise grade, Domain Investment Platform. You now have everything you need to Find, Buy and PROFIT from domain names. Where do you start? I’ve created many FREE videos that explain Domainer Income in more detail. There is also a FREE Membership too – so nobody misses out on an opportunity to start making money with domains.

Please leave a comment and let me know your thoughts….. remember – this has been my baby for many years. I’d love to hear what you think.

Simon

New gTLD’s – Just Remakes of 80′s Pop Songs?

“All this has happened before, and all this will happen again“. – Battlestar Galactica (Pythia).

Back in 2001, a company called New.net published a piece of software (.dll file) which enabled people to resolve domain extensions such as .xxx .law .kids and .church and many others. They also teamed up with ISP’s to provide the service. Check it out yourself at archive.org (and before you ask, it wasn’t me who did the johnson.family that’s in the middle of the page).

In any case, these “domains” were not real TLD’s, as we know them today. Many people called them subdomains or an “alternative DNS root”. This wasn’t the first time that these extensions appeared either; Eugene Kashpureff ran Alternic in the mid 90′s, and directly challenged Internic. That was actually fun to watch. Alternic also had .xxx too.

Here are a few extensions that New.Net were marketing back then:

agent
arts
auction
chat
church
club
family
free
game
gmbh
golf
hola
inc
kids
law
llc
llp
love
ltd
med
mp3
school
scifi
shop
soc
sport
tech
travel
video
xxx

Why is this relevant today? The ICANN board meets to discuss .XXX. Will they approve it after all these years? I’m guessing they will. This whole debate has gone on long enough.

Got some new ideas for a gTLD?

Australian Government To Consider Public Comments On ICANNs gTLD’s.

The Australian Government has released a Fact Sheet on ICANN’s new gTLD process. The purpose is to raise community awareness and allow interested people the opportunity to feed comments back to the Government.

A spokesperson from the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE) told Domainer Income that the Australian Government “is not conducting a formal consultation with a set time frame“, however DBCDE “will consider any comments received“.

Its known that many Governments, including Australia, provide advice to ICANN on matters of interest or concern through the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC). However, final decision making authority ultimately rests with the ICANN Board.

The Australian Government is an active member of the GAC, and has been since its inception in 1999. Officers from the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy represent the Australian Government in the GAC. Note that ICANN meets three times a year and right now, the GAC is meeting in Brussels.

This presents many Domain Investors with a unique opportunity to provide feedback directly to the Australian government, without going through auDA. The reason I mention that, is because auDA holds the “delegation of authority for administration of the au ccTLD” on behalf of the Commonwealth (of Australia).

As such, I’d STRONGLY encourage everyone to submit questions, comments and/or concerns – about ICANN’s proposal to the following:

Via Email: newgTLDs at DBCDE.gov.au

In Writing:

The Director
Internet Governance, IPND and Numbering Team
Department of Broadband, Communications
and the Digital Economy
GPO Box 2154
Canberra ACT 2601

Feel free to post a comment and let everyone know you made a submission.

New Godaddy Phishing Attempt – .Info Bulk Orders

There is a new phishing email doing the rounds, masquerading as a Godaddy email. I received it this morning and have since notified Godaddy.

There are a few things that are interesting about this email:

1.It uses the actual Godaddy graphics on the Godaddy web server, so it looks real.

2. In the body of the message it says “Dear <your email address”.

3. It was sent to an email address on my server that doesn’t exist (normally I’d throw away those “catch all” emails, but not in this case).

4. The fake email was (spoofed) from sales at godaddy.com with a subject of “GoDaddy.com Order Confirmation”. So if you have a lot of automatic email rules that archive off these types of notices, it may find its way into your inbox, and you may never notice it.

5. FYI: The links go through to “dextersss-com-ua.1gb.ua/zzx.htm” – the webserver is live, but the site is currently producing a 404.

6. For the techo’s, SpamAssassin gave it a score of 17.223.

I only initially picked up on it because I didn’t recall ordering 300 .INFO domains. If that had of arrived during a bulk ordering process, I may have not noticed.

Given the fact it’s a bulk registration. Could this be a targetted email especially for domain investors? The average person isn’t going to register 300 domains! Of course, the other side of that thought process is that phishing emails are designed to be “clicked on”, so if a member of public sees it, they will probably freak out first, click it and then inadvertently hand over their credentials (login id and password).

What do you think? Have you received this email?

NBC Backs Out Of Women.com & Women.Net Sale – Gets Sued

Its been reported that NBC Universal (GE) is being sued by Done Ventures after the sale of women.com and women.net fell through.

A complaint was allegedly filed in Los Angeles Superior Court. Here are a couple of points of interest:

1. Sedo had been hired as a “domain name broker”.
2. The offer for both domains was allegedly accepted (both verbally and via email) for the price of $1M
3. NBC’s “Jeff Zucker has overruled the transaction” and the deal was off.
4. “Sedo…..had earned the commission that was due to them under the brokerage agreement….”

Obviously there are two sides to a story. Its going to be a very interesting case to watch.

$2.3 Million Of Domain Sales In 1 Day

DOMAINfest Ft. Lauderdale has sold a massive $2,386,550 of domains at auction.

Here are the details:

Dating.com – $1,750,000.00
BoardGames.com – $450,000.00
Therapists.com – $50,000.00
Antidepressant.com – $30,000.00
GolfResorts.com – $22,500.00
EFP.com – $9,950.00
GJ.net – $7,200.00
BJH.com – $6,500.00
Birth.net – $6,000.00
PatioTables.com – $5,500.00
Sentimental.com – $5,250.00
Taunt.com – $5,000.00
ArtAppraisal.com – $4,000.00
Vinyl.net – $4,000.00
QWZ.com – $3,850.00
CarSecurity.com – $3,500.00
LasVegasDiscounts.com – $3,500.00
UsedHybridCars.com – $3,250.00
CakeStand.com – $3,000.00
CaribbeanCruises.net – $2,500.00
DivorceRecord.com – $1,500.00
StoneFurniture.com – $1,500.00
SchoolTutors.com – $1,200.00
AAC.co.uk – $1,000.00
CherryTrees.com – $950.00
BudgetOnline.com – $900.00
SportsSites.com – $850.00
MicroManaged.com – $600.00
LateShows.com – $500.00
LowerUtilityBills.com – $500.00
Day.me – $400.00
CdCollection.com – $300.00
NYC.asia – $300.00
TaxTube.com – $300.00
PersonalBanker.net – $250.00

Congratulations Snapnames on the impressive auction line up and a great result.