Does the domain industry seem greedy to you?

While maybe so to an extent your example isn't really relevant to your point. You mention it yourself - on one hand we are talking about a hobby and on the other - about a business that will sometimes have to feed your family and pay your bills. Surely you would like more people sharing your hobby but would you intentionally give someone a good start in a business where he can soon be a competitor for your piece of the market pie? I think not.

As domaining formed as a viable business industry years ago different strategical approaches formed around it. While sometimes the pricing on some names might seem silly fact of the matter is that they are someone's property and only they can put a valuation on it. If I am the one that first had a notion about the value of a product, why should I feel guilty putting an appropriate (in my eyes) price tag for it?

To be clear I am mostly expressing a logic that might be applied by individual domainers, companies operate on a whole different logic (or lack thereof)

gold2platinum said:

With domains it seems completely the opposite. You must have thousands of dollars if you wish to have a nice portfolio of domains.

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If you believe that the new gTLDs will be valuable in the future and capable of making people a profit from buying low and selling high, then this is no longer the case. Anyone can build a decent portfolio that will earn them a nice return in five-to-ten years from now. It will still take effort, intelligence, and time to find the good ones. That hasn't changed.

gold2platinum said:

Why hold out for thousands of dollars on every name you have?

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In my opinion, these two reasons come to mind:

1. Liquidity: This industry has very little liquidity, but when you sell a domain, it can easily produce the highest ROI of any industry. This affects the business models that are available to us. When you are a large portfolio holder, you still don't sell many names relative to how many you have. The names that you do sell need to make up for all the names that don't sell (yet continue to cost money in renewals). When someone is ready to buy a domain name from you at a decent price, the rarity of this event requires us to maximize on it as best as we can. Otherwise, we'd go out of business because our expenses would exceed our income.
2. Time: The more domains that you have, the more time you must spend managing them, fielding inquiries, etc. You may also have other companies or jobs that take up your time. Your time is scarce and immensely valuable. From a purely economical standpoint, it's not worth your time to sell a domain for a couple hundred dollars. Your time is too limited for such a small return. You could make more money working at your day job or follow-up on hot leads that might close for five figures. There are only so many hours in a day, and every sale takes exactly the same amount of time, whether the sale price is $50 or $50,000. It's simply not worth the time.

These forums are the best place for beginners to start out and find some decent deals if they put in the time. When large portfolio holders are looking to move names quickly or aren't interested in renewing them, they sometimes try to liquidate them here.

Not to beat the comparison to death, but the real estate industry is much the same.

Most property is not for sale. Most property that is for sale is really overpriced. Good deals depend on seller ignorance, seller financial problems, life events like death, divorce, etc.

However, with domains anyone with $10 can play the game.

It's fine to compare domains with sportscards, except there's mainly two big points where they differ a lot:

1) Domains aren't just nice glossy pieces of cardboard with NHL, NBA and NFL stars. I mean, what can you essentially do with those cards? Hmm, let me think... Ah yes, scrape dirt from tight bended corners and fill loose gaps. :P Domains have a real business value, because they're brands, addresses and access codes/gateways.

The first point is pretty bleeding obvious. It's either keyword.tld or uniquename.tld. Now what would Web.com be without their name? What about Amazon.com? You can easily continue the list. Now as for addressing, it's to make memorising your cyber presence (hmm, is that .com available... nah, okay, I'll carry on) easier. if you tell customers face-to-face, on radio, in a TV commercial or on your business card that more details can be found at www.njbargainshoes.com, which percentage will actually remember the URL, yet even visit it? Indeed, which means for instance easily brandable gTLDs come in handy. www.nj.shoes.

With access codes/gateways I'm refering to either cyber squatting with typos and other misleading domains, or protecting yourself against such. It either be to prevent loss of sales, customer trust or worse - phishing of details or intercepting e-mail with a catch-all address. So if my 20 staff company is rafaellomachinery.com and someone squatts some typo form of it or maybe rafaellomachinery.co, then they have kind of an access gateway to our confidential communication. And that's not even illegal, because the registrant hasn't maybe violated any trademark and (i.e. you never regged your tradename as a TM) could claim it's an unintentional moniker.

Now this third point of mine is one of the dark sides of domaining, which gives this a bad rep. I've personally lost once the domain which I used to have associated with domains, except at that point it no longer was, but theoretically there could still have been damage done. This kind of necessary damage control is another form of domain greed. You can't trust that your previous cyber properties wouldn't be registered even with purely hostile intentions. Even just grabbing them for parking can be a nuisance.

This has resulted that even I have to occupy much more pieces of cyberland than I actually use. Any domain I've used for e-mail, I now have to keep for good, just to play it safe. I might sound paranoid, but it's an unfortunate situation, if you don't take it into account when you still posess the domain in question.

2) You can't do any real damage with sportcards. It's just emotional fixation to materia when you appraise that Grezky from 1990 at 1000$ (sorry, no clue what Wayne costs ). Of course it might hurt someone that you find that Jager card to be grade B and not that A grade as you priced it, but that's just still a piece of cardboard.

With domains you can actually run amok and do loads of nasty stuff, which can cause millions of dollars in losses. Because it's just a line of 0s and 1s, which you trade online with a global market, no face-to-face contacts, easy to deceive and impose (hey, when am I gonna be blamed for posing as a Japanese schoolgirl?) and especially easy on ones consciousness to commit fraud as you don't see the sorrow or anger you might cause when someone loses 20 000$ on mlpcollector.com, receives nothing and you cringe when you see your PayPal account. The dehumanising factor of the virtual reality makes it so much easier to be a real nasty bastard. OTOH, I do personally see the net as more beneficial, but then again I like to meet IRL online friends. It makes things work better and you bond more. Okay, now I'm going off-topic.

BTW, notice my own greed in the earlier sidemark.

gold2platinum said:

Let's face it, all of the good names were taken in the 90's and early 2000's.

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Just to address this one point, no they weren't. New words are invented everyday, and old words acquire significant new meanings. Twerk, wearables, 3dprinting, sexting, augmented reality, and tons more valuable keywords have either been created or taken off in the last 10 years. Maybe many of these names were already registered 10 years ago, but even those would have been available for a few hundred dollars or less at the time.

True all the low hanging fruit, words that have been around forever and have established meanings, were taken. Finding similar words now requires foresight and a bit of risk. Considering renewal fees were $100 in the early days, I don't think a few hundred bucks for a domain with potential is too much to ask.

I know you mean well, but whenever I hear person B call person C greedy, it 's because person B wants something person C has. In other words, they are greedy too.

Just accept that you missed the landrush, but there's still plenty of gold to be mined if you are willing to work at it. Remember that the first guys in domaining were laughed at when they sunk real money into their domains. There was no domaining industry, and they were looked at as vaguely pathetic dreamers. Not many people have the courage to follow through in those circumstances.

gold2platinum said:

Let's face it, all of the good names were taken in the 90's and early 2000's. It also seems they are being hoarded away and ridiculous amounts of money are wanted for them. Recently I got to thinking about domaining as compared to other industries.

For instance, I have followed the sportscard industry for quite some time. Even when a rare or high value card is involved there is generally a fairly good price at which the card can be acquired. Now I understand that in the case of a card or collectible there normally exists more than one copy. That's all well and good.

It seems domains are not an investment that someone can just come in to without an initial buy-in that is astonomical. Even good .net domains are thousands of dollars. I know many domains are held by big business and industry leaders that need the big profit, but I would assume that they are still outnumbered by everyday people with big portfolios. Even the hobbyists don't part with names without astronomical prices.

In relation to the sportscard industry the big collectors share more of a comraderie with others hobbyists and there doesn't seem to be as much greed. They trade, sell at discounts, and generally tend to encourage others into the hobby and help in any way they can. Anyone can get into the sportscard industry at any level they can afford and work their way up. With domains it seems completely the opposite. You must have thousands of dollars if you wish to have a nice portfolio of domains.

If I were a domain investor with thousands of quality names that I picked up as hand regs in 1999 or earlier, I would probably not blink an eye at selling my lower end names. The demand is certainly there. If I sold them off for hundreds a piece I would still end up in a great situation with a paid off house, car, etc. Why hold out for thousands of dollars on every name you have? I would still have my top names as gravy and I would have helped others start good portfolios.

I know this thread may sound a little "sour-grapey" but my intention is to spark some good conversation on the topic. This industry seems too greedy and only the well-to-do can afford any investments within it. Am I the only one that sees it this way?

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Domain name registrations drop all the time. New ideas and technology come to be every year. It may not be as easy as it was ten or twenty years ago, but it's still possible to make money domaining.

I credit what little success I've had in domaining to my being realistic. I don't buy whacked out domain names that don't even make sense and try to sell them for half the money in the world. I'm happy making $99 on a domain I paid $2 for. Sure, if I wait some of my domain names may go for a lot more, but with the money I make selling a domain name for $99 I can reg a lot of new names.

I've sold 4 or 5 domain names on ebay now. I typically start what I consider the decent domain names at $99 and drop them as low as $9.99 when I start the get the feeling that they may never sell. I've actually made a profit at this point hand-regging. Not a huge one. But then, I'm still getting things figured out.

As to your observation that the Domain industry is too greedy, my question is, what are we going to do about it? Greed is a fundamental aspect of human nature. It's no more futile to ask a tiger not to have stripes then it is ask people not to be greedy.

We could spend all day every day talking about things that are wrong in the world, but none of that talk will change anything. Action is what brings about change. I say, if you a problem with something, make a commitment to change it, even a little bit. Through action.

Here's my opinion on "newbie" domainers, which make up the majority of this industry by the number of registrations.

1. Domain owner sees 20 sales being reported in $x,xxx range every week for domains that aren't all that great or were made-up brandables.
2. Domain owner adjusts the pricing of their domain names accordingly to these reported sales.
3. Domain owner is ignorant to odds and the fact that there are over 250 million domain registrations and 20 reported 4 figure sales
4. Domain owner thinks everyone knocking is secretly rich, doesn't value money, and has 4 or 5 figures to spend on regfee names.
5. Domain owner blows the opportunity to sell domain at a reasonable $xx-$xxx price for a few years.
6. Domain owner drops his million-dollar domain because it didn't sell for $10,000 in a couple of years so it's not worth the $9 renewal.
7. Domain is picked up by someone with the same mentality
8. Process repeats.

Trust me, there's several dozens, if not hundreds of lurkers here that are "in-the-know" and making sweet money flipping their names for $xxx profit all day to end users but they don't talk on it, what's to brag?

People want to see those "big boy" sales being reported all day, the $7,000 ones, and they price their names according to this.

Majority of domainers are the true gold-miners of the 21st century, or lottery players turning down profits for...yeah.. maybe you're right... "Greed"

My model:
Liquid domains = Hold for $x,xxx - $xx,xxx - $xxx,xxx according to price paid.
Regfee names/brandables with absolutely no personal use = Cashflow

Greed is an aspect of an individual's personality. To say that the whole industry is greedy is an overgeneralization.

At the end of the day it really is as tomcarl described it. I've myself really phased out from most domaining years ago, because I became oblivious to good business practice. I must have wasted some pretty nice sums at reg fees on names I never after all developed. I think onegig.com was the one I had most plans for. Now when I think - crap, did I really even reg it?!And I've noticed some idiot has followed in my trails and picked up those very same names...

I've done money with domains too, not just had expenses due to them, but when I look back at how I screwed myself by greed with the Zune domains, I do nowadays only occasional grabs. My portfolio is mainly for other purposes, but I'm still following closely what goes on. Especially the new gTLD rush has made me active again.

But yes, domains are like warrants or betting.

The domain industry is NOT greedy!
Okay, the domain industry is run by ICANN and registrars.

Now domainers?
Too many ARE freaking greedy!
To. The. Max.

Let's keep them separate please.

Domainers = Greed is to broad a statement. It is like Used Car Salesman = Sleazy It is like Athlete =Overpaid Cry Baby.

Some people in those fields may be greedy, sleazy or an overpaid cry baby, but not all. Hobbyist vs professional matters too.

Like Tom Carl said people see the big sales, but how many people could wake up each year with the renewal bill of Mike Berkens or Frank Schilling ? Those thousands of names need to be paid for.

All the good names are never all taken. In 2004 certainly not the early days I hand regged NNNN.com I want to punch myself in the face for only going after the ones I was focusing on and not regging everyone I found. Mistake on my part.

You could have registered a 5N.com in 2010 to 2012 without little problem and saw a nice ROI, no everyone does not make the list on DN Journal but I never understood people, a lot of them who have never sold a domain for x,xxx in their life, scoff at turning $7 into $300 especially on a random name that means little.

ICANN gave the world the new gtld program to combat against the greed, so if someone has a project you got a world of choice. Now if you want the best of the best say a two letter .com, you are going to need to pay up and if you owned the two letter.com would you be calling yourself greedy asking for xxx,xxx ?

“We judge others by their behavior. We judge ourselves by our intentions.”

iowadawg said:

The domain industry is NOT greedy!
Okay, the domain industry is run by ICANN and registrars.

Now domainers?
Too many ARE freaking greedy!
To. The. Max.

Let's keep them separate please.

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Actually, have you seen some of the renewals on those new regfee gTLDs? In the hundreds and thousands.

gold2platinum said:

I have followed the sportscard industry

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Funny you mention sports cards as I always liked it as a way to show a general domain era value comparison. (disclaimer when ever someone compares domains to anything else there is the apples to oranges crowd chiming in) But I feel its safe to say:

What baseball cards are the most valuable today? Its the cards that were printed before people (adults) thought of them as investments. Kids eating bubble gum and trading and playing with them. Are all old baseball card the same value? No the guy that played one year is not at all as valuable as the stars like Babe Ruth. But someone will still pay something for that one year bench warmer team mate of Babe Ruth or Ty Cobb.

What domains are the most valuable today? The mostly dot coms regged before domaining was so obvious. Perhaps a good high watermark was when every sensible word on the planet was gone in dot com, surely by when LLLL.coms first approached sell out. In other words the height of being able to hand reg something, hold it a bit, and you now have obvious value.

Are all old dot coms valuable? No, people reg junk in the old days too, just like there was players that were on the team just long enough to get their picture taken.

Want to own a baseball card from the old days? Have to fork over a ton more than the kid that bought it for the pennys gum back in the day.

Want to own an old dot com?, Like baseball cards of old, it can be attainable to varying degrees, but the upper ones will be like trying to buy a Honus Wagner T206 (in otherwords forget about it)

The new extensions? All of them! even the 'older' ones like dot pro. They are like baseball cards printed at the height of the card collecting craze (1980's) and beyond. They are worth next to nothing. They over printed and too many companys were making them. You can buy them by the shoebox full. The top 'premium' proven sold new extension domains of today? Well they are like the Derek Jeter cards of now. (there still stars in baseball and still their rookie cards)


I hope somebody had fun reading this. I dont want to debate any of this.

Good points brought up by all. It's nice to see intelligent and well thought out responses. To be honest, I fully expected everyone to get out their torches and pitchforks.

I probably should have made more clear in the original post and title that I was talking about domainers being greedy and not the domain industry. That was a goof on my part.

Also, many have formed their responses around the actual business part of domaining. Those that develop, maintain, buy, sell, and monetize their domains. Of course that takes time and incurs many costs. For those that actually do those things of course it makes sense to recover those costs and make a profit when selling a name. However, my post was aimed more toward the casual domainer.

Based upon what I've seen in the domain industry, as well as on these boards, the majority of domain holders are just sitting on them waiting for huge offers. They could easily turn a profit on many of their names and pay off the house, car, student loans, etc. Who really needs more than that? That doesn't seem to be good enough and this is the reason I am calling domainers greedy.

For instance, the domainers that are holding multiple 3-letter .coms. Assuming you hand-regged them when they were available, how much have you spent to keep them? Maybe $100-$200 in annual renewals per domain? Even that's a stretch. Yes, there are only 17,000 and some in existence but do you really need $10,000+ for a 3-letter .com with a Q in it? Show me proof that big businesses are clamoring for all 3-letter .coms and paying big money. If that were the case you wouldn't need to sell them to other domainers.

I look forward to more responses from you guys.

gold2platinum said:

Show me proof that big businesses are clamoring for all 3-letter .coms and paying big money. If that were the case you wouldn't need to sell them to other domainers.

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The domain industry lacks liquidity. Buyers are not always there when you need them. Domainers come across as greedy individuals, and some of them really are. In fact, some have a detestable mentality, because they are suckers looking for another bigger sucker. They want to screw the other party whereas it should be win-win.

However, the difference between sportcards and domains is that once bought, the sport card is yours to keep. But you have to pay the rent to keep your domains. Sustaining a portfolio costs money. Some people think it is scandalous to sell a domain for more than regfee but you have overhead and business expenses too.

I don't think trading sportcards is a real business. It is a hobby. Collectors are not competing against each other. The stakes are not the same. On the other hand domain names are strategic assets that can be developed into real-life business ventures.

It's quite simple:
I don't think domain names are overpriced. They sell at the right price, one that both seller and buyer agree upon.
Many domain owners ask for outrageous amounts, but if your pricing is not realistic you won't make a lot of sales. The market is unforgiving. Domainers need end users. The end users don't need them.

sdsinc said:

It's quite simple:
I don't think domain names are overpriced. They sell at the right price, one that both seller and buyer agree upon.
Many domain owners ask for outrageous amounts, but if your pricing is not realistic you won't make a lot of sales. The market is unforgiving. Domainers need end users. The end users don't need them.

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Exactly my point of view.

One more point I wanted to make. Some of you have mentioned that investing in some of the new tld's is an available option for newbies. Although it's a good point, buying into new tld's is not an even playing field either.

How many cycles does a new tld release go through where only certain people can buy up the good names before the general public can register? Or how many names are "reserved" by the registrars themselves?

Another example of greed and unfair practices in the domain industry.

I am not sure what you are really getting at ? You are not talking about the industry, so by that I take it you are not calling Go Daddy,Enom, Sedo, and Afternic Greedy, You are not talking about professionals, people like Rosener, Schilling, Berkens, Mann.

You are saying the casual domainer, who is the casual domainer ? Most casual or hobbyist domainers don't own LLL.com domains. You really picked the wrong niche there because yes there is demand for LLL.com all around the world, a Q is irrelevant and does not lessen the value if you are in China and some other parts of the world. I would argue in North America in third position it is nice for acronyms that deal with Quarterly, Quote or Quest.

One needs to know a human being before one can deem them greedy imo, reading someone on a forum or emailing them for a price on a domain they own does not provide that info imo.

Most people who own LLL.com today did not hand register them, those names have been traded several times over, so someone who spent $30,000 on an LLL.com asking $100,000 is that greed ? They are looking for a little over 3 times their investment which is not outrageous at all.

There is also a difference between greedy and delusional, usually someone needs to have some power and stature over a situation to be greedy, anyone can be delusional with a lottery ticket type mentality.

Someone who is a part timer who regs Cloudiestly.com and asks $1million, and says hey its got cloud in it so you know its good. That person is delusional not greedy.

Greedy would be the PIR who runs .org raising the prices of renewal on RedCross.org because they know they got the money, that is greedy.

Someone asking for $10,000 plus for an LLL.com is not greedy imo, they are the owner of one of the better naming categories in all the namespace.

Here are two LLL.com sales from NameJet today both with a Q

qwh.com $11,217
zeq.com $8,105

This is a mostly domainer platform and the free market decided their prices, qwh.com had 7 different bidders at $7,000 or more.

Zeq.com had 8 bidders at $5,000 or more.

Who says buying new gTLDs are not an even playing field? Although registrars and extension owners are registering some good ones, there are still plenty of wonderful, brandable domains out there. .Coms are still flipping healthily. The thing is there are still so many opportunities in the domain industry, we just have to look.

We cannot blame the early-adopters who made it big with the .coms. They happened to be there at the right time with the right vision, just like other industries. In fact, I would say the early-adopter deserves to be recognized as they were the ones who took the plunge into the unknown in the 1990s. If it is not for them, the domain aftermarket may not even be as established as now and this forum may not even exist.

Not to mention the internet and domains came into the general public in 1980s and only towards the mid to late 1990s did it took off. So thinking about it, it took them at least a decade to get the domain (.coms) off the ground.

So registrars, early-adopters, domain investors, etc are not greedy or have unfair practices when they reg good names for themselves and so-forth. It is a business ultimately, just like any other industries. To conclude, saying unfair practices because the early-adopters and registrars are reserving good names is akin saying every business in the world are unethical.

For example, .Club Inc, Donuts, Uniregistry, etc have raised and spent millions....millions.Is it fair to say they are practicing unfairly? Certainly not, blaming them and accusing them of greed and unfair practices is unfair to these entities.

P.S - Registrars also have to compete with each other to register a domain. It doesn't mean they automatically can have the domains they want. Furthermore, extension owners that reserve the domains have the rights to do so, they paid and invested heavily for these extensions.