Posted on Monday, 8th December 2008 by Kevin
Posted By Julia of http://isitmeoriseveryoneelsestupid.com
This morning I read Joe Davidson’s excellent piece on the crisis in domaining. I knew I’d enjoyed it as I also felt the need to post a comment in his thread highlighting my long standing belief in that domainers are inherently lazy. Before I attempt to mitigated any fevered replies i might invariably get here, allow me to set out my reasoning and back up a little.
I haven’t been writing much recently due to a new job - as mentioned before - and Ive been completely entrenched in the development, marketing and the business basics of a new internet start-up. All of which I have to say has been really good fun and very rewarding, if a little stressful and time consuming. Note to self - must begin leaving the office before 7pm and not continue working once I get back home.
Anyhow, for the first time in ages, I spun about the domain forums last night and was disappointed to read the same old “groundhog day” griping i was reading 6 months ago, “XYZ’s parking revenues suck”, “we’re getting ripped off”, “we should start our own parking company”, “I need a business partner for an exciting new venture” [read: Ive a 6 word dot net and want someone to do all the development work for me if i simply provide the domain], “check-out my mini site” [read: here's a page of adsense ads and some duplicate content] etc etc, you know the drill. All of which left me a little befuddled and somewhat disappointed.
Back-up some more. This week, it was confirmed that Johns Wu had sold his one-man-wordpress-blog, yes blog, Bankaholic.com for $15m to Bankrate. Wu is just a 22yr old guy with a domain which, Im sure, if he’d posted in the appraisals section of the domain forums, would have had valuations in the sub $1k region. If he had been a domainer, perhaps bankaholic would have been parked and Wu would also be spending his time whining about it not making any parking revenue, instead of getting off his backside and doing something about it. Neither of which he’s clearly done and, if i owned a hat, id at this point be taking it off to him.
As I posted in Joe’s blog, there are simply millions of domains parked and hundreds of thousands of people who regard themselves as “domainers”. Aside from me not knowing of any mainstream platform (outside of the domain channel) that has been created by domainers, the fact that in over 6yrs since domain forums have come to the fore, I’m also yet to be pleasantly surprised to hear of any domainer turn developer go on to achieve mainstream scale with something “new”. I find this all ironic because, without real sites that other people have taken the time and the imagination to create, there would be no “domaining”.
As ive posted previously, there are some shocking changes coming to the domain channel, one of which being the drying up of ad feeds to domains that receive very little in type-in traffic. Couple this with the fact that there are no low hanging domain fruits left to garner anymore (including from any of these crappy new TLD’s) plus the fact that development is a snitch nowadays and you need know nothing about PHP and HTML in order to make, as Google requires, a “unique and compelling website” - you would think that now would be the ideal time to do one, some or all of the following:
* Brainstorm a bunch of development plans and ideas. Choose ONE and stick with it
* Pick your best name in a subject you have an interest in and develop it. Make it into a blog perhaps. Caress it, care for it, promote it, add content and do this every day.
* Don’t start with the ad revenue and work backwards. Start with the purpose of the site, find a good CMS (content management system) like wordpress or Joomla (or custom), decide on a layout (there are some great templates available), get some hosting and get started.
* Dont pick a perceived high paying channel if you have no personal interest in it. Like exercise for terminally indolent, exercise like development only attains longevity if its something you like doing in the first place.
* Add lots of content long before you add any advertising. Get regular visitors before you piss everyone off (yes, regular web users understand the difference between content and blended adsense ads nowadays) with a maze of google adsense blocks on the homepage.
* Benchmark your plan and set targets and goals like: visitor numbers after X months, revenue after X years, pages indexed after X timescale. Remembering that an idea without a plan is just a dream.
Or, simply sit about and wait for a nice 6 figure offer to come in whilst your rent is overdue.
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