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S2 Ep16 Navigating the Complex World of Domain Names with Andrew Alleman
43 Plays9 months ago
This episode of Dial It In features guest Andrew Alleman, founder of DomainNameWire.com, discussing the importance of domain names in marketing. Andrew shares insights on the domain name industry and its relevance for businesses and individuals. Tune in to learn why getting your domain name right is crucial for your online presence and marketing strategy.
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Dial It In Podcast is where we gathered our favorite people together to share their advice on how to drive revenue, through storytelling and without the boring sales jargon. Our primary focus is marketing and sales for manufacturing and B2B service businesses, but we’ll cover topics across the entire spectrum of business. This isn’t a deep, naval-gazing show… we like to have lively chats that are fun, and full of useful insights. Brought to you by BizzyWeb.
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction and Focus
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to Dial It In, a podcast where we talk with interesting people about the process improvements and tricks they use to grow their businesses. I'm Dave Meyer, president of BusyWeb, and every week, Trigby Olsen and I are bringing you interviews on how the best in their fields are dialing it in for their organizations.
Marketing Essentials Debate
00:00:24
Speaker
Dave, what do you think the most important element of marketing is?
00:00:30
Speaker
Well, there's content and all kinds of other things, but you've got to get found. Got to have a nice website and email marketing. Email marketing is great. Yeah, absolutely. That's actually incorrect all the way around. The most important thing is usually the cheapest and it's also the most secure. And it's also the hardest to get right. And there's so many examples, great examples of how people get it wrong that
00:00:57
Speaker
We're going to dedicate an entire podcast to the Wiley domain today.
Domain Name Industry Insights
00:01:02
Speaker
I've lucked into an amazing guest. Andrew Olliman is the founder and editor of domainnamewire.com. He founded it in 2005 as the first daily news blog covering the domain name business. It's a news source for the entire domain name industry, WordPress and web hosting written by industry expert and edited by domain name industry analysts.
00:01:26
Speaker
Some of the great topics that you can find on there are for domain name owners, intellectual property attorneys, trademark lawyers, domain registrars, domain services companies, and basically anybody interested in the domain name and web presence industry. He has been cited in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and on NPR. Welcome, Andrew. Thanks. Thanks for having me, guys.
Business Strategy Shift at BusyWeb
00:01:50
Speaker
I think that I'll back this up a little. Our day job beyond just being devilishly handsome and running a podcast is we run a marketing company and in 2023 and 2022, we actually got out of website hosting.
00:02:07
Speaker
because there are so many bigger companies that are doing it at a more reasonable price than we could. We transferred all our clients. It was a painful experience. One of the things that we also did was sell domain names. We kind of really want to get out of that, but we also realized that it's incredibly hard once we get people in. First question, how did you get so excited about domain names that you started a website and started
Journey into Domain Names
00:02:36
Speaker
a whole business about?
00:02:36
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, it's funny because I tell people what I do at a cocktail party and they're like, uh, really? That that's pretty, that's a pretty niche career. So, you know, when I was in college, I wanted to create a website. This is back, I guess the beginning to the end of the.com boom. And I, back then you could, you could go get a piece of software at the,
00:02:59
Speaker
on-campus computer store which existed back then where you get your CD-ROMs or disks and Microsoft front page. It was down the hall from the computer lab. Yeah, exactly. So you get Microsoft front page at the time or hot dog was another one and I wanted to create a website and you needed a domain name. So I registered a domain name and people were making some money selling domain names, so really good.
00:03:26
Speaker
But all the good names were taken, everyone said back then, even though there were just like single digit millions of domains registered as opposed to over 150 million dot com domains registered now. But so I started registering some domain names and just from my websites at first and then moved on to other domains that might potentially sell for money later on. And so that's kind of how I get started.
Domain Investing and Policies
00:03:51
Speaker
That was the 90s and then in 2005, I started writing about it on a daily level, writing about the industry because believe it or not, there is actually stuff you can write about every day about our business. The rest is history almost, let's see, it'll be 19 years blogging this March.
00:04:12
Speaker
Wow. That's amazing. I don't think I've done, I can't, I've been married for 15 years. I don't think I've ever done anything for 19 years. Wow. So on domain, so was it originally a
00:04:30
Speaker
speculation kind of a focused blog and is that the best use of like if people are browsing the blog is that how people review it?
00:04:43
Speaker
Well, I say a very large percentage of my audience are what we call domain name investors. So these are people that buy domain names with the idea of selling them. And then it's that ecosystem as well though. So we also have intellectual property people, lawyers and such to come read it to stay abreast of the policies around
00:05:04
Speaker
domain names, right? So there's registering domain names to sell that are generic names that anyone can use. And then there's registering trademarks, which is a big no, no. And it's the Eagle and cyber squatting and all that sort of stuff. So we have intellectual property managers that read
Domain Structure Explained
00:05:19
Speaker
it. And then we have the domain name registrars. And by that, I mean companies like GoDaddy or DynaDots or Network Solutions that read it as well. Basically anyone in the ecosystem
00:05:31
Speaker
But there's a heavy focus on the people that buy and sell the main names either as a full time job or as a hobby.
00:05:39
Speaker
Excellent. As we're talking about these, one of the things that occurs to me is we're using very technical-ish terms and we should probably set down a vocabulary for today. Sure. Can you tell us what is a domain? I know that we're going to get a little nerdy, but A Records and MX and all that stuff, TLDs, can you give us a breakdown of what a domain is about?
00:06:03
Speaker
Yeah, so I think the simplest place to start is there are two levels to a domain name. So I have domainnamewire.com for my blog. And domainnamewire is what we call the second level domain. And .com is what we call the top level domain. So think of the top level domain as the part to the right of the dot.
00:06:22
Speaker
the second level domain is the part to the left of the dot. So when people talk about domain names, they're usually thinking about the second level domain, right? Because that's where, well, we can talk later, there's actually a lot of choice in the top level domains too, but that's what most people are thinking about, right? Their business name or what they want it to be in that second level domain name.
Industry Scope and Investment Potential
00:06:43
Speaker
And then you mentioned A records, MX records. So when people want to get technical, they can go in and set their own MX record, which is their mail servers, right? Where should mail for this domain name point to? And A records and C names, which is where the website points to. But for the most part,
00:07:03
Speaker
people just set what we call their name servers. And so if you go register a domain name at GoDaddy, you can host it there, but let's say you host it somewhere else, then you just change your name servers to point to where it is hosted.
00:07:18
Speaker
And so a name server usually looks like NS1.something.com and NS2.something.com. So a lot of people use CloudFlare. It might be CloudFlare.com, NS1.CloudFlare.com. But I think for most people, if you're using, if you're registering a domain name at a registrar, you might either host it there, in which case you probably don't even touch the name servers because you just tell the registrar, hey, I want to set up hosting, and they do all that in the background.
Speculation and Valuation Metrics
00:07:46
Speaker
But otherwise, if you're hosting it somewhere else, then you need to change those name servers. Andrew, one of the things that you mentioned, which I think is fascinating, is that there's an entire industry around domain name investment and purchasing and buying and selling. How big can you qualify it at all? How big of an industry is it?
00:08:05
Speaker
Yeah, it's really hard to quantify. I guess I can give a couple data points. GoDaddy owns what we call an aftermarket, which is where people buy and sell these domain names that is called Afternix. And throughout the year, they will transact $400 million worth of domain names in their aftermarket and GoDaddy aftermarket.
00:08:30
Speaker
There's an escrow service that handles a lot of domain names called escrow.com. And in any given year, they do hundreds of millions of dollars of transactions that they're handling on the backend, just kind of the financial side and the transfer side of that.
00:08:46
Speaker
So as far as how many people buy and sell domain names, it's difficult to say because a lot of people just kind of do it on the side and a lot of people do it accidentally. They're an entrepreneur, they start registering domain names before they know it, they have 100 and someone wants to
Choosing the Right TLDs
00:09:01
Speaker
buy one. So there's thousands of people like that out there. Really, as far as full-time people, it's probably 100, 200, maybe 300 that do it full-time.
00:09:16
Speaker
There are a lot of people that do it that you never hear about, right? So it's really hard to quantify that as well. So is it kind of like old-timey gold speculation where you're buying in hopes that somebody will find it, or do you buy for a reason? Yeah, so it's gotten pretty sophisticated. And people register now based on a number of different metrics. So part of it is just, do I think someone would buy this and what would they buy it for, right? You need to envision what that ultimate buyer is.
00:09:46
Speaker
But there are lots of tools and metrics out there that people use now, such as how many domain names is this second-level domain registered in? How many top-level domains? So we talked earlier. So if a domain name
00:10:00
Speaker
If the second level domain is books.com, is it registered in books.net.org.us.info.wtf, which is actually one of the options you have to the right of the dot there. Is it really? Yeah, it is.
00:10:16
Speaker
So thinking about how many domains that's registered in things like that. So there are a bunch of different metrics that people use. I mean, truly hundreds of different metrics that people use in different ways. How old is the domain name? How long has it been registered? If it was registered very early, there's a presumption that maybe it's a better name. That's not always true.
00:10:38
Speaker
But so it's a pretty sophisticated business now. People use AI to figure this out. They use bots to grab these domain names when they expire. So it's a very sophisticated business now, but there's still opportunity. I mean, when you think about how many people are involved in this on a daily basis, I think new people come in and figure out new ways to make money all the time, which is part of what makes it exciting.
Regional Domain Trends
00:11:06
Speaker
Sure. As you're speculating, and one of the things that we do for our customers at BusyWeb is we help them procure domain names sometimes for their businesses.
00:11:17
Speaker
One of the biggest questions I get is, do I need a .com? Is that the most important thing? Well, there is a WTF domain, so should I get mycompany.wtf or should I go for .com or what's the best bet for, and I know that it's different for everybody, but if you were coming to a business out of nowhere, what's your recommendation for what kinds of domains, TLDs, top level domains to
Risks of Country-Code Domains
00:11:46
Speaker
get?
00:11:46
Speaker
Right. So the advice back in the day was always dot com. And with the caveat that in some countries, you know, we're here in the US dot com, that's, that's primarily what you see, right? But in some countries, that's not the case. So there are these things called country code top level domains. Whenever you see something that ends in a two letter top level domain, that's a country code.
00:12:08
Speaker
And so for example, in parts of Europe, like in Germany, you're more likely to see their country code.de at the end of a domain name that's being advertised than .com. And so if you were in one of those countries, you might go with the country code domain instead, but .com was king, still is king, still accounts for about half of all the domain names that are registered out there.
00:12:31
Speaker
But starting around 2014, all of these new extensions came on. So we had, you always had com.org in the early 2000s, you had .info and .biz as options as well. And then around 2014, you started having options like WTF and .club and .plumber and all these interesting domain names come online. And I would say for the first seven, eight years, those didn't really catch on.
00:13:01
Speaker
Over the past few years, I've noticed more and more businesses using them and more and more communities kind of adopting them. So there's a domain name that ends in .xyz, which is really popular with crypto companies, web-free companies.
00:13:19
Speaker
And so they kind of adopted that, right? And I think you see it more and more. And now you see .ai, which is actually a country code for a tiny island called Anguilla.
Creating New TLDs
00:13:32
Speaker
I think that's how you pronounce it. And so now when you see artificial intelligence companies, your first guess is actually that they ended in .ai, their domain name.
00:13:45
Speaker
I guess the way I frame this for people is if you do something other than .com, you need to be prepared for some confusion. And so a lot of people will still type into .com as someone who owns a .com of websites that are developed and say .org.
00:14:01
Speaker
I know I get a lot of traffic and a lot of confused people going to the dot com rather than the dot org or the dot net or whatever it is. So there is some confusion there. The upside is that you can get some really good second level domain names in these extensions. So I say extensions and top level domains interchangeably. Got it. So while there are over 150 million dot com second level domains registered and some of these other top level domains, there might be single digit thousands.
00:14:31
Speaker
So there are lots more opportunities to get a high quality second level domain usually at an affordable price. Sometimes they price those higher, which we could get into, but I want to go down that rabbit hole right away. But so when we're talking about availability, there's a lot more availability there. And you can also have fun with it too. So some people will create something on the left of the dot that
00:14:55
Speaker
Kind of flows into the right of the dot there is a one of the bigger sales that casino i think it's not casino dot casinos speaking of confusion but it's online dot casino right so they kind of make it they make both of those you know match up and so there's some fun things you can do there.
00:15:15
Speaker
I think that people that choose those alternate extensions just need to understand that some people will be confused and potentially end up at another website. You want to think about how the .com is being used and if it's a competitor, then you're potentially running into issues there.
00:15:33
Speaker
I think my favorite second-level domain, because Dave and I live in Minnesota, has always been Mongolia as a country code because of the two-letter suffix. Yeah, the top-level domain. Yeah, it's .mn. So you could buy plumber.mn if you're a Minnesota-based business.
00:15:53
Speaker
Usually when I explain to people how they should really be buying their domains from Mongolia, then their eyes tend to glaze over. You know, dot ly, which is really popular for a while, is Libya. And so, you know, Libya has not been super stable over the past decade or two. And, you know, there are risks there to using these domains that are cute or different, like that, that are country code domains.
00:16:21
Speaker
Can you explain a little bit about how all of that works? Because it is. So does Libya control that domain?
Digital Marketing Services Promotion
00:16:29
Speaker
And how does all that work? So almost all of the top level domains are fairly tightly regulated by a group called ICANN, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. But the country code domain names are not.
00:16:42
Speaker
And so they can be a little bit Wild West. They don't have rules. They don't have contracts in place with ICANN that regulates how they use them, what they can do with them, ensures their stability, that sort of thing. So they're a little bit different animal.
00:16:57
Speaker
That says some of them are very popular and fairly well maintained, like .co, for example, is actually Columbia, as you probably see a lot of that out there. .me is Montenegro, which is actually a fairly relatively new country in the grand scheme of things. But that's fairly well managed because they're managing those for commercial purposes from the start, right? They kind of commercialize them.
00:17:25
Speaker
So they don't wanna shoot their golden goose, right? But yeah, it is something that those two letter domain name, top level domain names are much less regulated than anything else.
00:17:39
Speaker
I know the price for Mongolian domain names is about $55 a year or two. One of the things I've always wondered is if you talked a little bit earlier about these sort of new domains that are coming out like the XYZ or the dot plumber, is that something that you can create and then make a lot of money off of? So if I wanted to make, to offer dot trig V domains, is that something that I can do?
00:18:08
Speaker
Well, so ICANN regulates the release of those and they did a round of expansion back. I think applications were due in 2012 where you could apply. Anyone could apply. So yes, if you wanted to do dot trig V, you could have applied for it.
00:18:24
Speaker
The application fee was $185,000. And then you were probably spending hundreds of thousands of dollars more in legal fees, technology fees, that sort of stuff. So quite expensive. But then if you got that, you could go out there and offer anyone a .trigvie domain name and you can make money from that. So that's where all this expansion came from. Now it is over 10 years later, ICANN does not move at a very fast speed.
00:18:52
Speaker
And they're finally getting ready to potentially open up applications again, probably in a couple of years. I said probably because these things always get delayed. So there might be another opportunity, but it's not as simple as saying, I want dot trick V. I'm going to go set it up right now. And so these companies that set those up, they're obviously in it for profit and you think they put a lot of money in it. And in some cases, if more than one person applied, they had to go to auction against each other. And so like.
00:19:22
Speaker
What did Google pay for .app? I think they paid about $25 million to basically beat all the other companies to .app. So it could get quite expensive. And these are not nonprofit companies. For the most part, they're trying to make money from it, which is why, in some cases, these domains will be quite a bit more expensive than .com. Also, you'll find sometimes, I mentioned earlier that you can get these great second-level domains and some of these top-level domains.
00:19:49
Speaker
The registries, as we call them, these companies that applied for those names can set their own pricing and they can set it different for the better names. So you might find that online.casino is not one that you could go get for the same price as any other.casino. So they can kind of set a price there and in a lot of cases you pay that price every year, right? This more expensive price.
00:20:11
Speaker
So that's a long way to answer your question, but yes you can if you have a lot of money is kind of the answer and it's not at any time. You have to do it when these windows are open. Okay, so let's take a quick break and while I go check the couch cushions so I can realize the Dr. Trigby dream and then we'll be right back right after this.
00:20:34
Speaker
Today's episode of Dial It In is brought to you by BusyWeb, your partner in driving growth for business service and manufacturing businesses online. Are you a business service or manufacturing business eager to expand your online presence, generate leads and boost revenue? BusyWeb has what you need.
00:20:51
Speaker
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00:21:15
Speaker
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Selecting Business Domain Names
00:21:38
Speaker
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00:22:01
Speaker
All right, we're back with Andrew, the domain expert. He crushed my dream of not being able to have the .trigby domains. Andrew, when people are trying to buy a domain for their business, what are some key factors should they consider? Right. Well, I think one of the easiest and most basic things is you want something that's easy to remember.
00:22:28
Speaker
Remember the domain name, if they've been to it before, if they hear about it at a party, you just want them to be able to find you, right? And so something that's easy to remember is important there. And one thing that comes along that usually it's going to be on a shorter end. Domain name wire isn't particularly short, but I think it's fairly memorable to people that have been there, right? It's about domain names and I put wire on it just like a lot of publications do.
00:22:55
Speaker
And then you want something that we call that this is a key one that a lot of people miss. We call it passing the radio test. And that is that if I say it aloud, if I say it out loud here to you guys,
00:23:10
Speaker
Can you, can you understand what I'm saying and then go remember it and type it in, right? So some domain names don't sound like how they might type it in. So for example, if you put a digit in your domain name, so like homes for Minnesota.com.
00:23:29
Speaker
and you're actually using the digit four rather than F-O-U-R. Or if it's something that can be spelled in multiple ways, that won't pass the radio test as well. So one of the things I recommend to people is when you come up with that great name for your business and you're like, this is it, before you register to go buy it, call five people on the phone.
00:23:50
Speaker
People still occasionally call people on the phone, but make sure you do it verbally and say, hey, I'm thinking about this domain name for my business and say the domain name. And then, you know, 20, 30 seconds later, say, so what was that domain name? And then how would you spell it? How would you type that in if you were at your browser, if you were on Chrome right now typing this in?
00:24:14
Speaker
And so I think that's kind of a critical test to do, which is kind of doing this verbally to people, maybe not even asking them out in public or maybe it's a little noisy, that sort of thing. Can they remember it? Can they spell it? So will they actually be able to go type it in and visit your website?
Avoiding Domain Name Pitfalls
00:24:34
Speaker
So I think those are kind of the high level factors that I tell people whenever it comes to choosing a domain name,
00:24:43
Speaker
There are other things to consider too, which is kind of pigeonholing yourself in by making it too specific. At the same time, you might want it to be specific if your business is specific. And so I think that an example I always give is if Amazon had been called books.com, that would have been a problem once they moved past.
00:25:04
Speaker
past selling books, right? But Amazon passes the radio test, it's easy to remember. And it's a brand that they were able to use to expand to lots of different things, right? And it has this connotation of this big expanse, long river, all this sort of stuff that works well for them. Whereas books.com would not have been a great long term domain name for them.
00:25:30
Speaker
Somebody told me the other day that Amazon is now something that generationally people think of differently. Like we think of Amazon as a bookseller that has now changed into a much larger behemoth Goliath type thing. But people under the age of 30, they think of Amazon as a delivery service.
00:25:51
Speaker
Yeah. That would make sense. That would make sense. Something completely different. One of the things that I think I wanted to throw in that I usually tell people is you need to make sure that if you have more than one word in your domain, you can't spell an inadvertent other word.
00:26:09
Speaker
Yes. We have a number of examples on that. We'll get to that in a bit. But smushing two words together, the naked eye tends to make the third word that you don't always necessarily want to.
00:26:25
Speaker
And like dashes would definitely break the radio test, right? Yeah, I don't recommend hyphens. You know, it's odd. In Germany, people for some reason are accepting of hyphens in your domains more than elsewhere. But yeah, you don't want hyphens. In general, if you have a number in there, you'd like to have it as both, you know, the digit as well as spelled out just for protective reasons.
00:26:48
Speaker
So book both domains is what you're saying. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So sometimes you want to register some variations. If it is difficult to spell, then you might want to register a lot of those misspellings. I remember back in the dot com boom, there was a
00:27:04
Speaker
a company called Kuzootite, like the sneeze. Nobody can spell that and they registered so many different variations of that to try to capture everyone. But in general, you just don't want to go down that route if you can avoid it.
Acquiring Taken Domain Names
00:27:21
Speaker
If I'm online and I'm picking my domain name and I just want to put in my company name and it's not available, what do I do then? Can I get it?
00:27:31
Speaker
Yeah, so I think one mistake people make is they type it in and it's not available and they're like, well, got to move on to something else. But a lot of these domains are available for sale. Millions of them are available for sale and they aren't necessarily that expensive. So typically, a domain name that's for sale will sell for somewhere between $2,000 and $5,000, which I know a lot of people say, hey, that's a lot of money. But when you think about it being your storefront,
00:28:00
Speaker
anything about the fact that your storefront is going to be around for years it's really not that much i mean how much do you spend on other marketing how much do you spend on on ads how much do you spend on your website and that sort of thing when you amortize that cost out it's really not that much.
00:28:17
Speaker
And in some cases, you can get it for a lot less. Obviously, great names or actually even marginally good names cost more than $5,000, but you can get a perfectly good domain name for under $5,000 and get the right name, the best possible domain name for your business. Sometimes when you type that domain name in, you'll even see that the domain registrar, which are companies like GoDaddy and Dynadot that I mentioned earlier,
00:28:44
Speaker
Network solutions they'll say that that domain name is for sale and for how much and You can actually just click a button and buy it just like you would any other domain name You just pay more and then within a minute or two it's in your account at that domain name register You don't have to deal with transfers or anything like that and you can start using it other times you might have to
00:29:07
Speaker
find the domain name for sale somewhere. If you type in the domain name, a lot of times it'll resolve to a page that I'm sure everyone here has seen that says, this domain is for sale. This is the price or contact is here to find out more.
00:29:20
Speaker
And in some cases, if neither of those are in place, you might hire a domain broker to go out there and try to acquire it for you. Of course, then you're talking about added expense, so it depends on how important it is to you. But yeah, I definitely wouldn't stop there if the domain you want is taken. And then, of course, another option is going to some of those other top-level domain names. And so you want to think about, is there a top-level domain that has the right connotation for what I'm doing?
00:29:49
Speaker
Or do I want a generic one like.online or.site as an option there that you can certainly do. And as I mentioned, there are drawbacks to that and there's an upside too, right? You can have a fun extension. You can have a more memorable second level domain name because there are more domains available. But then there's the confusion factor of having something other than .com or your dominant country code to the right of the dot.
00:30:18
Speaker
One thing
Domain Investment Insights
00:30:19
Speaker
that we should probably understate here is you can have multiple domain names all pointing to the same website, right? Absolutely. Even for domain name wire, I have dnw.com, which I acquired much later, and I point that to domainnamewire.com. Domain name wire is a little bit long. If people are typing it in on their mobile phone or something like that, they can just type dnw.com and it automatically forwards there.
00:30:46
Speaker
And so you can absolutely do that. I think most people do variations or shortened versions of their name and afford, or they start it with a domain name that they didn't love, but they could afford and then later on they can afford the better name that they want and then so they can just forward it there and tell people that name.
00:31:06
Speaker
Do you think as a best practice, if you do upgrade your domain name, should you change your email address and all of those things that go with it? Yes, but this is challenging. And this is why if you can afford the right domain right off the bat, you want to go for it. Switching email is one thing. That's fairly doable. The challenge to switching your actual domain name
00:31:35
Speaker
is SEO in Google and it can take a while for Google to catch up to a name change. You've got all these links pointing to your old domain and you're forwarding it over, but you have to meticulously forward each domain with a different type of redirect. And there are a lot of case studies at big companies that have done this and for a while it
00:31:57
Speaker
dramatically hits the amount of traffic and unless the bottom line that they get from making that change so it's something that needs to be done with a good plan probably with the help of an outside consultant knows what they're doing if you're just business owner doesn't deal with domains all day. And websites and so in an ideal world you get that one that you want to start now.
00:32:22
Speaker
Sometimes people get the ideal domain later and they'll actually just forward it to the longer domain name. Kind of like I do with dnw.com, right? I couldn't get it originally and then it became for sale and I could afford it at that point. So I was able to get that and I don't, you know, I use it for some things, but I still use domain name wire.com as my main domain name. Dave, what's the most you've ever heard somebody spending on a domain?
00:32:49
Speaker
Well, there's a two parter on that, right? So the first thing is the, the most that we've ever worked with. And so I think that one was a construction client of ours and they wound up spending just south of $10,000 for the website domain. And they were, they were rebranding and it was, it was a big deal. And we count, we counseled them about the SEO drawbacks of completely changing, but we did a redirect. Yeah.
00:33:18
Speaker
then, man, I think the .app one, that's for the entire TLD or the top level domain, but wasn't it like, what's the big thing about like XXX or something that I read in the news? Well, for a long time, the most anyone I pay publicly for a domain name or it was revealed was sex.com. There it is. Might be what you're thinking about. I think that was 13 million.
00:33:46
Speaker
the most expensive domain name that was ever publicly revealed being purchased was voice dot com for thirty million dollars and this is one this is one that a web three crypto company.
00:34:02
Speaker
bought from another public company and they aren't even really using the domain anymore. They changed the use they had for it. It was kind of a perfect storm. This is a Web3 company that was able to get billions of dollars through an initial coin offering or whatever they were back in the heyday of cryptocurrency and that sort of thing.
00:34:25
Speaker
But we do have domains that sell for eight figures, so $10 million or more every year. In fact, last year, let me... Well, I'm blanking it. Let's see. Well, I think I know the one you're talking about is the chief technical officer at HubSpot. Yeah, yeah, Darmesh. He bought something and then he sold it again.
00:34:52
Speaker
I think it was chat. It was chat.com actually. Oh, was it? Okay. Yeah. So I was blanking there, but yeah. So chat, you bought chat.com for over $10 million and then he sold it pretty quickly for over $10 million. That was just last year. And so, you know, these names can sell for quite a bit of money.
00:35:17
Speaker
You know, we often see domains that sell for millions of dollars. I say often, I mean, a lot of times those big sales like that don't go reported. Neither the buyer nor the seller wants people to know about it and how much they spend for it. In fact, HubSpot bought a domain name for $10 million as well. They bought connect.com, which they're using for like a social media type company.
00:35:40
Speaker
They haven't really figured it out yet. It's kind of like a bullet board, but now they have some chat function on it. Yeah, I'm not sure too. I haven't played around with it. I've been on it because we're HubSpot people here. We're deep into the orange Kool-Aid here at PhysiWeb.
00:36:03
Speaker
These names can sell for a lot, but again, those are the outliers. Most names are going to sell for $2,000 to $5,000. If it's a one-word.com, it's going to sell for a lot more.
00:36:15
Speaker
But yeah, so they can certainly sell for a lot of money, but for the typical person getting a domain name, you're not gonna choose something like connect.com or voice.com because it's gonna be out of your price range, right? So buying something, I absolutely encourage people to think about them as a long-term investment for their business. Think of it as a marketing expense and think about the added marketing you're going to have to do if you have the wrong domain name.
00:36:41
Speaker
Right. So people are ending up at a competitor or they can't find your site, those sorts of things. Those are very, very costly mistakes. I think the classic example of that, a politician kind of blew a stack over the last year was that the White House is WhiteHouse.gov, but then whoever owns WhiteHouse.com, I think sells White House merch.
Importance of Domain Renewal
00:37:09
Speaker
There even was a porn site version back in the 90s. Yeah, I was going to say, the biggest... Well, now it looks like it's set up as a free election betting site, but... Yeah, even better. Yeah. So who's going to win the next election? That sort of thing. It seems like more Republicans are voting than Democrats, but...
00:37:31
Speaker
It looks like there are only a few votes anyway here, if I were to look at this. But yeah, that's a pretty famous example because it was used for porn in the early days. And so you'd had kids doing research for school projects and they land on this page. So it wasn't a good look. Right. There was an unfortunate juxtaposition of that happening during the Clinton administration too. So it just got weird. Right. Quick.
00:38:00
Speaker
This happened very recently as well with one of the domains that's listed on, I want to say Washington State's license plates.
00:38:10
Speaker
Yeah, it was in Washington because I'm there, but I remember this story. Okay. Yeah. But it wound up going to, because they let the domain expire. Right. And it wound up going to some very naughty site. Right. And it was on the back of, I think it was on the back of a bunch of license plates. Yeah. Right. Or something like that. So people were typing this name that was on the back of these hundreds of thousands of license plates or whatever, and going to a site they didn't want to go to. And that happens,
00:38:41
Speaker
There are quite a few examples of that. There was one recently, I forgot the name, but it was.
00:38:45
Speaker
a name printed on the side of a bunch of cereal boxes or snack boxes. It was some domain that a snack company had used for marketing purposes for a while. They were no longer really using it and they let it expire. And so that's why there are companies that specialize in just helping corporations not mess up like that. So, and keep writing their names. I think that begs an interesting question. So, you don't own a domain, right? You license it.
00:39:13
Speaker
Yeah, and you have to keep paying your fees for it, which are typically annually in order to retain that domain name. And so there's a huge market for these domain names that expire. In fact, that's where I would say the majority of the activity takes place with domain investors like myself as we wait for domain names to expire that were registered a while ago that are really good.
00:39:34
Speaker
and then we snap those up. No, we're not doing it because we want to take advantage of the previous owner, and we're not doing it to forward it to improper content. We're doing it because we think it's a great name that was registered a long time ago that some business might want to use in the future. I tell people it's like getting married to a woman. She's not yours, but you go through the process so it's nobody else's.
00:40:04
Speaker
That's one way of looking at it. I'm not gonna advocate for using that, but yes. Well, it's a deep cut in my humor bag and it doesn't always hit. But if your domain does expire, it doesn't automatically get picked up, right? It does go into sort of like a quarantine.
00:40:23
Speaker
Yeah, so there's this grace period, right, where you can renew it with your registrar. At some point in that grace period, you usually have to pay an additional fee to do it if you wait too long. But I think one thing people need to understand is that when it goes through that expiration process, you might think that no one in their right mind would ever want this domain name, but it gets added attention because it's going through this process.
00:40:47
Speaker
And there's a pretty good chance that someone else is going to pick up that name. So think about even if you don't really want to keep paying for the domain name, is it worth having someone else own it? How would you feel if someone else owned it and what they might do with it too? For example, that license plate pointing to horn or something like that, right? Because there are, you know,
00:41:12
Speaker
companies that are in the online gambling in the adult entertainment space that's one of their models right is to get these expiring domains that people might still be typing in or going into because they're in google and that sort of thing and landing on it.
Maintaining Domain Ownership
00:41:25
Speaker
So i would think about that before laying a domain expire and i would stay on top of your domain names.
00:41:33
Speaker
You always want to set them up for auto-renew, which means that they'll automatically renew, usually on expiration date. But you also need to make sure your credit card on file is still up to date. And in an ideal world, you have the keys to all your domain names, but a loved one also has that login information in case something happens to you. You're incapacitated for some reason.
00:41:58
Speaker
something like that so that you can protect those domain names as well. My advice is to renew them early, not wait for that auto-renewal. The renewal fees on .com domains, depending on where you have them are 10, 12 dollars. Just go ahead and do it for 10 years. Is that a better idea? I've heard people say, it's better for SEO if you book for 10 years out. Does that have any real impact?
00:42:26
Speaker
So there are two things that SEOs might tell you. One is that an older domain is viewed more favorably by Google. So a domain that was registered 20 years ago. And then if you registered 10 years out, they know that you're not just a spammer setting up a site that you're going to turn into here. Google has kind of denied that, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's not a factor. There's some obfuscation there that goes on, but they've said it doesn't matter.
00:42:54
Speaker
Whether or not it does, I'll let SEOs debate about that. That's not really my place. Sure. In our prep for this call, I know Trigvi, we were looking at some interesting domains. Let's get a little bit into- I found a list, but I'm curious from Andrew's standpoint, if he's got any good domain schadenfreude that he can share. There was actually an entire book written about these names that mean
00:43:22
Speaker
I mean, well, they could mean different things if you put capital letters in different places. And one of them that actually just came just expire recently was auctioned off. So it came on my radar radar again was therapist finder dot com. Yes. So therapist finder seems like a great site.
00:43:42
Speaker
To go find a therapist, which we all need right now, right? Crazy world out there. And so it actually just expired and someone else picked it up and someone actually bought therapist finder.net too recently. And so they're creating a site to find therapists. And if you put, if you capitalize the T and the F, it looks like therapist finder, but
00:44:06
Speaker
If you capitalize the T and the R and the F, then you have a totally different meaning. You can say it. It's a safe space. It spells the rapist finder.
00:44:19
Speaker
Absolutely not what you want when you're talking about therapy. I've got a list and it's going to get a whole lot worse than the rapist finds out. Yeah. Well, that's the one that's fresh on my mind, but I'm sure you have many others. Well, let's see if I can do there. So guys, obviously, we're all tech guys. We all love our tech. So as you're cycling out of your tech,
00:44:43
Speaker
What do you do with it? You obviously want to be responsible citizens, right? Yes. Right. What you can do is you can go to itscrap.com to find a place to recycle your old technology.
00:44:58
Speaker
Okay. I-T-S-C-R-A-P. Yeah. At that point, it is or it works both ways. Yeah. Yeah. So at that point, it's also literal because it could spell it's crap.com. Yeah.
00:45:17
Speaker
But boy, you know, a lot of times if you're in the entertainment industry and you're wanting to get in touch with somebody, you can't get in touch with the person, but you can get in touch with their agent. But who really is their agent? Wouldn't it be a great website if you could find out who somebody's representation is? Don't you think so, Andrew?
00:45:42
Speaker
Yeah, like who represents? Yeah, who represents dot com. That's important to have the R in the right spot. Yeah, so H-O-R-E, I see where we're running into a problem here. Yeah, so that if you read it wrong, it would be horrorpresence.com.
00:46:02
Speaker
Oh, the classic one. I think everybody sort of knows this is if you do anything internet related is the company that decided that they wanted to create an office supply store, but make it Caribbean theme and they opened up pen island net. Oh,
00:46:20
Speaker
Right, right. Careful with some of these so we don't get flagged in our inappropriate language. Yeah, well, I mean this is fact. It's not so you know the way you read that wrong is penispeniceland.net. Oh yes, let's see what else.
00:46:40
Speaker
I like experts exchange. That's a good one. Yeah. Cause you obviously, if you want to find an expert, you want to go some of my like Angie's list and you want to make sure you're hiring somebody who's, you know, really doesn't knows their stuff. But, um, boy, if you read that wrong, if you capitalize that wrong, it would also be expert sex change.com. Oh yeah. See.
00:47:02
Speaker
So it's important to be careful and I think the radio test is really important. And then there's the visual test here, right? I think my favorite too that I was able to find was an art gallery that was known as the speed of art. Yeah.
00:47:30
Speaker
that if you read it as the domain, it's speedofart.com. But I think my favorite one of all time was, I mean, there's all sorts. The Lake Tahoe Convention and Visitors Bureau did gotahoe-north.com.
00:47:51
Speaker
which then shortened to gatahonorth.com. What? Oh no. Yeah. But if you live in Boston and you're Jewish and you're of a certain age, obviously dating is hard. You guys know that. Being Jewish and not living in Boston. There was a company that built a great dating website for Boston Jewish singles over the age of 40.
00:48:21
Speaker
and it was North of Boston Jewish Singles was the name of the company that they did the initials. So it was nobjs.org. That I think was my favorite. The one thing that I want to add at the end here is, and one of the things that we do as, because we're in and out of domain work all the time, is if you're going to building a website,
00:48:53
Speaker
The one thing that Andrew didn't mention that I think is critical in the life of the business, Dave, is you absolutely have to own your own domain. Do not let somebody else buy a domain on your behalf. Or if they do, immediately do the work to transfer ownership.
00:49:15
Speaker
We did something where one of our best customers called and said, hey, I need this domain, buy it for me and I'll pay you. And we did and then we transferred and it was fine. But if you don't own your own domain, then you have a
00:49:30
Speaker
potential to be held hostage later as you're trying to break up with a vendor. And unfortunately it happens. You know, a lot of website developers will register to domain on behalf of their clients. And then if there's any sort of spute rightly or wrongly, they,
00:49:45
Speaker
they can hold that company hostage, right? Or just even more likely, the developer, the designer just stops doing that anymore and they stop paying attention to it and then all of a sudden your domain is up for auction somewhere. You need to have it and you don't want to delegate this, let's say you're a small business, 15, 20 employees, you don't want to delegate this to an employee, you as the owner of the business at that point want to
00:50:15
Speaker
have the control there. I see oftentimes where there's a dispute where it's an ex-employee did something or an ex-employee still had the keys to the domain registrar, still had the credentials, that sort of thing. And they do something and maybe they're mad or something like that. So redirect it. Absolutely.
Further Learning Resources
00:50:35
Speaker
You want to control that.
00:50:39
Speaker
Only if your business gets very, very big, is that something you want to want to hand over to someone else is their responsibility. But never a vendor. It should always be in-house and on the root level by the company, by sure. Andrew, this has been illuminating and certainly fascinating and a lot of fun. And, you know, obviously the therapist finders is something that we're going to have to continually work through. But much like, um,
00:51:08
Speaker
Choose Spain dot com is a good one too so where can. If people want to learn more about domains work what's your website and how can people name wire dot com you'll also find my podcast there as well as on your podcast app which is the domain and wire podcast.
00:51:25
Speaker
And I'll warn you, this is where we get into the weeds about domain names. So it's a place you want to go. If you're like, hey, this is really interesting. I have a lot of names. What can I do with them? How can I sell them? That sort of thing. Or maybe I want to start investing in names, then it's for you. But it definitely gets into the weeds. I'm subscribing. That's brilliant. Yeah. Andrew, thank you so much. My pleasure. Thanks for having me, guys.