UltSearch: The $82 million/ year man?

[Focus]

originally domains were FREE for awhile I forget the year but I am thinking like 89'.....down here in south florida the IBM world headquarters was in boca raton at the time, right down the street from where I live and supposingly those guys were all WAY ahead of the game and got ALOT of the two letter and three letter .coms as well as many priceless generics, IBM was at the cutting edge of computers and technology at the time and everyone was on the good old 386 IBM desktop models...remember how long it would take just to load a webpage?!?! LOL if we had broadband back then I think I would have gotten alot more done and been able to figure alot more out, I thought my 14.4k modem was so fast at the time, when 28.8k came out it was like a revolution! Also, remember there was no "domain market" and no info forums and no big domain sales to make everyone go try to register all the gems before the pack...ebay had just come out and only a few people were selling stuff with just text ads and you had to send a money order, it seemed nuts at the time and I even remember talk of how crazy an online auction was and it couldnt be trusted (maybe not then))...hehehe, this was before Paypal and other online payment services and even the act of just registering a domain online using a credit card was highly suspect as the general consensus was that your information was very unsafe online, this was back when aol 2.0 and 3.0 was out and people were on the internet stealing account information left and right, hell thats how almost everyone got online at the time was with AOL. If I could only go back, if I could only go back! I remember a close friend who was older than me started telling me about domains and he had read something somewhere they would be valuable "one day" at his house I checked "fishing.com" and it was available in .com and .net, why I did not register it is beyond me but I was in my teens at the time and didnt just have a credit card handy to get names on a whim, and $40 was kinda steep for a kid back then, even here in south florida where the larger part of the internet boom occured - just remember that people who ARE NOT online now in this domain name game like we are, will most likely be saying the same thing though in another 10 years from now, (maybe less)so try to think like it's 10 years from now but do all those things now. It really is virtual realestate and for now at least its a wide open market with alot of good .com's still not taken! It's NEVER TOO LATE to have a breakthrough idea!

Chris

Also, take my advice, I have put much thought and research into it and I can firmly predict that 4 letter .coms will be just as valuable in 5 years as 3 letter ones are now...it's easy to see if you think about 2 letter .coms being worth about 20k a few years ago and now you can't touch one for less than about 100k with most being more like 500k to a mill.
2 years ago you could buy almost any 3 letter .com you wanted for maybe a few k max, now they are hitting six figures! There are not many good undeveloped 3 letter domains to go around and in fact ALOT of companies can use 4 letter domains and you can apply many potential meanings to alot of 4 letter combos, there will always be a big market for the shortest .com domains possible and soon 3 letter .coms will be out of the normal grasp of almost everyone but the big capitol venture groups and fortune 500 companies who own most of them now and also companies that will have them forever and use them for business, those who were holding names have long since sold them off and the next big ticket is 4 letter domains and they are almost all gone. It is just the logical progression from 2 letters to 3 letters and then 4 and so on and so forth...how easy do you think it will be to get a four letter .com in 5 years? The day they go extinct (which will be soon) the market will take a huge leap in value for them, and thats not far off with some big domain speculators registering hundreds at a time and people like elequa with their own registrars who might possibly just take them all in one shot. I have recently hand reg'd over 80 of them with VERY GOOD letters and even repeaters from drop lists, just get yourself at least 10 good ones no matter what and hold on to them for a few years...riches await us all if we use the past to pattern the future, it's almost an exact science. :evil:

 

[Rubber Duck]

Chris

Also, take my advice, I have put much thought and research into it and I can firmly predict that 4 letter .coms will be just as valuable in 5 years as 3 letter ones are now...it's easy to see if you think about 2 letter .coms being worth about 20k a few years ago and now you can't touch one for less than about 100k with most being more like 500k to a mill.
2 years ago you could buy almost any 3 letter .com you wanted for maybe a few k max, now they are hitting six figures! There are not many good undeveloped 3 letter domains to go around and in fact ALOT of companies can use 4 letter domains and you can apply many potential meanings to alot of 4 letter combos, there will always be a big market for the shortest .com domains possible and soon 3 letter .coms will be out of the normal grasp of almost everyone but the big capitol venture groups and fortune 500 companies who own most of them now and also companies that will have them forever and use them for business, those who were holding names have long since sold them off and the next big ticket is 4 letter domains and they are almost all gone. It is just the logical progression from 2 letters to 3 letters and then 4 and so on and so forth...how easy do you think it will be to get a four letter .com in 5 years? The day they go extinct (which will be soon) the market will take a huge leap in value for them, and thats not far off with some big domain speculators registering hundreds at a time and people like elequa with their own registrars who might possibly just take them all in one shot. I have recently hand reg'd over 80 of them with VERY GOOD letters and even repeaters from drop lists, just get yourself at least 10 good ones no matter what and hold on to them for a few years...riches await us all if we use the past to pattern the future, it's almost an exact science. :evil:

The problem with extrapolating what happens between 2, 3, 4 and even five letter domain names is that they grow Geometrically.


2 Letter Alphas 676
3 Letter Alphas 17576
4 Letter Alphas 456976
5 Letter Alphas 11.88M

Clearly getting much value out 5 Letter domains depends on much more than their shortness. 4 Letter domains also are hardly ever going to be considered rare.

However, I think there is some logic behind your thinking. I have extended that to the IDN market where there were a lot 1 Letter Characters available. The important markets are the larger language groups, which do not use the Roman Alphabet. As you have realised it is all about supply and demand. Single aphabetic characters are in short supply and the more online users there are the more sort after such domains will become.


China has about 100M Internet users and is growing rapidly but there are about 5000 individual characters. By contrast Arabic, Japanese Hirigana and Hindi have limited character sets. We have registered numerous single character domains in Chinese, but we also have:

1 Cyrillic Letter "k".com and a couple of dot nets
22 Isolated Arabic Letters in both dot com and dot net
2/3 of the Davangari (Hindi) alphabet plus all the numerical digits except 1.com
The lions share of the Japanese Hirigana alphabet.

Much depends whether IE 7.0 support for IDN will lead to a wider adoption. I think in China it is inevitable to some extent due to the shear demand for domains and the fact that English is not really widely used, despite claims by the UK government that there are 300M English speakers is PRC. For Arabic and Hindi by contrast, by the time most people get online, most of the language infrastructure will be in place. Many may never use English to brows.

By the way, I have no objection to being called Juvenile. When you reach your late 40s, its sort of a complement! Mind you with a girl friend 20 years younger perhaps the hat fits!

Best Regards
Dave Wrixon

 

[Focus]

thanks for the info, and mine is 23 for the record and a semi-porn star/model! lol

and based on the shear number of 4 letter .coms alone it would seem to the untrained eye that a ton are out there, but in reality a very limited percentage of them are of highly usable combos...same with 3 letter .com's as well...numbers dont tell the whole story..the fact is they will be gone and people will want them, and it is much easier to do business with an english person or company than foreign and the ability to reach such markets is at least for now very limited, not to say that won't change in the future but ultimately nothing will ever beat the .com

heres my chick by the way...

http://www.onemodelplace.com/member.cfm?ID=166577

since you brought it up...

 

[Rubber Duck]

thanks for the info, and mine is 23 for the record and a semi-porn star/model! lol

and based on the shear number of 4 letter .coms alone it would seem to the untrained eye that a ton are out there, but in reality a very limited percentage of them are of highly usable combos...same with 3 letter .com's as well...numbers dont tell the whole story..the fact is they will be gone and people will want them, and it is much easier to do business with an english person or company than foreign and the ability to reach such markets is at least for now very limited, not to say that won't change in the future but ultimately nothing will ever beat the .com

heres my chick by the way...

http://www.onemodelplace.com/member.cfm?ID=166577

since you brought it up...

Yes, of course you are right there will be very valuable 4 letter Acronyms which have a specific meaning to a large number of people just as 3721.com is huge in China. It would be rash, however. to assume that all 4 digit numbericals are going to highly valuable. That would imply that most of us are capable of learning the phone book, and indeed if we were that good then why not just use IP addresses.

For IDNs, yes I agree with you that things are currently difficult although some speculators are already paying serious money (not me I have to add). The main problems are lack of traffic revenues and serious browser support, which was exacerbated by the phishing hype earlier in the year (well at least someone saw the potential).

The traffic situation is complexed but Sedo are working on a PPC system that will not only support IDN but will provide adverts in Geographical and Language context. At the moment the main players in this field are Baidu and 3721.com of China, although the latter is paid Keywords system not related to type in. In Russia there is Yandex.com. As for the Arab world until recently no serious effort had been made by the major search engines to get the majority of web-sites indexed and even then the number of web-sites is still comparatively small. Googel and MSN are now going head to head over this.

The launch of full IDN support by Microsoft for IE 7.0 and Outlook should give many more users access via IDN.

In relation to your LOOK BACk on the earlier days of dot, it is interesting to note that most of us had no local HUB or ISP in those days let alone Broadband, which is why most of the good names were registered in the US.

Best Regards
Dave Wrixon

 

[Focus]

yeah and we were all stuck on snail slow aol....it literally would take 10 minutes to sign on...i cant imagine how long it would have taken to reg a domain, and hour? and of course there were no bulk tools or bulk registrations..let alone a list of anything available..it would take 10 minutes just to check a domain, hard to imagine now but it really was that slow..

 

[OnSpec]

The problem is what is the next big thing?

It is a " Number$ " game.

 

[Bashar]

back in 90s when a domain get transfered to a new owner the registration dates resets, like what happened for kuwait.com when it sold in 1998 regdate changed from 1995 to 1998

i think this what happened to most amazing .coms before ICANN accredited registrars got into biz in 99 i.e sex.com etc..

 

[Focus]

I think you are right....dude