Agreed on the % of trend names for a portfolio.

On a related thought, and I would love to hear other opinions on this (might be worth a separate posting from you) but why do we domain investors think that time makes domains worth more dollars?

It’s as if we think domains are like a fine wine (maybe they are) and with time chemical and cosmic reactions make them ferment and therefore they are more valuable. If tomorrow I were able to register perfectname.com, is it really going to be worth more six months from now than if I listed it for sale the day after tomorrow?

Just thinking.

Maybe I need a glass of grigio?

Claude

***UPDATED BY ELLIOT***

I would say its because people assume that the value will increase similar to real estate values. More people building websites means more domain names are in demand, and the price of the better ones will increase.

I do think a glass of Pinot Grigio will do you good, but I prefer a Pinot Noir or Cabernet

I really enjoy and appreciate your blog. But I am compelled to point out that you registered subprimemess.com in early Oct. and listed it for sale a couple of days later. A. this is certainly a trend domain in my eyes and B. you listed it pretty quickly (which you had previously said was not something that domainers like to see).

Claude

***UPDATED BY ELLIOT***

Yes, and I also said I do this on occasion. The difference between what I do and what I have seen others do is that my portfolio contains about 5% speculative trend names (or less) while others have entire portfolios of hundreds or thousands of names that are all like this.

If I wanted to, I could spend $20k on speculative names just as a roll of the dice, but I don’t think this would be wise, and it would be a bitch to manage.

A trend would be if it was the case where more and more people were naming their children names like “Barack” ie names of African origin (“Barack” evidently means “blessed”) . Who knows how many names from outside the traditional English language aren’t yet registered? If confronted with enough statistical evidence and the availability of the right names as dot com domains I might seriously think about registering a few dozen of whatever I might decide are the best names in the hope of getting the new “doug.com” (or whatever).

The point between something being a “fad” and becoming a full fledged “trend” would be that “emergence”. I would think that the ability to spot an “emerging trend” is the number one requirement of the successful “trend” domainer.

Recently I did a study to find which of the top 300 generics had been registered in the 600 top cities (North America) and when. 200,000 whois records that I had accumulated. I computed the average and mean registration dates of each generic for a variety of cases.

For example, there was/is a increasing number of “doctor” domains over the years registered as opposed to say “hardware”. That is, over the first few years “MiamiDoctor.com” type names were in (all positions are for example) position 150 – “lawyers” being number 1. The next few years saw the “doctor” generic rise to position 100, then to 60 and so on. Whereas “hardware” started off as the 30th earliest generic over the first few years but gradually has fallen.

When every single top 600 city and the generic “lawyers” dot com has been taken, along with “realestate” and a few others then you can be pretty sure that eventually “doctor” will reach that depth of penetration as far as domains go. “Hardware” might take a little (lot) longer if current trends continue and more professionals go online as opposed to traditional “niche” retailers. Who knows? All that was “for example” anyway.

Of course “doctors” and “lawyers” are easy targets but my point is that the same applies for dozens/hundreds of other generics. The task is picking which one, spotting a trend is crucial to not registering tens of thousands of domains but picking the right ones.

So, I’m assuming “joetheplumber.com” is a fad. However, there are plenty of good reasons to have a name like that, I’m not a plumber but if I were “gregthedomainer.com” – everyone would know which “Greg”. I’m not a real “domainer” though, more of a gambler hoping that ICANN won’t spot me counting cards at their table for a little longer. If I were “Jim” or “Bob” and had a profession that suited itself to people who basically know me, I’d be “JimThePlumber.com” or “BobTheExterminator”.

Of course who knows what these domains would be worth – but if there were a “trend” to do that, not a “fad”, and I had spotted it emerging – I’d take a few chips in that game. Who knows? In 23 years the $200 you spent to keep “BarackThePlumber.com” and “BarackTheLawyer.com” all that time would finally start paying off!!111

Ask eBay if they would un-brand themselves. We are fast leaving old rule books useless in a lot of asset market plays these days. Ever notice the times they are a changin.

There will be an exciting future for trend .com names.

***UPDATED BY ELLIOT***

Jeff,

I have a pretty good track record for buying and selling well, so this is based on my experience.

eBay and other companies in similar positions built their brand names based on their product or service, not on the name they chose for themselves. They have the best auction software, spent the most money marketing their services, and they gained market share by offering an almost unbeatable product. If they called themselves ibay or tbay or whatever else, they would have done just as well. It’s not the name, it’s the product/service.

As a personal example of this (and how many F500 companies think), I will share a story that happened during my time at AIG. We were rolling out a bill payment product with a trend/branded name. After I became involved on the project, I found that the product name’s domain name was taken and if/when we rolled out spending hundreds of thousands of marketing dollars, people could navigate to the product .com and get confused. In light of this, I did some research to find a product name that had its domain name available, and we rolled out with that. We didn’t go out and offer stupid money to the guy who owned it, as he probably hoped (since it was parked and not a common phrase). Sure, if we needed that name, we might have spent money trying to buy it, but at launch, it was more important to spend marketing dollars on marketing rather than on a domain name. This is how most F500 companies think.

A lot of domainers see all the “good names” as taken, and they try to buy fringe names. Many end up buying worthless names that they hope and pray someone will buy – which inevitably very infrequently happens. They waste a lot of money and buy domain names like lottery tickets, and that’s not a good way to make a living in the domain industry. Had I done that, I would probably be still in corporate America. I didn’t, and i have done pretty okay for myself – and I just started out 4 years ago, unlike many of the professionals who bought in 1995-2001.

Out of curiosity, since you continue to be adamantly opposed to what I am saying, could you share some of your success stories that revolved around buying trend domain names and then selling them at a considerable profit? What are some of your valuable trend domain names that have received large inquiries? I am an open book with just about everything I do, so why not share your successes with the rest of us.

When you identify a trend and if that trend fits with specific geo locations it is then possible to register hundreds of domains. Of course you have to be somewhat sure of the trend. About 4 years or so ago I figured “robots” and “robotics” would be a pretty good trend and so I registered 50+ geo-robotics.com domains like “australiarobotics” and “canadarobots” and “losangelesrobotics”, etc

Now, robotics and robots may or may not be geographically important and my investment may or may not be a profitable one but I suppose my point is that “trend domaining” doesn’t have to be all that much of a gamble. You don’t have to be the first to spot the trend, just one of the first to realize that an existing, confirmed, growing trend can be applied to geographical locations.