After spending a week at the ICANN Meeting with 2,000 + people which are pouring over a Billion dollars into the domain name industry, I read the piece in Forbes.com by Deborah L. Jacobs, who is a self proclaimed “woulda coulda shoulda” kind of girl who still dreams about all the money that was sitting on the table in 1995, 2005 which she missed and is still missing today, trying to figure out how to fit all of her “worldly possessions into a carry-on bag“.
Ms. Jacobs took the opportunity to write about the domain name industry concluding “After The Gold Rush: Domain Names Have Lost Their Glitter”.
However Ms. Jacobs seemed to rest her conclusions on the domain industry on the results HA.com auction that was held in New York on Thursday and the $500K domains that sold and the volume of high dollar reported domain name sales in recent years
Ms. Jacobs apparently does not read TheDomains.com otherwise she would know that a representative of escrow.com who handles the escrow on more domain name transactions than anyone else recently reported that they process a total dollar volume of domain sales that greatly exceed the amount that gets reported saying; “we close in some weeks more dollars in domain sales than what other company’s report in sales for the entire year.’ Ron Jackson of DnJournal.com, reported that $25 Million in domain sold in the last quarter that were reported
When asked what percentage sales actually were processed through Escrow.com, compared to the reported amount of $25 Million dollars, Ms. Hill answered after a lot of hesitancy, two to three times that amount.
Ms Jacobs also completely ignored the 2,000 + people that were meeting at the same time at the ICANN meeting in Argentina who have already spend 1/3 of a billion dollars just in applications fees for new gTLD domain names whom are expected to spend over a billion dollars to acquire the domain name strings and market the new domain extension in just the next couple of years.
The Forbes.com article contains a quote from Weston Anson, owner of CONSOR Intellectual Asset Management, whom in my 15 years in the domain industry, I personally have never heard of, quoting him as saying:
“Your domain name is far less important than it was a decade ago,”
“Search engines are much smarter so the domain name doesn’t matter as much as the meta-tags embedded in your website”
“And with the number of top-level domains expanding (they now include .net, .info and .org, to name just a few)”
Hum
As far as I know .net and .org domain names were around before 2000 and .info was delegated in 2003, so none of those really qualify as a recent development, certainly not in Internet Years or even Dog Years.…
