Web Domain Advice

[roymond]

And Jim, .net is totally cool.

[Spud]

Hey Eric, you aren't the jerk who is holding out for us to cough up for songfight.com, are you?

SPUD

[Lunkhead]

Real estate speculators are frankly also sleazy, if you ask me, only what they do is actually more harmful because housing is a basic necessity. Their treatment of homes as a commodity in a speculative market makes it harder for normal people to own their own homes, which puts them in the financially dubious position of having to rent.

Domain name speculators have a similar effect, making it harder for people who have non-speculative uses for domains to get the domains they want. Of course, if somebody can't get the domain they want, it may just be a nuisance to them, but it might also stifle businesses and individuals who don't necessarily have a lot of money but might have great products/art/services/writing/etc. to offer. They will have to settle for some second-choice domain that's less easily remembered and found and they will not be heard by as many people.

Just because you manually parked them before there were parking services doesn't mean you were "using" them for more than speculation. They were still parked, you just actually had to do some basic maintenance work to make money off them the way you're making money off of them now.

I think what puts people off about speculators is that they are not actually adding any value anywhere along the line. They are serving as middle men, but rather than being middle men who aid in getting people the homes/domains/etc. that they want, they are actually impeding people by inflating prices and introducing instability into the market, with profit as their sole motivation. You're being a really great capitalist, and it's nice that you're helping out your mom, but you're mostly just making life harder for other people (at least, other people who can't afford your prices).

[MC Eric B]

Spud - no, songfight.com is owned by BuyDomains.com. They own over 400,000 domains.

[Spud]

Eric - how do you feel about them?

[MC Eric B]

Lunkhead - Yes, I pretty much agree with what you said. I am just making money off the misery of others. But, I am ok with that as long as it is legal.

Also, I do really use a lot of my domains for real sites. My main business is creating new websites. I come out with 5-10 new sites per month, so having good domains for them helps me a lot. My company has revenue of $3 million per year and less than 3% of that is from sales of domain names, plus it costs me $70,000/year in fees just to keep all the domains.

[Niveous]

I'm finding this conversation absolutely fascinating. Really, I am.

It sounds like the equivalent of a comic book horder buying a bunch of comics in hopes that one day he can resell them for a profit. It may suck for those who want the comic for the pleasure of reading it, but what can you do?

MC Eric B- what you do is cybersquatting but I'm not gonna put you down for it. Don't hate the player, hate the game. If you rolled the dice on these sites back in the day and now they worked out, congrats.

Jim- Don't worry about which suffix your website has. Just focus on the one you have and promote the hell out of it so that it's the top site in search engines. Who in this day and age is just typing in what they assume the address is without checking first? Those aren't the kind of the traffic you want anyway, they have web cooties.

[Spud]

I am just making money off the misery of others. But, I am ok with that as long as it is legal.

O.K. I give up.

[MC Eric B]

Spud - Buydomains.com is only in the business of buying domains for speculation, so they don't do exactly what I do, but I don't see anything wrong with it as long as they don't have trademarked domains. I actually bought 2 domains from them last year (FindBlogs.com and WebSwaps.com) for sites I was developing. Both were around $1000 each. It was worth the $1000 for me to have great domain names for those sites.

Now, the songfight.com domain is a little different situation. It appears you started your site before they bought the .com version of the domain, so you may have some trademark rights to the name. It depends what was on Songfight.com when you started your site.

[Spud]

We are never going to buy it from them. If someone else does, it will cause confusion. We are not doing this for money, so we cannot hire an attorney to deal with it for us either way, so there it sits. Good use of internet resources, eh?

Every case is a special case, in my experience.

Oh wait. I gave up. Because my opinion about this is not going to have any influence on you one way are the other. You do what you do, and I happen to not like it. My bad. I am sure you are a nice person.

[HeuristicsInc]

I am just making money off the misery of others. But, I am ok with that as long as it is legal.

Wow, so how do you sleep at night knowing that you purposely live to cause misery to others to profit from it? Lovely. I recommend reading "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" as it has some very good things to say about living with integrity. This seems to be something you sorely need if you think that the law is the only moral imperative.
-bill

[MC Eric B]

HeuristicsInc - If I bought Google stock for $100 back when it went public a few years ago, and sold it to you today for the market price of $450, how would that be different? A domain is worth what people will pay for it. If I owned the HeuristicsInc.com domain, then you might be the only buyer, so in some ways I would be holding it hostage. But, my domains are not like that. They are generaic domains that many people would want.

Assuming there are no trademark issues involved, why should you have any more right to a domain name (like my GetSongs.com domain for example) than I have? Who cares what I do with it, as long as I paid for it ($35 plus annual fees ever since then). You could have bought it just as easily as I did back in the 1990's.

I took a big risk by spending $100,000+ to buy domains in the 1990's and could have very easily lost it all if domains became worthless. Should't I be compensated for that risk? Why should you be able to come along today and say you want the GetSongs.com domain (for example) for the new domain price of $10?

[starfinger]

he was responding to your quote.. not the logistics of your shenanigans

[HeuristicsInc]

yeah, i was responding to the one where you said you were profiting from other people's misery... sure you can try to justify your behaviors this way but it doesn't give you more integrity. speaking of which, you talk a lot about your actions, trying to justify yourself to us (and, presumably, yourself). i've noticed this a lot in your posts about this and also the music you do. somebody that had more confidence that they were doing the right thing wouldn't need to be so defensive. just saying, sounds like you have a guilty conscience and are trying to put a good face on yourself.
-bill

[MC Eric B]

I justify myself a lot because out of the blue people say things like:
1. I am not a songwritter (even though I have written over 50 songs).
2. I am a cybersquatter (even though I in no way meet that criteria).

I am happy to debate subjects like this, but if I don't defend myself other songfighters will assume those type of things are true. Those types of comments are based on no facts whatsover.

If you listen to my songs, or read the responses I write about domain ownership, and still don't like what I do, I am fine with that. It is fine to say I am the worse songfighter you ever heard, or that selling domains for profit is a bad business. But, I just want people to have the correct info at least.

[Spud]

A songwriter is hard to define. I will give you that one.

A cybersquatter is easier to define. You fit my definition, and this is based on the facts that you give.

I am glad that at least you are pretty forthcoming about it.

[MC Eric B]

Spud - you may define "cybersquatter" that way, but that is not the generally accepted definition of it. Cybersquatter is a legal term based on the 1999 Anti-Cybersquatting Act that the government passed. That law made cybersquatting illegal, and in no way does what I do meet any of that criteria (having trademarked domains and buying them in bad faith to prevent the trademark holder from getting them).

Yes, I am a domain squatter in the sense I buy domains I don't plan to use right away and hold them to use later or resell. But, "cybersquatting" is actually something different.

[HeuristicsInc]

2. I am a cybersquatter (even though I in no way meet that criteria).

Yes you do, and you also do a very good job of avoiding talking about the very real issues and criticisms that people talk to you about.
-bill

[MC Eric B]

HeuristicsInc - how can you possibly say I meet the criteria of a "cybersquatter"? You are totally making that up. It just is not true. Look it up in Google. For example, The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is the group in charge of domain name disputes, and they define cybersquatting at http://www.wipo.int/amc/en/center/faq/domains.html . They say:
"Domain name disputes arise largely from the practice of cybersquatting, which involves the pre-emptive registration of trademarks by third parties as domain names. Cybersquatters exploit the first-come, first-served nature of the domain name registration system to register names of trademarks, famous people or businesses with which they have no connection. Since registration of domain names is relatively simple, cybersquatters can register numerous examples of such names as domain names. As the holders of these registrations, cybersquatters often then put the domain names up for auction, or offer them for sale directly to the company or person involved, at prices far beyond the cost of registration. Alternatively, they can keep the registration and use the name of the person or business associated with that domain name to attract business for their own sites."

[Lunkhead]

I don't think you can really use stocks as an equivalent at all, as stocks are a purely speculative commodity, for all intents and purposes. They have little or no utility other than to make people money through their sale. Domains, like homes, have more utility than that.

[MC Eric B]

Lunkhead - Good point. But, why should it matter what I do with my domain names? Why do you have more rights to my GetSongs.com domain name if you want to actually use it for something real, as opposed to me parking it like I do now? I am not stopping you from creating a website, just getting a catchy name for it.

If I buy a vacant lot in your town, and never build a house on it, what right do you have to take it from me or tell me what to do with it? Why are domains different?

Yes, I agree, speculators like me do increase prices.

[jimtyrrell]

At the risk of completely derailing this already second-track discussion: must the internet be bought and sold as if it were American real estate?

EDIT: I don't really need an answer to that. But it seems to be the perception that I tend to slip into when thinking about web domains, and I don't know if it's really the right model to go by.