The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Jim - because much like real real estate, everybody wants the best locations. I am very happy never selling any of my domains, since I use them all for my sites or for domain parking, but people go to a domain they want, look up that I am the owner, and make me an offer for it. I think not selling my name to somebody who really wants it would be worse.

ban it! ban it! it's a witch!

eric, where did you get the $350k to buy the domains back in the day?

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

Another word for that is "Capitalism."



Seriously folks, Eric's scheme is certainly not the most egergious example of money-making at the expense of others. You could say the entire US economy works on this principle. (Not that that's necessarily a good thing.)

Hell, you could say I profit off the suffering of others because I work for a hospital. (Although I'd be a much better capitalist if I worked for the pharmaceutical companies instead.)

I WILL say that if I had 100K disposable income in the 90s, I'm pretty sure I would have spent it on something other than web domains! (That's the point in Eric's story that makes me question his sanity! Heh.)

Blue - I did not pay $35 each for all my domains. I probably only bought 2000-3000 like at that price. The rest were mostly in 2000-2002 and cost me less than $10 each. I would buy a few hundred domains a week, so I did not have to come up with the money all at once. I made some money from the links I put up on the domains, but mostly I financed everything with credit cards.

I started creating websites back in 1995, so the Internet was my business. That was what I did full time. After a few years I phased out my clients, and started building my own websites instead for myself, on the domains I owned and that is what I have been doing ever since then.

MC Eric B wrote:HeuristicsInc - how can you possibly say I meet the criteria of a "cybersquatter"?

the legal definition is going to be, by its nature, pretty narrow. i'm not concerned with the legal definition. anyway this discussion is going nowhere. bah.
-bill

It's been pretty informative. Thanks all.

So, anyway: I've got a six-song CD of drinking music for sale on my web site. You know where to find me. Cheers!

jimtyrrell wrote:It's been pretty informative. Thanks all.

So, anyway: I've got a six-song CD of drinking music for sale on my web site. You know where to find me. Cheers!

songfight.com?

D'oh!

MC Eric B wrote: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.

I'm not really thinking about "rights". In a capitalist system (one that ignores non-economic discrimination), everyone has the "right" to buy something that's for sale. Of course, only the person with enough money to pay what the owner wants can actually exercise that right.

Anyway, I'm thinking more about utility and needs. People need housing, and real estate speculation makes it harder for people to meet that need. Appropriate and memorable domain names are highly useful to businesses, artists, etc. that want people to find out about their products/services/art/etc., and domain speculation limits access to useful domain names (to those who can afford to pay whatever the speculators want to charge).

As for the parallel to housing, as an individual I don't have any right to tell you what to do with your property, but collectively, as represented by government, people can claim that right, for example via eminent domain or nationalization, etc. So sometimes people do get together and decide that they have more of a right to some resource/property than the owner, because they will use the resource/property for the common good. Fortunately for you, no such thing exists or probably ever will exist for domains, so even though lots of people may think they have more of a "right" to some of your domains than you do, they can't do anything about it except cough up the money. Personally I think that sucks, but hey, everbody's gotta make a buck, I suppose.

Lunkhead - Speculators do play some helpful role in the domain business though, because if I owned lunkhead.com for example, there would be a good chance you could at least buy it from me for a fair price if you wanted it. But, if it was owned by somebody else who was using it for their business or family page, they might not part with it for any price.

Assuming all the really good domains are already taken (if not by speculators than the general public would snap them up just as fast), then somebody who is starting a new business today has a much better chance at getting the domain they want because it might not actually be in use, meaning the price will probably be a lot cheaper. If I did not own the domain GetSongs.com, for example, it would probably be owned by a big record company of music site and there is almost no chance they would sell it after years of using it as their website url. Try buying iTunes.com from Apple.

I am not sure the demand from speculators even drives the price up any. If I did not buy GetSongs.com many years ago, somebody else would have. Most domains are bought by actual users, not speculators. The value a music company would pay today for GetSongs.com is not really any higher because I own it, or because other speculators might want to buy it from me. It is worth whatever it is worth because it is a good name for a music site.

"Spec" domaining sounds pretty similar to patent hording.....

yeah, that reminded me of the people that were patenting (?) random gene sequences in the hopes that they would eventually mean something.
-bill

Yah, I forgot to mention I own 10,000 patents also

This is a fascinating thread...I've learned alot in reading it. One question that comes to mind is how is profiting from buying and selling domains any different than the businesses that sell domain registrations for $ in the first place? Are those business' not making any profit on those sales? Why are there quite different prices for .com domains from different companies who sell registrations for them? Aren't those companies also partially to blame by making money in the first place? And the people who sell access to the internet...and the people who sell the gear that makes the internet, and so on...

To me that there is no way for the most important communication technology ever developed to have gotten here at all and become as useful as it has without someone deciding they could make a buck doing it. Speculation is an uneasy business, but it's a key part of the "goldrush" that fueled the internet's development, isn't it? Without other people stampeding over each other to buy domains to hawk their latest and greatest ideas, providing interesting content to grab eyeballs, clicks, or sales....how great would the internet be? Profit = development. Speculation in any commercial way helps seed development in areas simply because people MUST make money, so they need to get creative. And the big machine keeps on rolling....

Not saying it's good, bad or positioning myself morally...just thinking aloud really.

Lunkhead wrote:So sometimes people do get together and decide that they have more of a right to some resource/property than the owner, because they will use the resource/property for the common good.

Marx, Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Castro come to mind.

To all those putting down speculators, while you might not like the concept, smarter people than you (economists, scholars, me, etc.) have actually studied the role of speculators in markets (like domain names and real estate) and it has been shown that speculators actually are a good thing for a market. For more info, read the column called The Benefits of Speculation at http://www.fee.org/publications/the-fre ... sp?aid=726 written by the Foundation for Economic Education . Even Wikipedia agrees: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculatio ... peculation

thehipcola wrote:To me that there is no way for the most important communication technology ever developed to have gotten here at all and become as useful as it has without someone deciding they could make a buck doing it. Speculation is an uneasy business, but it's a key part of the "goldrush" that fueled the internet's development, isn't it?

no, none of that had anything at all to do with the internet's creation. the internet isn't a finite resource like land or gold. it is artificial and arbitrarily defined. domain names are free - what you're paying is a fee to the companies who have managed to get on the bid list to administrate the registration process. it's really a matter of integrity more than anything else.

the short answer as to why squatting and SEO tricks are bad is that they add noise to the system and lower the valuation.

the long answer is a dissertation.

MC Eric B wrote:To all those putting down speculators, while you might not like the concept, smarter people than you (economists, scholars, me, etc.) have actually studied the role of speculators in markets (like domain names and real estate) and it has been shown that speculators actually are a good thing for a market. For more info, read the column called The Benefits of Speculation at http://www.fee.org/publications/the-fre ... sp?aid=726 written by the Foundation for Economic Education . Even [CENSORED] agrees: http://en.[CENSORED].org/wiki/Speculation#The_economic_benefits_of_speculation

this is not true in the case of domain names. i'll explain why when i get off of my concall.

Eric, it isn't necessarily the case that a domain would be bought by someone else if it wasn't owned by speculators. You yourself probably have 1000s of sites that you've never gotten any offers for. And besides that, if someone else did get it, in a first come first served system, it probably would be more tolerable to later comers if that first person/business had non-speculative plans for it and didn't want to sell it. Once Jim found out somebody with his name owns the domain, and was going to use it, he seemed to indicate that he was satisfied with his .net domain and would just forget the whole thing.

Here's some interesting info from Netcraft:

http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2007/ ... urvey.html

From their first graph it looks like only roughly 50 million of the 110 million total host names actually pointed to a responding Web site. So right off the bat over half the domains are parked w/o even a minimal site (like the kind you've mentioned that you run for many of your domains) behind them. So the percentage of domains that are actively used by non-speculators is probably significantly less than 45%. Whacky.

actually, eric obviously has a limitless supply of self-delusion from which to draw, so i'm just gonna bow out of this one.

melvin wrote:

Lunkhead wrote:So sometimes people do get together and decide that they have more of a right to some resource/property than the owner, because they will use the resource/property for the common good.

Marx, Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Castro come to mind.

And don't forget Hugo Chavez, the latest anti-capitalist bogeyman.

Also I don't think Marx belongs on that list, having not been a head of state, or even a politician, that I'm aware of. I could be wrong about that, though.

Plus you should add lots of democratically elected mayors, governors, state senators, etc. in the US, who declare eminent domain and pay people fair market value for their property so the city/state/etc. can use it for things like roads, etc.

Let's not even mention the folks who decided that collectively they had more of a "right" to some continents in the Western hemisphere than the people who were already living on them. Good times!

But I see your point, only evil communists would get a whacky notion like taking other people's stuff away from them.

Lunkhead - I am not sure it would be better for you if I (a domain speculator) owned lunkhead.com instead of a real domain user. Many people would be very happy to know they have an option to buy it. Jim may not want that domain he mentioned today, but if he gets rich and famous, he might feel differently, but the other owner probably will never sell it. So, what you said is true, but there are probably just as many people in that position who feel the opposite and like the idea of buying it.

Yes, the fact that over 1/2 the domains that are owned are not even used is a whole other issue. Most of those are not speculators though, it is people who buy a domain because they someday plan to use it, but have not done so yet (nad maybe never will).