DomainTools Blog

If you are a regular reader of Frank Schilling’s personal blog, you will want to re-subscribe to his blog. He is off typepad and on his own domain like all domainers should be. Head over to SevenMile.com and click subscribe. His old RSS feed is dead, so be sure to re-subscribe. If you are not a regular reader, now is a great time to start.

Typepad is good for beginners, but if you want your own blog make sure to do it under your own domain. Traffic is hard to build up for a blog, it takes months and months of hard work and a lot of posts. However Calvin Ayre of Bodog proved you can switch domains mid stream and the visitors will find the other front door if they are really loyal. (It also helps if you email them several times and they are addicted to your product. )

While I am announcing Frank’s new permanent URL. I think I will mention some other domainers that are fun to read. If the DomainTools Blog is not covering a subject, it is because one of these great guys already beat me to it. Subscribe to all of them and read them along with me. We are like one big newspaper.

• Richard Ball of Apogee.
• Sahar Sarid of Conceptualist.
• Ari Goldberger and Larry Fischer of DirectNavigation.com.
• Frank Michlick, Adam Strong, and Crew of Domain Name News.
• Andrew Allemann of Domain Name Wire.
• Peter Askew of Domainers Gazette.
• Roland Buck of DomainNews.com.
• Milton Mueller of Internet Governance.
• Dominik Mueller of Dmueller.com.
• Mark Fulton of DotSauce.com.
• Elliot J. Silver of ElliotsBlog.com.
• Joe Davison of NameStrategy.com.

I recommend full feeds, not partial feeds. It is much easier for someone to read your blog this way (your audience will also grow faster and link to you more). There simply is not a HUGE blog out there that has partial feeds so please open up your feeds. Go full feed. Say “No” to partial. I know it is tempting because you see more page views in your log files and that makes you happy. But frankly page views are an old way of measuring success for a reading based media source. A blog’s success should be measured by a third party RSS counters like feedburner. If you want to make money with your blog, put the ads inside the feed or get creative. Don’t quote page views to potential sponsors, quote them readership base. People can read your posts via email delivery or via an RSS Reader like (Google Reader). End of rant.

One last thing, if I did not mention your blog, feel free to post it in the comments below, I think there are 50+ domain blogs out there and I try to read them all. I may not get any work done, but I know what is going on. It seems like last year there were none. We have come a long way in this industry, perhaps in 2009 we will all have vlogs.

Frank Schilling will be keynoting the Domain Roundtable next month. The most well known Domain Investors in the world, Frank Schilling will take us through his humble beginnings all the way to how he got to where he is. With over 320,000 domains in his collection, he is not resting & continues to buy. I love looking through his portfolio because he has so many generic killer domains. I am always stumbling on his domains, like for example, today I looked up Reverse Whois.com and who should own it, none other then Frank’s company Name Administration. I guess I will use a different name for our new service. It is funny how small the domain world is, when you can look up a domain and it is owned by someone you know it proves the world is very small or Frank is very big.

Frank will be doing some Q&A with the audience after his Keynote on Monday. One of the questions people love to ask him is, “Is there still room for people to follow in his foot steps?”. I will not spoil the answer… ok, I will spoil it. The answer is, Yes. So come be a part of a fabulous conference and learn from the best.

Early on Monday the 13th before the keynote, Frank will be participating on the Domain Industry Roundtable discussion with Sahar Sarid and Adam Strong. The treo will be speaking about how the Industry is changing and where things are moving.

To read Frank’s Personal Blog check out Seven Mile.com or 7 Mile.com, Isn’t that clever. He got both versions.

It is an extremely rare case when Business 2.0 puts an anonymous unknown person on the cover, but the editor just did it for the month of June 2007. Kevin Ham is the biggest person on the Internet that no one knows about. Kevin had been under the radar for such a long time that even other famous domainers did not know who he was. Kevin’s portfolio is huge and throws off more cash than even Frank Schilling’s. To put that in perspective, Frank is currently the most well-known domainer in the world with some 320,000 domains and several million dollars in income a month.

I wrote about Kevin’s company Reinvent Technology in April as did Frank, but I didn’t go into a lot of detail. Paul Sloan has done an awesome job in his cover story on Kevin.

The headline is “Here’s how the master of Web domains built his $300 million empire”. When I saw the headline I was shocked that Paul had given Kevin such a low evaluations. I talked with Paul and he said if he had it to do over he would have changed the headline from $300 Million to $400 Million. Even that is an understatement. I would put Kevin between $500M to a Billion. But the value of his company in the future will be worth Billions and not Hundreds of Million like the article says.

Kevin’s Business partner Colin Yu was not touched on much. I think if I wrote the article, I would focus more on the two of them – they are a good team and founded the company together. Everyone wants to talk about Bill Gates and Batman, but Paul Allen or Robin deserve credit as well. I can see a follow up story on Colin one day.

Kevin is a devout Christian and his domains show it, He owns God.com, Satan.com, ChristianRock.com, and several other Christian related domains. Kevin has some great names and they get traffic. I think the reason Kevin came out of the closet was because he wants to take his business to the next level. I have talked with Dr. Ham a few times and the thing that always impresses me is how humble he is. For a man that is worth so much, you would never guess it if you met him in an elevator or saw him in a cafe. The best Domainers are very down to earth – I think that is why I love this industry so much.

Name Intelligence was asked to provide some color for the article so we supplied some registration stats on the growth of dotcom and other TLDs. It goes to show that the space is young and the registration rate is not slowing. In the chart to the right, we can see the cooling effect that the dotcom crash had on the market. But what people don’t realize is that millions of domain names were artificially inflating numbers in 2000. Network Solutions was invoicing clients for domains rather then charging for the domains, so some domains were existing on the Internet for free. After the registration process switched completely over to Verisign and the 1990′s invoicing practice stopped, we can see the registrations volume started to turn back up and there was sort of a second boom.

I have already predicted we will crack 100 Million dotcoms in the next few years. There is no signs things are slowing down. A lot of people wonder how many domains can be left to register, but I have to remind people there are millions upon millions of them. Just today I registered the three names. Some of the people that enter the market today will be millionaires in a few years. There is always room for smart people in this Industry. I like to remind people this is the 1880s of domain names and that we have decades in front of us. Domains that trade for 10K today will be trading for Millions in a few years. Porn.com failed to sell for $7.5 Million in March and one month later it sold for over $9 Million. We saw Sahar Sarid start from nothing after reading about Business.com in a magazine. It proves that anyone can start late and make it big.

The value of generic domain names is going up and the registration rate on city names, suburbs, local names, and new concepts is spiking. I find domains that are still unregistered and often wonder how so many people missed the name.

DNJournal has a wonderful write up on Sahar Sarid for the month of May. There are a ton of great photos of Sahar in zero gravity and stories about his life and how he got into domain names. While growing up he always found the easiest route to the finish line and thought outside of the box. Around fifth grade he figured out that if he used the teacher’s edition of the text books it gave him an advantage. Why use the student version when the teacher’s edition has recommended test questions and therefore easier to study for a future test. In seventh grade, Sahar was told his final grade in carpentry class would be largely dependent on a year end project. He had little interest in wood or carpentry, so he drew up plans for a desk and took his plans to a professional carpenter. When he turned his professionally made desk in, The teacher knew he didn’t construct it and flunked him. “Thinking of it today, that failing grade in school was really a winning grade in life. The ability to find and contract work to others will get you much more then if you were to do everything on your own” said Sahar.

I am glad DN Journal is featuring professional domainers, We need more positive PR around domains. Sahar got his start by using his sister’s credit card. His sister had a $20,000 limit and he used every penny to buy domains. Once the credit card was maxed out he asked in a chat room if anyone wanted to invest in him and partner with him. Jeff Bhavnanie responded and the two have been partners ever since in their company “Recall Media Group”.

If you want to follow Sahar’s blog the address is Conceptualist.com.