Domain News

Domainers Must Adapt…Again

It’s a funny thing how domainers always expect their stank to rise…and continue rising. Funny because if you’ve been in this business long enough you’ve likely weathered, or not, a few industry tempests and cycles. We’re hardened sailors who have seen tough squalls and lived to tell the tale.

Truth is, over time things have ‘changed’ much more than domainers care for - there is no question. There is nary an old domainer, no matter the age, without a gray hair or two from our career. So part of the expectation may be wishful thinking, part of it denial, part of it realistic business outlooks and goals.

If there is one thing to be said about domainers, besides they like to party and are generally ADD, is that ‘growth’ is always on the brain. Each acquisition is an attempt at growth – we feel if we stop buying, we stop growing. We have ‘fear of non-growth’, thus the long-held belief that domaining is an addiction. I’ll drink to that.

So as we struggle to make our way through floundering economics and currencies, regulation and litigation, registrars and beyond, domainers should look at their past cycle performance and adjust, adapt and grow. The past is prologue.

For example, the current propensity is to pull back on domain purchases – all while it converts to a buyer’s market. A smart domainer looks for the peaks and valleys in the cycle and anticipates each quarter-step forward. After all, we made our sweet creamy butter via ‘anticipation’ and ‘risk’.

But the real question at these moments becomes a matter of faith – if you believe domains (dot coms, in this case) are the future global standard, then now is the time to expand, anticipate, grow baby!

Alternately, if you are skeptical, low on funding or already well seated in the space, then now may be the time to lay low and, if at all possible, not sell. Truth is domainer-to-domainer sales are not the future and never were - too much perpetuating money, too much depreciation as domains go from holder to holder. Eventually, the risk outweighs the return.

The future lies in end-user sales, the Holy Grail of domaining, with the emphasis on ‘quality’ – irreplaceable domains, in other words. Names that have no alternate, no opposite, they are a singular brand or product or service. They are marketing machines by their birthright; they are one of a kind.

In the recourse, there is little individual domainers can do to affect the overall outcome beyond supporting the community, the industry as a whole. No, for holders, it is a matter of fittest-type survival in turbulent terrain.

My advice, far more dependent on your current financial state, it is to reassess, find your bearings – domainers are often brilliantly scattered-brained as they chase one name only to lose an equally good name to lapsed registration. DOH!

For all of us, as a sum of its parts, it is best to pool together – surround the wagons in no uncertain terms. Yet as an ‘individual-based’ industry, that seems less likely as fewer and fewer of its inhabitants attend to its overall health.

If for some reason the industry dies, it is no doubt for a lack of community, of unity and fraternity. It is as if the founding fathers decided they had enough land and wealth and need not go to Philadelphia to declare anything against Britain. In fact, by not going, they reasoned, they were declaring true ‘independence’ – I am my own island. That’s the collective spirit d-town!

So here we sit, between a rock and a really hard place, like a Republican having to vote for Grandpa McCain, waiting for the world to decide if it needs Internet addresses for the long term while the industry splinters and flails at its own lack of commonality.

Sadly, we’re nothing more than street vendors to the larger world – “I got great .com, I got excellent two word .net, I got .mobi - big discount only for you, my friend! You buy!”

In that case, perhaps the best advice is to head out to the countryside, get some friends to hide you in a hole in their yard, put an air tube running up to the surface a la Saddam. And don’t forget, you’re going to need some Grecian Formula for those new grays.

But you better hurry - sky is falling…again!

(c) 2008 DomainNameNews.com

Domain Convergence, October 6-8, 2008, Niagara Falls

Original post by G.Bag