Posts by uk_domain_names

Google OUTBID on g.co.uk at auction

Do I detect an undercurrent of sour grapes? Either way, it's time to nip this line of reasoning in the bud before the discussion goes too far down the rabbit hole...

The auctions were 100% OPEN, and were run to simple rules that were publicised many months in advance.

Anyone, anywhere in the world, was free to participate - the only "qualifier" was an initial £10 buy-in to join a given auction. Companies, non-profits, sole traders, partnerships, individuals - the auctions were open to any entity no matter what its "structure"...

So there was no collusion, no price fixing, no extortion, no racket - just a market operating "cleanly " without artificial barriers of any kind: a series of auctions in which the highest bidder won. It's impossible to concoct a fairer scenario than that!

Brits registering .uk domains mostly get first choice

Actually, the problem is that the domain market is not yet visible enough, not that there isn't one. Every week, DNJournal.com reports on some of the top global domain sales, and their typical weekly report covers several hundred sales. DomainPrices.co.uk has tracked public .co.uk sales for the last 5-6 years, and they have over £8,000,000 in recorded sales in their database, with the average price paid per name hovering around the £2,000 mark. In both cases, only a tiny fraction of sales make it into the public eye, because the overwhelming majority occur privately and are not publicised anywhere. It has been estimated in the past that the worldwide resale market for domains is of the order of a billion dollars a year.

The other issue is that there are genuine *independently verifiable* benefits to owning the exact match domain name for your business, be it in decreased PPC costs (a case study was put out on this a couple of years ago), easier SEO (exact match domains have long been a ranking factor, as a quick Google on the topic will show you) and of course it's easier to promote the domain name offline as well, because it becomes much easier to remember.

So (assuming you're a business owner or have input over how the company you work for does its marketing) disregarding out of hand the idea of buying an exact match domain name to complement your product or service because it's somehow "unfair" of the seller to own it ends up damaging your own business prospects to make a hollow gesture.

On the comparison of ticket touting and multiple domain name ownership, the latter is recognised as a valid and legitimate pursuit at various levels, not least by Nominet, who explicitly go out of their way to address the issue in their DRS policy document "Failure on the Respondent's part to use the Domain Name for the purposes of email or a web site is not in itself evidence that the Domain Name is an Abusive Registration." "Trading in domain names for profit, and holding a large portfolio of domain names, are of themselves lawful activities."

Take a deep breath and a step back...

It's bizarre how quickly everyone seems to dismiss out of hand the idea of actually buying the best domain name off the entity which was smart enough to acquire it first, yet in the real world that happens all the time. The best land was sold many hundreds of years ago, so if you want to build on a commercial patch in the middle of the business district, you'll have to open your wallet extremely wide and pay the current owner of the land so that they sell it to you. Nobody bats an eyelid, that's just how the property market works.

The domain name market in the UK is admittedly less mature than the property market, but it's been around for longer than you might think. When you consider how much faster the internet moves compared to the "real world" (it's like dog years) the names that were registered in the late 90s and early 00s are positively ancient by now.

There seem to be two basic psychological hurdles in play here:

1) "It's not fair that somebody's profiteering": it's legitimate (domains are sold on a first come first served basis, and always have been) and it's business, so get over it. That's like complaining that it's not "fair" because you'd love to build a huge shopping complex on the land under Harrods, but somebody is squatting on it with a building of their own.

2) "If it wasn't for that squatter, I'd have that domain name": no, you wouldn't, because you're not second in the "I wanted it" queue, you're 50th or 500th or 5000th - you just never got to see all the other people ahead of you because they didn't it buy off the current owner either, but like you they would have bought it had it still been available. If you're starting your quest for a decent domain name in 2011, you're so far behind the game that the players are already off the pitch and hitting the showers.

So once you can see past those false barriers to the reality of the situation, you can either go away in a huff and register something less than optimal, or you can take a deep breath and a step back and analyse the BUSINESS case for owning the best domain name, and the knock on effect that would have in terms of ease of SEO, PPC advertising savings, credibility improvement, simplicity of advertising offline, etc. etc. You may well be surprised to discover, if you can conquer the emotion and get down to the brass tacks, that the price being asked for that particular domain is a FRACTION of the benefits your business would gain from acquiring it.

And at that point, there's only one correct business decision, and it's not sulking...