) their concept is to create a funeral homes directory, but of course, Funeralhomes.com is registered many years ago. What are they to do? They go and find a different domain of course, say fuenralhomes-newname.com.
They put their site together, hypothetically speaking, a better site then the current leader Funeralhomes.com, and start to market. They happen to be experts and do extremely good job marketing, and achieve the unimaginable - they become market leader.
What is happening with the traffic to funeralhomes.com though? users who do not remember the complicated/creative name of the startup tend to remember the concept behind the name (especially if they heard of the generic before), and they type funeralhomes.com. Traffic leakage goes up at funeralhomes.com thanks to the new startup. Even if funeralhomes.com goes out of business traffic will still be there thanks to the new startup.
The more traffic the startup command, the more leakage. How’s that for motivation?? The cost gets higher as some users, even though acquired at great cost, “get lost”?. This by the way is happening today every single second of the day and most companies, I would guess over 99.999% of them, don’t realize it.
This is the long term power of generics. It isn’t just about today, it is also about those startups 20 years from now. Whatever they gonna do, and those who succeed, will (fortunately to generic domain owners) keep leaking traffic to generic domains.
Hey, Sahar I want to be domainer like you. Kindly write a guide how to start. I have a nice domain celladviser.com(grammatically correct) to start with. Kindly guide how to start!
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Hi Sajib, I’m flattered!
Please consider this blog, as well as the few other domain blog out there, as your guide. We put allot of material and time into it daily to help anyone who wishes to learn. In addition, make sure to read DNJournal and subscribe to some domain related keywords in your RSS software.
Cheers
Sahar
Thanks Sahar!
I am using SEDO to sell my this domain. Is this a good move? I am getting no response, almost it is about 3 months.
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If it was me and I was selling I would make the habit of listing anywhere possible, places like Afternic, Sedo, and domain forums such as domainstate, dnforum, namepros.
Hope that helps,
Sahar
What about sites like flickr? I’m not sure that a startup like flickr would leak any traffic to photos.com. Even if the user cannot remember the unique name are they going to just type in a name that they know is wrong or use a search engine to try and find the name that they now can no longer remember?
Also I use the site luckyoliver.com to buy stock photos for cheap. Do you think that stockphoto.com would get traffic from luckyoliver and startups with unique, but good names like this?
I could certainly understand your point when you consider similar names for new startups. So say hotels-book.com might leak traffic back to hotels.com
Just a thought.
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Flickr does leak traffic to photos.com and pictures.com as well, I don’t doubt that. It may not be significant but consider this: every lost user is increase in cost per acquisition. The way we think is multi dimensional. If we don’t remember something (and it happens to all of us) we tend to remember concepts. Frank and I discussed this here..
http://frankschilling.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/05/the_power_of_co.html
“So say hotels-book.com might leak traffic back to hotels.com”
Yes, if hotels-book become mainstream they are sure to leak trafffic to hotels.com.
Wow, interesting.
Sahar, although .com is the oceanfront property what’s your 2-5 year outlook on the other TLD extensions that hold one and two word generic keywords. Mine is that the real land rush has yet to come and all TLD’s with premium generic keywords such as paper, phonecards, cameras etc, will be extremely sought after.
Love to hear from you.
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New TLD’s were introduced since I believe 2000, and so far, none of them made any significant behavioral change. My prediction therefore is based on seven years history. While something good may come out of new TLD’s ion the next 2-5 years, in terms of type-in traffic and based on historical observation, I would not put a penny into those.
Recently, I finally ‘realized’ the power of generic domains while working on an Adwords campaign for a small business. Either I pay Google to send traffic based on keyword searches to this particular business, or I buy all the generic domain names around this business and drive that type in traffic to this website. Generics alone won’t solve the traffic issue, I’d still need to advertise. But acquiring good generics would be a one time high-ish cost if they are already registered (then there’s just annual renewals) for x amount of traffic. Google Adwords, on the other hand, wants to be fed according to clicks or impressions. And I could easily pay 600 dollars a month on Adwords. That makes spending 5 - 10k for good generics look cheap. I wonder if Google will begin to notice if advertisers begin picking up generics and forwarding that traffic to their sites. And I wonder if Google will step in and start sucking up domain names. They sure have the computing power to do so.
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Congratulations!
I don’t think it is meaningful loss to big search engines that people have some direct traffic such as from domain names, as businesses need to expand, as you indicated, even with a good generic you are still going to buy traffic from the engines.
As far as Google/Yahoo/MSN getting into the game and acquiring domains, I believe that is the end goal (wishful thinking anyways) of med size companies such as Marchex, NameMedia, ,Demand Media, Ireit.