(image source)
Few days ago I wrote about domains as collectibles. I wrote:
We always hear the comparison of domains to real estate however the other comparison I heard many years ago from a fellow domainer is that domains are like collectibles. If one can collect cards or memorabilia one should be able to collect domains. Is it any wonder that many in the domain space are people with prior collectible interests? In Rick’s house, in the living room, there’s a jar full of hotel keys from his salesmanship/tradeshows days. Another highly successful domainer started first collecting sports cards, and yet another started collecting watches. Why not collect domains for their rarity/scarcity value? And if this is acceptable (as it should) then it is essentially a bona fide use of a domain and should hold against trademark owners. If the world was as it should be..
Writing this post reminded me a statement Yun Ye made years ago, however, I couldn’t recall specifics. Thanks to John Berryhill for refreshing my memory here. The following was posted on the old NSI Net-Policy mailing list and It’s one of only two public statements Yun Ye ever made.
Yun Ye:
“People collect Pokemon cards, and they don’t call them Pokemon squatters.”
Of course I fully agree. Talking about Yun Ye, I’m curious what was the other statement? Anyone?
Loading ...
Weird thing is that I was also a collector of phone cards and stamps before collecting domains. So I think it has something to do with this too.
Nice article.
Nobody minds selling a pure investment at a good profit. When I sell a stock I don’t miss it, I don’t feel like I’m selling a part of a collection. You might miss your primary residence if you sell it, but you don’t miss an investment property you just flipped for x%.
Domains are more. You can take any domain you own, premium, average or just downright low quality and come up with a dozen potential development ideas for it, businesses you could run on that domain and ideas you could try (but realistically will never get to). When you let a domain go, all that goes with it.
I agree domains are collectibles but more than that they are able to be developed to create more value. You cant do that with stamps, or baseball cards. A more accurate term maybe is “constructables”. Some people may even refer to them as “DNS Children” as some people truly love some of their domain names.
I wasn’t there but I thing his other statement was directed to Marchex and went something like “how much you got?”
But Pokemon cards were designed to be collected. Domain names were designed to be used.
I’m new to this issue but it’s interesting. DNS is a part of internet history and I think everyone should know about it.
As I understand it, Verisign is the only entity charged with physical access to the server on which the root server list (of all domain names) resides. Registering a domain name, at its most fundamental level, is merely a change to that list. As it was in the beginning with the original “hosts.txt” file.
Registrars, by paying fees to ICANN, are given access to Verisign’s servers via their connection to the internet, i.e. they have indirect access to the list, through Verisign. Obviously we place some trust in registrars, as they can issue commands to Verisign’s servers and have changes made changes to the list. They are in a position to exploit the full market value of all domain names, were they allowed to use it for that purpose.
Was Yun Ye a registrar? Did he use a registrar?
But what about the root servers? They must communicate *directly* with the server on which the root server list resides. I would guess that anyone who has experience with root servers would know more about Verisign’s system than the rest of us. I wonder if, Jon Postel were alive today, would he be working for Google? Would he start a business like pool?
One of the oldest root servers in operation is located at the University of Marlyand. It may have been very convenient for Mr. Ye to have both completed his MS in Computer Science there and to have been employed by the Computer Science Department there.
In terms of the appropriateness of domain name drop catching, is there anything to stop anyone from learning what Mr, Ye learned in his many years of study? Is anyone actively hiding this information? Or are most people simply too lazy or disinterested to learn how a system works?
Is it not true that PPC in the context of parked domains is profitable because of
(a) the ignorance of those who click on ads that they are unable to decipher as spam dues to a lack of learning and exoerience, or
(b) those who will spend money online indiscriminantly, anytime, anywhere, and need only to be presented an opportunity?
I have more respect for someone like Mr. Ye who obvsiouly put in the time and work to learn DNS at a low level than I do for those who are eager to join an “industry” centered around something they will spend little effort to understand themselves, instead content to spend their time paying, praising or criticising others who have took the initiative and have “done the work”.
As I see it (so far) Mr. Ye was one of those people.
Are the interwebs about buying and selling or are they about exchanging information, solving problems and learning? It seems the answer to that question has changed over the years.
To get more phiolosophical… you might consider people that engage at marketing via the web as targeting consumers, using tactics of hype. And you might distinguish collecting domain names as not targeting consumers, but targeting advertisers (piggybacking on the hype they create). However, I now see tangential “industries” that go beyond collecting domains. I see those who wish to create and capitalise on bidding and auctions, on selling information (much of which is publicly accessible) and tools (guis built for lazy people), and on conferences. And I see registrars engaging in FUD.
I see people lacking a DIY menatlity, lacking UNIX skills and who rely on hearsay. And in the ignorance and confusion fueled by lazyness and information overload, I see possible opportunity. In that sense, the interwebs is much the same as it was decade ago. Still poorly understood. Maybe even moreso.
—-answer—-
There’s nothing wrong with having an advertiser in mind when you create an offering, or even purchase an offering (as in purchase a piece of land in order to put a billboard on it, or a domain). Do TV shows really create new sites solely for consumers? Do magazines write articles without considering advertisers in mind? Do radio station not consider advertisers when they create a segment about financial advice? At the end it is capitalism. Domainers are there to serve the needs if their visitors, whatever that need is. They provide a service, both to consumers and advertisers. Without domainers hundreds of millions of people to this day would have landed on 404 error pages, having to hit the back button, having to retype a web address, maybe even must go and find some other way to find their ultimate destinations. Domainers helped millions of consumers connect with their needs faster and in an efficient manner, and that connection is really what matters.
At the end this is capitalism. There are consumer needs to be addressed and domainers are doing so by serving relevant content. One does not need to be a top programmer, a web explorer, to do it right. One needs to understand the basics of business and make sure their offering is making sense, or otherwise, they won’t be in business long.
Cheers
Sahar
Interesting perspective.
You wrote:
“Without domainers hundreds of millions of people to this day would have landed on 404 error…”
Instead they land on a page that says, e.g., “What you need, when you need it” or contains some meaningless combinations of words, in each case accompanied by a host of links.
I was always annoyed and in some cases perplexed by these pages. Now I understand what’s behind them. Although I still do not know who, exactly. If you know who, please tell him it was never what I needed, nor when I needed it.
I’m one of those people who always hit the “back button”. And I always assumed everyone else do the same. Of course this is not true. And that is becoming more clear every day. As Google grows to a point of critical mass that is probably here to stay, forever (like a Microsoft), it’s seems clearer and clearer to me that there will be an endless stream of mindless users, and advertisers who follow them, coming online, much like the old concept of “the endless September”.
They will be further and further removed from the control of (e.g. “cloud”), and hence the understanding of, their computers and the networks they connect to.
The first question I have is what is the role for the oldschoolers and their apprentices, those people who have been with this since the beginning and know what is hype and what is not? The ones who know UNIX. The sysadmins who live in the server rooms and the computer science faculty who guided them through the learning process, the guys who keep this thing going, so everyone can use it to, among other things, capitalise on each other, financially. (I recall the rates of use for Google vs Google Scholar as perhaps illustrative of what people will tend to use the interwebs for these days, as they come online.)
Those “UNIX guys” have to make money too.
But they have a conscience. Why are they not all “domainers”?
Some of computing’s founders and key contributors have joined the ranks of big corporate IT. Many have not. Many will continue to be lured to join.
It is these guys who are in the best position to opine on what the internet is, and where it should go. They built the foundation which is still being used. All the rest, your Firefoxes and javascripts, runs on top. And through these sysdmins’ efforts, they continue to keep things running.
I’m OK with everything as it’s going, but I’m concerned not enough young people are learning UNIX, prefering to learn some other high level nonsense instead. And they are thus not learning the history of things and how they work. And there’s too much misinformation obscuring the facts, which have always been and are still publicly available. There’s plenty of focus on computers, but perhaps some of it is misdirected. Think of it as a sport, and you’re the coach. The kids have to learn the fundamentals first if they are to truly make use of their full development potential as players. In this sport, I see many, many kids skipping the fundamentals. And they really don’t know what they’re doing.
If more people had a more fundamental understanding of their computers and networks, it would bring about profound change. In the world of business and capitalism, advertisers may sometimes prefer “uninformed consumers”. But I think when it comes to computers, we have an obligation to expand people’s know how. Computers are not just powerful appliances or devices, they have the ability to run appliances and devices. They are tools for automation of human thinking. There is more at issue here than just gaining some financial resources. Markets. Buying and selling. That is trivial stuff.
As domainers, you have seen how easy it is to make money. (Though few may possess the proper mindset.) The next question I have is, after you have “enough money” *then* what are you going to do? How are you going to make the world a better place? (Beyond simply replacing 404’s with PPC links?)
And I don’t don’t simply mean philanthropy. I mean putting in the work to achieve something you beieve is meaningful (Again, beyond the world of PPC.)
Education of oneself and others is one such thing, in my opinion. With financial pressures removed, you do not have to see education as a business (filling spots and collecting fees) nor as a means to a financial end (believing your degrees justify a certain compensation entitlement). Imagine if a domainer used his earnings to return to university to pursue an advanced degree in computer science, in hopes to give something back to the DNS that gave him so much.
A major reason domain drop catching works is because people do not fully understand computers nor the interwebs. This was also the reason for the dotcom bubble. Ignorance leads to overvaluations (look at Facebook and their former lawyers squabbling over this very issue).
I was reading something today that put “domain kiting” under the heading of criminal activity (not simply abuse of a system loophole, as Network Solutions has done). And this was from a well-established spam security-related site that should know better. I am certain that they would read the rules that are promulgated by the various bodies that govern the system, so there is no excuse. Sloppiness like this, is one reason misinformation and ignorance is rampant on the interwebs. A little DIY investigation and learning can go a long way. To get answers you have to be able to ask the right questions. In order to ask the right questions, you need to do some work on your own.
I think DIY investigation and learning goes a way. I would guess it did for Mr. Ye. But you would know better than I.
—-answer—-
Lots of information here, will try my best to address it here..
1. It isn’t about “making a better world” but about providing a service people need. Many who look at those “useless pages” do not see the STATS that we do, and in many cases, we are looking at really good CTR (click thru ratio) numbers. The reason is simple: They provide what users want. I know it may sound to you as “useless” and it sounds liek this to many, but these pages send qualified buyers to advertisers. If that wasn’t the case there wouldn’t be a business here to do. Business really does not be as complicated as building a new software, a new offering, an OS or a search engine. It is in its simplest form providing something others want or need, and these pages, while they are not impressive on the eye, just like billboards on the side of the road, just like a small flyer given to you down the street, they do the job.
As for those tech guys you are referring, there’s a major difference between tech guys and business guys, in most cases, they are not the same. From my experience it just rare to have tech guys who exhale in business or vice versa. The exception would be B. Gates or the Google founders, and you see how far they go and it is one of those “perfect combinations”. I actually happen to learn most of what I knew back in the days about picking up expired domains from one of those “server room guys”. He had no interest in any of this from a business perspective, he was just really proud he figured out how it worked and wanted to share it with the world.
And while I do not know Yun Ye (we did a little business back in the days) I do want want to assume anything about him. He ran a good operation, made good calls along the way (I’m sure some weren’t as good as well), and hopefully it worked for him. At the end, my view is we all learn from what we do, our successes and failures. It is human nature to make mistakes and we all do, and I truly embrace that, and just try to observe, and learn.
Cheers
Sahar
Domainers need advertisers for the links they place on their pages. Otherwise all the links would be noncommercial, and we know that’s not what domainers do. But what I ignored in my thinking was that domainers also rely on consumers as well as the advertisers. That peculiar breed of websurfer that actually clicks on them.
I’m still getting my head ’round this PPC model.
But it’s high time I did. Google would just another search engine without it. PPC, encouraged by PR, has created a behemoth.
Here’s a thought for you. Are you familar with SETI@home or folding@home? The former may have a questionable goal depending on your views, but the later is directed at a very real problem that affects us all. These are distributed computing models. Guess what else is such a model? The “bots” you read about created by script kiddies and petty criminals to turn Windows machines into “zombies” and available for use in the usual forms of computer malfeasance. And guess what else is distributed computing model? Google. You can read about this anywhere.
If you took all the power behind the “bots” and directed it toward building an index of the web, in the style of one of the @home projects, you could compete with Google, and win. Will any company ever have more computing power than the distributed power of the sum total of personal computers? I doubt it. Thanks to capitalism, we created a paradigm that for the last 30 years has driven production of PC’s over mainframes.
This is why everyone should *want* to understand their computer. And to contribute. We each have immense power and storage capabilities, and we’re likely only using a fraction of it… and for what?
—-answer—-
Am familiar with distributed computing, I remember someone (maybe more then one) tried to build a web index this way, not sure where that company is these days, but evidently, something didn’t work so well.
I wrote:
It is these guys who are in the best position to opine on what the
internet is, and where it should go. They built the foundation which
is still being used. All the rest, your Firefoxes and javascripts,
runs on top. And through these sysdmins’ efforts, they continue to
This may be misleading. To be sure, while they are in the best position, they are not in a controlling position. They never have been. If one traces the history back the 70’s, it seems UNIX would never have been disseminated if the patent department at AT&T had not determined it to be commercially useful (i.e. for formatting patent applications). “Academics” often need a go-ahead from a “capitalist”, and often some supporting capital, at some point to justify working on a project long term. What begins as a hobby, as UNIX did, develops into something more polished and professional because someone, somewhere is motivated by capitalism and further “justifies” the work to make it so.
Their bosses gave them the go-ahead because they saw commercial potential.
Perhaps one point to take away from this is that these guys did not create UNIX just because they wanted to make money with it. They did it to improve their productivity, to solve a problem. Multics was the problem.
I doubt the guy who’s developing OpenDNS is doing it just to make money. I’d guess that from the beginning he was aiming at solving a problem. The DNS system was/is the problem.
—-answer—-
“I doubt the guy who’s developing OpenDNS is doing it just to make money”
Its really simple. It isn’t important what was his intention when building the company, what is important, for his business, is that the dynamics work and work well, or he will be out of business. He may have been thinking “I’m going to help everyone” or he may have ben thinking “I need to feed my family”. Either way, by solving a real problem, by marketing it well, by building a system that he gets paid, he solved his business needs. Now if at the same time he happen to make the world a better place, even better, but definitely it isn’t a requirement.
Domainers solve a problem too. You cannot satisfy everyone and domaining always involve to begin with. People do click on these “useless links”, they buy. Having them where they are solve a real problem, one you or others may not have, but many others do, and voting with their money, they vote with approval.
If that makes any sense..
Cheers
Sahar
The phrase “make the world a better place” came out of a discussion I was having with a friend recently. Not sure why it stuck with me. It’s sounds like a cliche. But I think it captures an attitude. I think it does make a difference. Not necessarily to “the market” but to each and every person that constitutes the market and those the market affects. At the end of the day, everyone needs peace of mind. Philosophically, you could argue that’s why we do business. To give ourselves and our families what we need (resources) in order that we should have peace of mind. Money, recognition, good health, [whatever] may not be the ultimate “goal”. The goal may be a state of mind you wish to be in. “Making the world a better place” might be encouraging and spreading that state of mind.
In any event, I do not disagree with anything you have said. Because much of it is subjective.
As for distributed computing, that’s what Google does. The idea is proven to work.
But it is advertising that has fueled Google’s growth. Without the ad revenue, they would have gone the way of other forgotten companies and their search engines (the technologies are still being used, but the companies were not able to stand on their own).
At some point, either they decided for themselves or someone told the Google founders they needed to find a way to generate income, and that’s when the ad services were developed.
What the “tech guys” know that most others don’t is that success in these business areas is not merely a result of the quality of the technology, it is heavily dependent on what I call a “popularity contest”, what others might call marketing. I think it’s more simple than clever marketing.
Whatever becomes the most widely adopted is what prevails. Some consumers will seek out high quality, but most, especially in this ares where understanding of technical details is rare, they will just use “what everyone else is using”.
This is why Microsoft and many other tech companies are successful.
The “popularity contest” can be very unpredictable. People can be fickle.
But once a company has enough critical mass, assuming they continue to have cash, they are in most all cases, here to stay, in one form or another. M&A begins and takes on a life of its own. And they become the examples we refer to again and again. They are permanent fixtures. Symbols.
You are wise not to make assumptions. And perhaps I am making some about Mr. Ye and some other people I have read about. However, these folks do symbolise something for me. And that is a passion for solving a problem using technology. Like solving a puzzle.
And the more one learns about technology, the more interesting the problems and puzzles that one can tackle.
It is true you cannot please everyone. Even if you win the popularity contest, you will still be very unpopular among some people. But, if you truly are passionate and absorbed in the problem you are tackling, the puzzle you are aiming to solve, this should not be a major concern.
In reading about domains, I recently read something about the founder of MySpace working on a way to present more interesting content on these otherwise dead-end landing pages. I always thought MySpace was a nightmare in web design, but they certainly won the popularity contest. And eventually they improved their design. Anyway, I think he is aiming at a legtimiate problem. These landing pages are boring to many users. Yes, some will click on the links and maybe even spend some money online, but for many of us, they are so obviously generic and devoid of meaningful content.
The point I want to make, going back to what I said about learning about technology, is that the more one learns about computers and networks, the more interesting problems one can tackle. So if, e.g., this person developing landing pages were to increase his knowledge beyond what he already knows about computers, he could do more interesting things. For the benefit of everyone. He could “push” the quality standard up, since as I said above most users lack the knowledge to seek out higher quality themselves. They may be unaware it even exists.
Have you ever noticed that often people who are “experts” in their field will make a presentation at a conference, and then they will keep rewriting it, presenting it in altered form as an article, then as another presentation at another conference, then perhaps as a book, etc., etc. They just keep rehashing the same idea. They may be passing on information to others, but how much are they themselves learning? Are they ever puching themselves beyond merely small increments of improvement to their original idea?
Once one has reached a level of success where he has alleviated the financial pressures of his life, is there any excuse not to push himself to learn more about new things? To tackle new, more complex problems?
One of the things I see among the various forms of internet marketing is much emphasis of those who are successful at it to “teach” and and enable those who are not successful (yet). But this in itself becomes another source of marketing, and a new revenue stream, for the “teacher”. At times, it appears to be an elaborate Ponzi scheme. To become successful by teaching others to become successful, who in turn become successful by teaching others to… you get the idea.
Strangely, this seems to result in no one really *learning* anything about the *original problems* that had to be solved in the beginning. And so it avoids the possibility of taking a new angle on those original problems, and raising the quality of technology’s solutions to them.
And it all begins with DIY initiative and a devotion to learning. I will again make the assumption that Mr. Ye exemplified this spirit.
In the beginning, after gopher, there was the web directory. Yahoo! was it. Then the word “portal” was hyped. Let’s all do what Yahoo! does. Meanwhile crawlers arose, like Lycos, AltaVista and Inktomi. AltaVista was what I used for many years (the good ole days). Nothing ever came close. Then we had the word “push technology” hyped. If the user cannot go out and find stuff, we’ll get him to subscribe and then we can send it to him. Then there was Gator (the adware king) and Goto (later renamed Overture). By monitoring what words people search, we can sell them to advertisers. Let them pay to in the first 10 results. At the time, this seemed ridiculous. But look where we are now. The money came rolling in, and Overture (with no crawler of its own- no real index except a list of its advertisers) could soon buy out AltaVista and AlltheWeb, two very good search engines. Meanwhile there was Google, coupling a crawler with a “new” results ranking algorithm and a very simple start page (the antithesis of a portal). A decent search engine that was slowly getting better. In order to compete commercially, Google had to copy Overture, selling search words. Overture sued to enforce its dubious business method patents. Yahoo! acquired Overture and Inktomi (advertiser income + crawler and index). Google settled with Yahoo! with Y! taking 2.7M shares in Google.
I’m stealing this story mostly from Wikipedia, where there is a link to a CNET article from 2002. I stuck with AltaVista until it sucked, then on a tip from a friend switched to Google. I never followed any of this closely. As I said, operations like Gator and Overture seemed ridiculous to me back then, as “SEO” seems silly to me today.
Looking back on this, maybe Goto is to blame for what has happened. They forced Google to adopt the AdWords model to compete. The money came in and now we have the “ultimate” search engine+ (for now) but one that has so much cash flowing through it, and so much power over information, that goverments have no choice but to get involved.
Yet we still have a general public that does not understand computers very well.
(I read an old SearchEngineWatch article from the 2002 period and it had the same comment one could make today: the financial analysts do not understand algorithms.)
If we forget the past we are doomed to repeat it. There are some who have had great fun in comparing the “latest new things” to their 1970’s-80’s counterparts, be it Twitter, Amazon services, etc.
What was “push technology”? Was it later rebranded “RSS”?
Is the portal idea still with us? Do the parked domain landing pages resemble mini-portals? (Nothing to read, just URL’s)
The hype just seems to go on forever. How many times can we rename, rebrand and repackage the same old thing?
There are parts of our computer systems that have not changed since the 1970’s. Because there was never any reason to change them. They work.
I have seen many people gloss over some of these “artifacts” yet without them, their computers could not boot. And the interwebs could not stay up.
These types of components are for the most part “un-hype-able”.
I am wondering if a crawler now fits in that category of “un-hype-able”.
One of those things that most everyone will take for granted.
Maybe the PageRank algorithm is overrated, because of the company’s overwhelming success. Maybe AltaVista and AlltheWeb had good, simple algorithms of their own to rank results. Ones that worked. Maybe they would be the best search engines if Overture had not bought them out and neutered them. Maybe we have forgotten about crawlers. Who has the best one? Inktomi? Google?
Maybe there has always been a tradeoff between delivering the most “relevant” search results versus delivering the most comprehensive search available (largest index). I think that was probably what the Google founders were interested in addressing at the time.
And then I acame to know the wonder of “direct navigation”.
Perhaps the consequence of being a longtime search engine user is that you would never guess that people would be satisfied to find things this way.
Who needs a search engine? We can just go straight to a portal. Linked to a search engine. And maybe the MySpace guy will convince us to load down these pages with audio, video and MySpace-type “content”.
My issue with MySpace in the beginning was that is presumed everyone had a fast connection and heaps of patience. But it has become very popular, so I guess that’s not an issue for everyone. I guess developers can just ignore low bandwidth users or disregard loading times and crashes. Like they routinely ignore disabled users, who might be blind or deaf. In a sense, crawlers are both blind and deaf. They only see text. And yet they’re the ones who know where things are, and who tell us where to go, if we use search engines. Perhaps this is something to think about.
Perhaps one day, IPv4 addresses will be the sought after commodity, because typing in IPv6 addresses is not all user friendly. Someone already has a US patent on a keypad specially designed to type in IPv6 addresses. I doubt he was only aiming at sysdmins.
Maybe one day users will type in, search for content located at, and bookmark *IP addresses* instead of *names* that must be translated into IP addresses by a complex, poorly understood system and vulnerable system. Users can “name” these IP addresses however they like. As a mobile phone user can set his speeddial names however he chooses. That is, in a way that is most useful to him.
In short, users may gain control of their own custom “phonebook”, by making use of the hosts file. Too simple. It’s just a phonebook. It (the hosts file) has been there for 30+ years, waiting to be used again. Frequently visited entries can be loaded into RAM for high speed lookup: faster than DNS for most home users. All it takes is for people to start using hosts files again en masse and the paradigm could shift. If people can memorise phone numbers, they can handle IP addresses.
Why would they do this? Who knows? Maybe bad press about DNS and domains; maybe they just got tired constantly being redirected and funneled from place to place.
Hi 257c257c, what is your view on internet access on your mobile phone? I have been reading that internet access via mobile phone is going to exceed internet access via pc/laptop.
Nigel