I couldn’t agree more. Your expansion of one’s concept of value is brilliant. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on value with the domain community. We are all better for it.

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Thanks Alan, just trying to help and create a healthy discussion. I learned A LOT from posts here.
Cheers
Sahar

What is value?

To me, value is Happiness! Is it really that simple? I think so.

An entity will normally look at an asset and try to put a value on it. If this asset was based on the ROI and 20 other factors, your heart will make you feel one way or the other no matter. When it comes down to it, somebody has to be “pleased”? to make the call to buy or sell. If you are happy, you accept and your value was met. If you decline, your value was met as are not feeling the happiness.

We all value our family and friends the most! Why is that? Happiness!

When you place yourself around people that make you happy, good things happen. It is much easier to make deals with people that share happiness and it doesn’t matter if it is business or pleasure, this is the reason why you value them so much.

No matter if you are putting value on a physical item, a domain name, an employee or friend, if they create happiness, you have true Value!

Jamie Zoch

As always your posts and insight not only to the industry but to the business community as a whole are invaluable or better put for the purpose of this post “priceless”? and while I do often ponder many things and their value as the financial overseer for our organization the TRAFFIC convention is one I will never question its value. For those of you whom are unaware, Sahar, Jeff and myself all met at the first TRAFFIC and that was the foundation or “seed”? as Rick put it for the formation of Recall Media Group, how could any of us put a value on that or base an ROI on that.

Over the years we have invested a lot of time, energy and money at each of the TRAFFIC conventions and often do not see the fruit of those efforts for months even years sometimes if at all, not ever contact or relationship is going to yield a quantifiable cash return however the ability to pick up the phone and call someone whom you respect and/or trust that may be able to help lends to the value and needs to be considered when calculating value not only in this scenario but in all scenarios.

This industry is one of the friendliest and more approachable in the world, have you ever been to a Donald Trump party try approaching someone there and discussing business or asking “do you mind if I give you a shout after to pick your brain a little”? security will escort you out the door before you reach for a business card. The fact of the matter is people don’t realize the opportunity they have at their finger tips, the ability to gain knowledge and insight from extremely successful people whom are in their business when attending these shows. People are so stuck on ROI that they often forget the reason why they are there.

But for all of those who are still in doubt I think I can quantify the value pretty easily in dollars (although I highly discourage it and usually reserve ROI for monetary investments and business related expenses) for everyone that may be questioning this or similar investment”¦Put together a panel of speakers like the Kevin Hams & Chris Harnetts of the world, in total I came up with about 30 (and didn’t even consider the cost of speaking with industry leading attorneys, have you ever had to pay a John Berryhill or Ari Goldberger bill, I have and would gladly swap the price of admission for either”¦) consider these are some of the brightest most successful people in the industry a group of entrepreneurs and business owners whose net worth are well into the billions, now when totaling it up considering you only have to pay their equivalent salaries or net profit for the day (and by the way they don’t get paid to be there), then throw in the food, drinks and entertainment as well any business you actually got done(if any that’s quantifiable) then divide that number by the number of attendees and tell me the price of attendance.
Guest what guys TRAFFIC is a bargain and extremely valuable to anyone in the domain name or internet business but let me caution you, some will not be as fortunate as others because you didn’t realize the opportunity, life is what you make it and if you continue to question things that are so blatantly obvious then you are already starting at a disadvantage.

Now consider we didn’t factor in the value of the potential relationships that may be developed because that is impossible to quantify but I can guarantee you one thing, if you merely exchange a business card with anyone in attendance it could very well change your life like it has ours. So that is just an added bonus.

I want to give a few more quantifiable examples to help the non-believers:

-Say you signed up at DNZoom.com and by doing so you were able saved one of your valuable domain names (one worth at least $3,000) from being dropped, is it worth it now?

-Say you had no clue there were opportunities to gain addition income from parking your domains and started parking them with one of the fine companies represented at the show and generated a mere
$5,000 annually, is it worth it now?

-And say, by sitting in on one of the panels you didn’t realize you owned a TM (trademarked) domain name and by doing so you realized the risk was not worth the reward and dropped the domain name, thereby preventing a $100k Federal Trademark lawsuit against you, was it worth it now?

These are only a few quantifiable examples of many”¦

In closing if you answered I already knew those things and still cannot see the value then my friend you have let the opportunities I discussed previously pass you by and now only yourself is to blame for the value NOT derived from this or any other lost opportunity in your life.

Darren Cleveland
President/CEO
Recall Media Group

Value is created by need. Sometimes you don’t realize how valuable it is until you lose something. Imagine this. If you had no air to breathe for four minutes, what would you trade for a breath of air? If you lost your eyes, what would you give to get back your vision. Your hearing? Your legs? Your heart?

Then there are values, great ones like honesty, integrity, humbleness. But show me a man who is perfect and flawless, and I will show you God. Even then, there are critics who claim flaws there. And we struggle with our conscience, to do the right thing, to live beyond ourselves. Each person in this world, six billion and counting have different things they value and different needs. And yet, some things are very common, that are able to bind our hearts and work together for a greater cause, beyond our needs.

It’s not tied to money. If you wait until you have lots of money, and most of the time, you spend what you make and so you have very little savings, it will be so difficult to do big things, when you have not been accustomed to doing things on a small scale. Donating $1 when you only have $2 is a lot harder than donating $1,000,000 when you have $2,000,000.

I am not perfect by any means and people can judge me for this based on what they read, but as they say, don’t judge a book by its cover. Do I have faults? Just ask my wife. In my short life, I’ve watched babies die, healthy people die, my own mother die and I’ve watched dozens of children come into this world, including my own. I’ve saved lives and at other times, I felt helpless and just watched people die, as a doctor, as a person, as a father, and as a husband.

Life is full of value as our time in this world is finite. Value each breath, value your dreams, value the people around you, even though they are imperfect. Those are values and that is the most valuable thing in life - life itself.

Life itself is a miracle, greater than anything we could ever know and yet we exchange our lives, our time, in return for a paycheck because we need to provide shelter and food for ourselves and our family. But in our inner self, we long to be fulfilled. We feel good when we make others feel good.

This morning, a little child looked me in the eyes and smiled and said, Good morning. That made my day. Then later in the elevator, this man looked at a picture frame I was carrying and he said, “Very nice picture frame.” I thought he was mocking me because he was looking at the backside of the picture frame. Then I turned it around. It was a gift from my associate, who had put a picture of me in a frame and I showed him the picture and then he really smiled and said, “An award. Congratulations!” Just that very morning, I found three $20 bills in the school parking lot and asked a lady if it was hers and she said, “No, but wow, that’s a lot of money.” I asked my wife to give it to the school office as I thought one person’s gain is another’s loss and I thought about how bad the child who had lost it must have felt.

So we go through life with our experiences, our biases, and we look out for ourselves. But how can we add value to others?

Domains and parked pages? Far from it? Build skyscrapers in Central Park? Develop out all undeveloped land? There is a time and place and we all are limited by the imagination, by resources and mostly by time. There is a lifetime of value that we can create, each day, starting with a smile, with a thought and saying and moving up from there. Let’s look back in five years and look at the value we have created, how we helped others in some way, indirectly or directly.

This is getting a little long winded but my fingers can’t keep up with my thoughts and they come unfiltered. I am still yet young in years, and have much to learn, much to go through, but we stick our necks out there because we want to make a difference to someone. And the more you want to make a difference, the more difficult it becomes, because we are all human and many a times, we err and from these mistakes, we learn and we grow. But inside, we all have value, to someone, somewhere and if we can touch that person, who needs it, that person can touch someone else and who knows, perhaps one of those people will make such a profound difference to a great number of people.

If you had $6 Billion and you gave every person in this world a dollar, people would still ask for more. But if you touch their hearts and you give them hope, show that life is full of value, even in the midst of hardship and poverty, you will start to see a twinkle in their eye. I’ve witnessed this many times doing medical missionary work in Mexico, Poland, Thailand, China, the Philippines as well as here locally in North America. And of course if you can, you help with their physical needs, their health and teach them. In the end, we are all accountable, some say to God, some say to your conscience. We reap what we sow and so we should sow the seeds, for in due time, some will be fruitful and beautiful.

I tell my daughter that she is beautiful but I would like her to be beautiful inside. Yet I buy her books that show outward beauty, because that is what people see. But when they get to know her, they will be more amazed by her inner beauty.

Value life. Life value.

Kevin

As usual, you come up with a great topic post that encourages a lot of prominent domainers to submit their comments. Although I don’t fit in that group, I have a comment that represents one of my most constant efforts in the past two years. Those who know me will probably bypass reading this.

The value of a domain can only be applied to the real word application of that domain, whether it be by traditional advertising of the domain brand, or whether the domain brands itself, as in defining its generic real world manifestation.

I keep touting a future where businesses will try to buy all the generic domains that describe their catalog of products or services. Essentially, a business has a product to sell. Most advertising companies will build a campaign around their clients’ products, and use traditional methods to promote those products (ie. TV, radio, magazine, newspaper, industry periodicals, etc). Now a lot of those advertising agencies are following “New Media” approaches more closely. Buying banner ads, getting pinpointed demographics on searches for similar terms that can apply to a company’s products are important online.

However, a domain name STILL is a nebulous marketing factor in most businesses. These companies don’t understand the value of owning the keyword generic domains of their products. Why? Because the advertising agencies don’t want them to know the power of these descriptive domains. If you watched TV in primetime for three hours, from 8pm to 11pm, you will most likely see a national or regional commercial where at the end of the commercial, a domain name is presented at the bottom of the last few frames of the commercial.

That domain name doesn’t really represent the client’s product clearly, but it DEFINITELY describes the AD AGENCY’S CAMPAIGN idea. It’s almost fun to watch, and I encourage all domainers to take part in this study. Watch a commercial, and if the company is a national company, think about the power that company would have if they owned the “root” domain of their product. For example, if the company sold “ice cream sandwiches”, the ad agency would never encourage their client to buy the domain “icecreamsandwiches.com”.

If the ad agency was pushing a campaign to sell their client’s product, and chose a funny marketing campaign that had people dressed as varieties of flavors of the Ice cream sandwiches, and the consumer could win a trip to Disneyland for their family if they sent in an email that identified the “most popular flavor” of ice cream sandwiches, the ad agency would register a domain like this: “pickaflavor.com” or even “whichtasteisbest.com” or “mostpopularicecreamflavor.com”.

The ad agency would never pick “icecreamsandwiches.com” (I don’t own this domain, and I didn’t check to see who did, this is just an example). Why won’t the ad agency pick this domain? Because this domain will work WITHOUT the ad agency, and they know it. The ad agency will only buy domains that match their campaign titles. And therein lies the rub, people.

Businesses need to know and understand the value of domain names, especially generic and geo-related domains, to their products/services. That HAS TO BE THE FOCUS OF THE DOMAIN INDUSTY, or the sad state of domain auctions we’re seeing now will continue. We need NEW BLOOD in our industry. We need a powerful coalition of domainers and domain companies to POUND the business sector with easy to understand reasons why they need to buy the domains we own.

This is my vision for the future of the domain industry to be successful beyond what we see right now. If we can’t organize this type of educational campaign and promote it, then stagnation will set in and lots of domainers will start seeing no value to the domains they own.

Thanks Sahar, for asking me for my opinion on this question you posed. I hope I made sense for your readers.

Stephen Douglas
Successful Domain Managementâ„¢
BLOG: http://www.Successclick.com
DomainRelevance.com
“Own Your Competitionâ„¢”

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“Although I don’t fit in that group..” - You most definitely do. Thanks Stephen for participating.

You bring a good point, which is why businesses do not pay as much or any attention to generic domain names. Running actual businesses, going over emails from industry peers who send us generics for our businesses, I believe it is worthwhile to try to uncover the mystery of miscommunication, misunderstanding, between domain owners and business owners. I will write about this topic soon.
Cheers
Sahar

I got a technical degree in college, and most of the skills I learned in college (for mainframes) I re-learned in the real world (client/server and Web). However, most of what I took away from college were the intangibles - most from being the manager of my college radio station! Would that be considered worth the money? To me - yes!

I attended my first domainer conference at DOMAINfest a few weeks back. I had ideas on what I would expect to see and learn, but not completely. The driver for me going was to absorb and try to validate some of the ideas I had for expanding my work as a domainer within my Internet consulting business. Did I get this from it? Yes, and then some! I met a community of awesome people and learned a lot not just about domaining but about business - there was an entire conference full of entrepreneurs!

If you look at many things in life purely by the cost, you will decide not to pursue it. And many times there are intangibles you can’t enter on the general ledger of your company’s books. I probably will not be attending another domainer conference in 2008 but that has to do more with other events scheduled in my business and life more than cost.

It sounds like TRAFFIC Vegas was a great event - I wonder if anyone recorded Dr. Ham’s speech, as I would pay to watch it!

mp/m

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Hi Mike, thanks for participating, and hope that somehow you will find the time to attend a conference or two. At times I think to myself, it is not if you can afford them, the real question is, can you afford not to?
Dr Kevin Ham’s speech, as I last heard from Rick, will be available online by DVD soon. Contact Targeted Traffic for more details.
cheers
Sahar

Sahar you have lifted the lid on what I consider an immensely important subject that of “˜value’ and in context talked about Dr Kevin Ham’s address on “˜success’ which I was fortunate to hear. Naturally value means different things to different people…just like ’success’.

Believe it or not, whilst an avid reader, this is the first blog I have ever posted, leaving it to those who understand the industry far better than I ever will. However this subject is really about life and one upon which I feel qualified to comment.

For many both value and success is embodied in family and friends, for others both can be measured in dollars and cents. Neither view is right or wrong but consensus would almost certainly combine the two in the ideal analysis.

The perspective of the individual defines our personal value system. Many people are shaped and driven to achieve by the often philosophized ’super natural’ purpose within community and it is in this context that we often see extraordinary success where value is exposed and delivered.

Often the competing needs of the business and the inner desire of the individual conflict resulting in some challenging intraspection and often compromise.

I applaud Kevin Ham’s courage to address sometimes controversial non business issues because for me success and value can never be defined in pure materialistic terms no matter what the media tries to tell us. For anyone to make such public comments puts one under scrutiny and makes one vulnerable. So Kevin took a risk because none of us can really ever live up to our own ideals completely”¦.we either stumble along the way or discover another higher level of commitment from which we fall short. However the conviction I took with me relates to the compromise of values with respect to family and friends in the pursuit of success no matter how worthy the motive may be. Such compromise I struggle with almost daily.

Sahar touches on the value, as part of success, of making a difference in the lives of others and in particular I know that for many years RMG’s assista.com project has been a major passion and driver in his business pursuits among other things. We have spent hours exploring the difference this tool will make to the lives of ordinary people for generations.

In my address to TRAFFIC last week I was one who acknowledged the value of the friendship and assistance freely offered to me by Sahar early in my short domain experience, when few would even engage in serious conversation. Community is about putting something back, about values beyond our own business agenda.

To be truly successful in life I believe we need to find balance and incorporate “˜making a difference’ in our lives and corporate values. I commend the subject and those that raise it.