Supernatural Agency: Online business tales

If you don’t get the almost daily WIPO emails covering domain squatting disputes, it may be time to sign up and occasionally read through the decisions. Most are quite obvious but this one regarding boomerangvodka.com covers the issues regarding trademarks, timing and legitimate use of a domain. If you’re wondering whether you have infringing domains you might want to check this out. BTW, the complaint was denied.

Boomerangvodka.com is a parked domain so I question their decision that it is a legitimate business site, however they did legitimately predate the complaintent’s registration of the trademark.

There are 1 billion Internet users worldwide right now. The remaining 5 billion humans on the planet are not connected. Right now the UN is working on getting the next billion users connected. The challenges include poverty, infrastructure and interference by various governments.

For domainers and the online advertising world the implications of this are huge, including:

• The enormous potential for growth on the Internet. There are a limited number of domains out there and those of us in the first billion own most of them.
• Potential ad spend growth online is far larger than any current predictions which are based on the existing user base.
• Sites and domains targeting global audiences with very different worldviews will thrive.
• Digital products will be the major growth sector because they do not require shipping and they can be priced to fit the demographics of a geo-location. The downside of this is piracy.
• Forget intellectual property as a business model. The only IP that will be protectable is your domain. Your content, ideas and business concepts will be copied over and over. Domains will become the currency that determines value on the web.
• Dot coms are the gold standard. As the web grows and piracy flourishes money will retreat to the gold standard. This always happens in times of great change.
• English, IMHO, will still be the primary language online, however processing power and bandwidth are going to mean real-time translation of site content. Think about this- a Mandarin speaker/reader visits one of my sites and Google auto-translates it on the fly. Can we auto-translate domains? I’m in flying car territory here…
• It took ten years for the web to hit one billion users. I’m guessing the second billion will hit a lot faster.

My biggest takeaway? Domains are the only safe harbor online, the biggest growth opportunity. Domaining is a teeny-tiny business right now. The ‘players’ argue amongst themselves over silly imagined slights and the entire domain blogworld is limited to a half dozen blogs. Watch for the big guys to enter this world, the Goldman Sachs, Warren Buffetts and hedgefund managers. When that happens our little crew of domain millionaires will find their world dramatically altered (of course they will get very rich in the process).

Here’s a scenario to ponder: What if Amazon got into the domain business? They have virtually every product imaginable to promote and huge amounts of user-generated content to leverage. They have enormous scalability and unlimited resources. It’s a thought…

While I typically agree with those who find Business Week to be a great contrarian indicator (get lauded on the cover, watch your your stock go down), this article on the impact of applications on iPhone and the Google Phone OS gets it.

Basically, software developers don’t like to develop for mobile because the phone industry is too greedy and too fragmented. Every carriers wants their own piece of the pie, a big one, and they want the apps customized so they only work in their network. In my own experience working for a web-based email provider we found that the telecoms we sold private label versions to would only pay a few cents per user. For the average developer this simply isn’t worth the hassle.

Now, with an SDK (software development kit) coming for iPhone and the rumored Google phone operating system, we’ll have environments on phones to run apps that are not associated with the networks. This will re-engage those software developers who walked away from phone apps. The key to this, as anyone who reads this blog knows I am obsessed about, is the full browser on the phone.

Bye bye .mobi.

Hello web 3.0 on a mobile device.

And cheers for not requiring a laptop just to check my mail and the web while traveling… Next year everything changes again.

My business partner was sitting up last night buying dot com domains- I think there were martinis involved

This morning he sent me a list and wondered if I thought they were too goofy. I sent him a blog post on domaining I’d read and commented on and then wrote this to him:

Well, if you read the comment I left on the blog you’d know that I’m starting to think that practically anything we buy will be worth at least 100x what we paid for it in a year. If that’s true then we should be buying practically everything we can afford to buy, but, and this a big but- I still think there should be a clear path to developing traffic and monetization as a benchmark for deciding to buy a domain because that’s where the big money is. Those domains should be worth 1000x what we have into them.

How much would you pay for a site that made $3600/year? If you think like an investor you’d gladly pay $10k for that site to realize a 36% annual return on your money. So if we build a site to the point that it makes $10/day it is conservatively worth $10k or 1000x what we paid for it, probably more because once a site hits that number it won’t stop growing in pageviews and revenue.

This whole thing, IMHO, is the biggest no-brainer I’ve seen in my life as a business opportunity. It’s so big that the big players aren’t even hiding what they are doing- wonder why? Because they know they’re creating a much bigger market cap which drastically increases the value of their portfolios. There’s no reason to hide the activity, in fact they undoubtedly think the time has come to expand the market.