You can earn money investing in domains related to overall trends in 2007.
This time of year every publication likes to run an article about predictions for the coming year. Savvy domain investors should pay attention to these articles. Overall business and lifestyle trends can have a big affect on the value of domain names. People who noticed the trends toward user-generated content and self publishing banked on blog and social networking domains over the past few years.
Let’s take a look at a recent Forbes article, “Fearless 2007 Predictions” by Rick Karlgaard (January 8, page 27). Here are some of his predictions and how you can apply them to the domain name market.
Big Tech has another good year. Karlgaard explains that HP, Oracle, and Cisco are all up and should do well in 2007. You can bet on big tech in domains. For example, last year I spent a decent amount of money to buy IndentityManagement.com. Identity Management is a genre of technology for organizations to manage its employee’s IDs, network, security, etc. An example software application in this segment is enterprise single sign-on. If you search Google for “Identity Management” you’ll see the top advertisers include HP, Oracle, and BMC…and many of them are paying over $8 per click. Look for domains that might interest these big tech companies and their startup rivals.
Web 2.0 inflates to bubble status. As a domainer, I look at a lot of these web 2.0 companies and laugh at their domain names. They are perhaps the worst domain names a company could ever choose. Flickr.com? (A Yahoo! company (NASDAQ: YHOO). Talkr.com? Frappr.com? The only thing these domains are good for are sending traffic to Flicker.com, Talker.com, and Frapper.com.
Tiny jets begin to ship. Browse on over to Domain Tools and use its suggestion tool to find domains related to private jets and tiny jets. Or look for similar domains for sale.
Hockey and soccer gain popularity. Karlgaard predicts these sports will gain popularity because large flatscreen TVs make these sports easier to watch. Sports domain names are typically shunned by big domain investors because of relatively low pay-per-click prices. You can pick up good ones for under $1,000. Again, Domain Tools is the place to find available and for-sale domains related to hockey and soccer.
Of course, Karlgaard could be wrong. And trends don’t necessarily translate into fast profits in an illiquid market like domain names. Don’t invest anything you can’t lose.
Don Murray says
I agree with you on flickr, frapper and talkr, not very good. Why would these companies spend so much money to create a name out of thin air when the could buy a generic name and spend millions less to market it. Its hard to remember all these news names with having then ending come with an r on it.
With web 2.0 and vlogs I am hoping it continues to surge. We own around 100 vlog domains alone with vlogs.mobi being my top one. Vlog.mobi just went for 6100.00 on sedo last week, I thought that was a steal seeing that we had 4 offers in the 10-15k range already this month for vlogs.mobi.
I personally think any geo demographic domain name will also do well. Along with betting names for the .mobi area.
Don Murray
Robby Kumar says
Domain issues are interesting. I have recently come across new data and understanding and wouldn’t mind networking to improve my revenues.