Comments on tech articles about domains show how ignorance makes us all look bad.
Whenever I come across a domain article on CNET and its peers I am amazed by some of the comments made by John Q Public. The comments show that the readers don’t understand the domain name system and industry, so they assume the worst — and are typically incorrect.
Just today I read an article from eWeek titled “Whois Hijacking My Domain Research?” The article was about the possibility that domain searches on CNET were being intercepted and registered by a third party. This may be true and the author provides some good backup. (Most previous accusations of such behavior have been by people simply dissapointed that a domain they queried was registered a month later. Sorry, you have to be faster than that.)
But my comments here aren’t about the article. They’re about the reader comments appended to the article. Here’s one:
…Alwats Suspected some-one was watching the queries. Google seems to be buying a lot of names under alias now that they bought the registor and get the names cheap. Their purchases are based on search engine queries. They now own over 100k names that they flog ads on.
While it’s possible Google is snatching these domains, my guess is this person is landing on domains owned by investors. This person sees the Google parking ads and assumes Google owns the pages. He then searches Whois and is confused by the various registrants, so he assumes Google is registering the domains under an alias.
…the domain name wouldn’t be valuable to anyone else except for me…now that someone mentioned network solutions, I think someone should target them. the domain I was trying to register earlier was originally listed with them … it was on expired status waiting on the prior owner to re-register during the “grace” period. I was watching their website every day waiting on the domain to be released intending on registering it with domainsite.com. Hmmm … then it gets “bought” within a couple of hours?
This one is obvious. This person doesn’t realize that domains get registered within seconds of dropping, or likely a direct transfer in this case. I find the reader’s comment “the domain name wouldn’t be valuable to anyone except for me” particularly ignorant. If it didn’t have value to anyone but you, why would it have been registered by someone else in the first place?
Time and time again I see comments like these. What can our industry do about it? We can post “corrective” comments on these articles. Or we can just let people live in their ignorant world. But at the end of the day, too much ignorance can hurt the industry.
Alex Tajirian says
We can point out to them (and insiders) the analytical models that have been developed in areas like appraisals, protection, TLD branding, monetization, and portfolio construction.
Roger W says
Its just a case of ignorance and you have to let people learn for themselves. This is still such a new industry that even experienced computer users are clueless when it comes to understanding what is going on. At least its getting more coverage in the mainstream press now.