Lee Hodgson, who owns Domain Guru, talks about shutting down ValuableNames.com and where he sees value in the domain name market.
Depending on whom you asked, Lee Hodgson was either the greatest guy in the world or the bane of your existence in 2001. That’s when he started publishing a series of articles about the domain drop on SitePoint. He outlined how and when the dropped worked, giving ordinary Joes the chance to participate.
So how did Hodgson get involved with domain names?
“I got into business on New Year’s Eve, 1999”, explains Hodgson. “I was looking for some work I could do in Thailand as opposed to going back to freezing cold UK when I came across an article about business.com selling for $7.5M and I thought “that looks ideal, work from anywhere with an Internet connection, and it could be nicely profitable”.
“So my New Years’ Resolution was to become a domainer,” says Hodgson.
In 2000 and 2001 he started writing articles about domain names, including the infamous “Domain Goldrush” article at SitePoint. Hodgson says a handful of people have never forgiven him for writing that article and exposing the domain drop, although many more have thanked him.
He says he’s always enjoyed the challenge of designing systems and services. He created NamePursuit.com, a service to help people be the first to make a backorder for a domain on SnapNames. (Before auctioning domains, SnapNames sold backorders for $60 to the first person who placed the backorder.) He also created Valuable Names, a service which is now shutting down.
Why is he shutting down the service? Notice how Hodgson says he enjoys the challenge of designing systems, not necessarily marketing them. The everyday work of promoting Valuable Names wasn’t fun to him.
“I decided to shut down the service and offer the underlying data for sale,” he says. “I don’t want to sell it to too many more people, because that will create competition for the good domains. I’m going to continue selling the data until the end of the month, and then I’m done. I’ve sold my lists to about a half dozen people in the past couple weeks.”
The high price for the data is certainly limiting sales to only serious domainers, and that is Hodgson’s intention. He is serious about stopping sales of the data at the end of this month, at which point it will be extremely difficult to obtain this domainers’ treasure trove of information.
(If you are interested in getting your hands on this data, see this article which describes the data and pricing he is offering.)
Hodgson is now investing heavily in international domain names (IDNs, domains which are not in roman characters).
“My big passion is IDN domain names. Since I live in Thailand and can speak and write Thai, I have invested 95% in Thai language domains. Many of the best I got on launch day on April 19th, 2001 but others have been acquired since, both fresh registrations and aftermarket purchases. We have around 900 Thai domains now and have focused almost entirely on acquiring the top Thai search terms.”
Hodgson continues:
“We are still very much “ahead of the curve” with Thai IDN domains. Only about 10% of Thai browsers are IDN-enabled. Thais are stuck with IE6 for the most part, but it will change in the next couple of years. Also, Thai traffic is difficult to monetize at the moment. That will start to change when Google Adsense is launched here, which was supposed to happen sometime in 2007.”
His first “hub site” is http://xn--12c8d1a4fxc.com/, or เà¸à¸¡à¸ªà¹Œ.com, which means “games” in Thai.
Hodgson admits that IDNs are speculative, but backs up his investments with reasonable assertions. “I understand the jury is still out with most domainers on IDNs,” he says. “Domain names after all is said and done are a communication tool. Thais are currently being forced to communicate in a foreign language. Think of all those Bangkok billboards containing domain names full of foreign letters. How many Thais can remember them? Very few. Is that effective communication? No.
“How many ASCII domains could possibly pass the “radio test” for Thais? Way below 1%, if for no other reason than there is no standard way for Thai words to be written in the English language, so Thais simply cannot listen to a domain name, then go and type it in. It just doesn’t work for them. But if the domains were actually in Thai, then suddenly a huge % would pass the radio test.”
Is the Domain Guru right about IDNs? Will he help turn the world onto them like he did expired domains? Only time will tell.
Claude Gelinas says
Lee Hodgson has been a privileged witness to the stellar rise of the domain name business.
Nowadays, savvy domainers know that what the size and quality of their domain name portfolio can have a huge impact on their bottom line… a positive one, that is.