Dispelling The Myth of the Domain Name “Queue of One”

I must have received countless variations on the following over the years: "Hey, if you weren’t sitting on this domain name, we’d be able to register it. That’s not very fair."

So I wrote a blog post to bust the myth open. Perhaps you'll be able to take something away from it for your own sales pitches...
http://www.webmastering.co.uk/domain-names/the-myth-of-the-domain-name-queue-of-one/

 

Great post! Like the analogy of queueing round the block - had never thought of it like that, but it describes the situation perfectly.

 

Well said Edwin, you're right about that besides Nominet theirselves say " first come first served " so you're doing nothing wrong in regging all them domains

 

Great article Edwin. Really puts it into perspective.

 

Edwin while I understand the motivation for your article there is a big difference between people searching for a domain to register for their new business idea or project for £6 and buying one from you for £2,500 and upwards.

How many of your 6,000 domains have had serious multiple inquiry's and really have a queue of people looking to buy?

If you were an estate agent with 6,000 houses on your books and only selling a few a month you would be out of business very quickly.

I don't believe any article will have the power to convert people to part with a large pile of cash.

 

I think it would be on a sliding scale from the most desirable, thousands perhaps millions of times, down to the commercially viable dozens of times but even once would mean the target example would probably have missed it. Not rocket science the fact of the matter is -Too Late.

 

Whilst it doesn't happen too often in my case when it does I ask them to think about if they wanted amazon/com/.co.uk/ (note dictionary generic)

I suggest to them, could they really believe that they could buy it from the owner for whatever [paltry sum] they've got? and also that they have 'no given right' to the domain (whatever their claim) since Amazon got it first.

That usually does the trick

 

This is a good article and it helps domainers to keep focused in understanding why domains have a value. Targeted buyers will often spend thousands advertising but not on a domain name that could cut customer acquisition costs.

 

You've completely missed the point of my article.

I was addressing a very specific complaint that I have heard repeatedly MANY times.

Although the wording may have been slightly different, the basic implication has always been that if we hadn't registered the domain name, it would be "free to register".

My contention is that is utterly false.

Regardless of the value we may be placing on it (which is a totally separate debate) it is beyond reasonable doubt that somebody else would have registered the name if we hadn't done so. And for some of the "stronger" names it's certain that they've been whois-ed hundreds or thousands of times by hopefuls who then gave up on the idea of registering them once they saw that the names were taken.

That is a totally different proposition from having hundreds of offers on a name, which is NOT what I said. I never suggested as much, nor did I imply anything like that.

All I am saying - and it's a valid, valuable point - is that the names would not be FREE TO REGISTER even if WE hadn't registered them!

 

Tame version?

I think it boils down to the thinking that they (the haters) view Domainers as an unnecessary layer in the domain name food chain.

 

Hmmm, this is a tricky one for me. I hate it when people do it but then I do it myself. There's a slight difference in that I'm not regging/buying to sell but regging/buying to develop, but that doesn't mean I get all my domain names in public use and to the outside world it looks like I'm sitting on them.

I don't really agree with the argument in the post because it's basically like saying 'I may as well be a paedo/murderer/thief because other people are and/or someone else will be if I'm not'. A little extreme on the example, but the principle is the same. If there was some rule or restriction about how long you could keep an unused domain, the internet would be very different, and a lot of people would be a lot richer.

I just hate the idea of millions of good names sitting there doing nothing.

 

it would be nice if Nominet would supply whois/dac lookup counts for domain names to the registrants. Not sure on the feasability though.

 

There is a difference though between the people owning good commercial names which understandably will be snapped up and owned very quickly - and as Edwin rightly points out there is nothing wrong with it.

My gripe is people sitting on names they chuck on to Sedo wanting £x,xxx for something that has been there for 5 years (showing no offers on Sedo) and probably, commercially, worth around £100. The names would help people and small business get a foothold with a nice name - not the type of name that will cause ripples in the domain world - but good name offering an opportunity.

Instead of that the user goes off to .org.uk, hyphen or worse the .me.uk route - or even to something less memorable and forgotten quickly - without fully understanding what they are doing.

Not that I'm in favour of such per se but domains costing £200-£300 each would stop people buying up stuff they can't shift too quickly and let a nice name do what it should be doing.

 

Some registrars do this in the .com namespace I believe.

 

What ridiculous, utter nonsense.

Comparing something that is a well-established, completely legitimate and above board business practice with a heinous crime is a cheap straw man argument.
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/straw-man.html

 

Great blog post. I always found it bizarre that people actually believe that they were effectively second in an imaginary queue.

 

Ok then, take any well-established, completely legitimate and above board business practice that you don't like and apply it to your argument. It still ultimately comes down to 'If someone else is doing it, that makes it ok for me to do it'. It's a shame really because your article made some interesting points which would have provided a stronger argument in your favour when developed than 'everyone else is doing it'.

 

Incidentally, there's also another closely related myth: domain names "normally" cost £6.

The reality is that for many years now, any commercially valuable descriptive, generic, exact match domain name has cost £XYZ, where XYZ > £6 and in most cases >> £6.

Therefore, except for the odd free-to-reg but still commercially meaningful name that's slipped through the cracks, there's no such thing as a "£6 name" any more unless you're talking about brandables.

It is correct to say "A brandable domain name costs £6" but it has not been true to say "A commercial generic domain name costs £6" for many, many years in most niches - and therefore drawing a comparison with an alleged £6 starting point is a misleading (but very widespread) mistake.

 

How can anyone knock the first come first served rule, the shear scale of effort to run any other method would be cost prohibitive. To balance one point in Edwins' reasoning though, I'd suspect a large percentage of those whois lookups are actually other domainers looking for domains to stockpile.

 

By my calculations the last time I looked, just over 60% of the top 75,000 highly ranked single word generics in both .co.uk & .org.uk domains were held by domainers.