July 24, 2008
Drop Wizard Gordon Martin Puts All of His Chips on Country Code Domains
When I entered the domain business in the spring of 2002 there were some independent drop catchers around who made it possible to occasionally get some great domains for next to nothing. Canadian Gordon Martin's DropWizard.com was one of those. I remember him catching two 3-letter .coms for me for what was then his flat rate for going after a domain - $120 apiece! Now THOSE were the good old days! I wound up doing an article about Gordon in our first year of publication (2003).
Martin got out of the drop catching business in 2004 but now he is back with a new venture devoted entirely to his latest passion - country code domains. "In 2004 we made a decision to exit that market and start catching for ourselves," Martin said. " What many don't know is I felt the .Com market was rising rapidly and future progress would only be made at a huge expense. Given today's prices it appears that prediction was right on the money. I felt that Country Codes were seriously underestimated and seriously undervalued. Accordingly that is the direction I moved in."
Martin added, "there are far more local and national companies selling goods within each country than international enterprises. People (buyers) tend to trust local (country) domains and local enterprises over international companies." Martin said he believes the local ccTLD for each country will become the domain "extension of choice" in the consumer's mind.
"Local search is becoming a larger and larger part of the search market, therefore, local extensions will become increasingly
important in providing local search results. For all the above reasons I believe that CCTLD's are vastly underpriced and represent one of the best opportunities in domain investment today," Martin said.
So what is he doing about? Martin has just introduced a new newsletter (the only cost is a $1 PayPal account verification fee) to connect ccTLD buyers and sellers. He said his newsletter would feature a closely filtered list of names for sale. "No more spending time crawling endless forums looking for gems. Most days we don't expect to exceed 10-20 prime generic domains," Martin said.
He believes the newsletter will be the perfect marketing tool for sellers as well. "Take advantage of our large clientele base. There were over 1,300 large qualified buyers in our initial mailout. These are some of the largest buyers in the world and they are fast too. I have closed major $xx,xxx deals, been paid and had the domain transferred in less than 5 minutes with these clients!"
Martin may be on to something. In our latest weekly domain sales report, seven of the Top 20 domains on the all extension leader board were ccTLDs (including three of the top ten).
(Posted July 24, 2008)
Source:
www.dnjournal.com
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