.. I still don't see why per se being aged is always positive and meaningful.
Or am I missing something? Thanks for any insights.
Bob
Age adds value. The reason is simple: Value is derived from scarcity. Age = time = money. Time is a scarce resource, so it's valuable, even the most valuable resource for many people. Time is money, money is time. Anything aged is more valuable by default unless it's a dead or extinct product (example: horse carriage, spear, telegraph). Every product has a life, is born, lives and dies like humans. Internet is still young, so age will add value to internet based products until internet dies and becomes extinct like telegraph.
Even older humans are more expensive than younger ones. Seeing a 50 years old doctor is more expensive than seeing a 35 years old doctor or an advocate, technician, accountant, etc. Because you can't revert back the time, accelerate it or stop it or slow it down. Little children want to become adult faster, want to get rid of childhood but time passes in its own speed. Elderly people miss the old days when they were child or young but they pass away like all the other previous humans. We don't control the time. We can't produce more time, can't consume it faster or slower (eg: you can't shave your beard when you are 5 years old
) Time is not only scarce resource but also fully out of our control. Gold supply is scarce but you can decide how much gold you will demand. Land supply is scarce but you can live in a smaller house when you have to. So time is the most valuable thing as its quantity is fully out of our control in both, supply and demand sides.
Age alone has a value. Assume beer.com is available and someone hand registered it today. It would be cheaper if it was registered today.
However, what if the domain was first registered say 12 years ago, but has essentially sat parked for most or all of that period? In this case I don't see how being aged is positive, and maybe even it could be negative if an unsuccessful attempt has been made to sell the domain over years.
Being parked or failed sales attempts in the past are not good indicators in an appraisal. Age always adds value. Because you can't turn back to the past, say, turning back to 1990's and being able to hand register 3 letter domains like sex.com. You can safely assume randomly chosen older domains are known by more people, need less promotion than randomly chosen newer domains. This is the main reason of why aged websites rank better in search results: They need search engines less as they receive more direct traffic (type-in or via browser bookmarks). Conversely search engines need aged, premium domains more than the need of aged domains for search engines. Because the search engines I know -specifically google- don't operate on good domains, so they have to provide reliable, quality search results to survive. As they aren't confident to survive merely based on search service, they added different services in addition to their initial search service. In my opinion, the reason is mostly related to bad choice (or not a perfect choice) on domain. In my opinion search.com would be a better choice than google.com if it was available to hand register.
Another striking proof: If you renew your website domain for longer 1 year in advance it ranks better in search results. I personally verified this on my own websites. Register a domain today, develop it today and renew its domain for 5 years, till 2022. By renewing its domain for 5 years, you are announcing everyone (including search engines) your site will certainly become 5 years old in 2022. Therefore your site deserves enjoying some portion of the authority of a 5 years old domain as it gives a guarantee to become a 5 years old domain.
Age isn't just a number. Even in the emerging markets of today (bitcoin, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, robotics) older domains will be always more valuable than the new ones. I saw some threads on this forum which started to buy 1+ year old crypto-bitcoin domains. Age adds value to everything you see. For instance you could buy 1 bitcoin for $1 in the past. But today you have to pay almost $6,000 for the same 1 bitcoin. Age isn't just a number. Of course everything dies after getting old enough. But internet is still young and is still growing.
Early adapters, first entrants skim the market (any market, not only internet-domain market). This rule never changes. Can you hand register 3L com's today? I remember the times when people were discussing if hand registering 4L com is a waste of money as most of 4 letters you can think of are meaningless random combinations. Now, the train missed, you can't hand register any 4L com. Is it important if your 4L com was parked or didn't sold after many attempts? No. Age is still adding value to 3L and 4L domains. 4L domains have value as they are scarce. Some smart, forward looking people saw this fact before the most people and hand registered 4L com's while it was possible. So we turned back to the beginning of this post. Value is derived from scarcity. Air is the most valuable thing to live but air has no economic value as it's not scarce. 4L or 3L is valuable as they are scarce. Being forward looking is valuable as it's scarce. Anything valuable is scarce. Age adds value until the product dies, becomes extinct, or until human can control quantity of the time.
