Early domainers

[Debt.tv]

I have some history questions....

I remember back in 1995 when I was 17-18 years old, I was amazed at the fact that I could pick up girls while chatting online (AOL of course). I thought to myself if I could go back I wouldn't spend my time chatting, I would have been registering domain names with my McDonald's paychecks.
But then I thought since the internet was pretty new (to the public, at least) and when things are new they are expensive. So my questions are:

1. How much did it cost to register a .com?
2. Where did you register them?
3. Did you have to send a check? Just wondering because I don't know how secure the Internet was back then.

And my last question has to do with how you found out you could register .coms. When I was online back then, it never once occured to me to register a .com, mainly because it really wasn't public knowledge that the domain names are someones property, and anyone could have one. I am assuming most of the early domainers came from the silicon valley where they were in computer science or just in the computer industry.

 

[weblord]

1. 1995 i registered .com.ph i learned from my isp 1998 on netsol. i think it's U.S.$70/2 years

2. netsol.com

3. credit card

 

[maxeaus]

There is another thread on NP's about domain prices. Initially they were free, then $50 a year, and prices have been coming down ever since.

 

[Archangel]

I found out about regging domains around 2001, from spam that RegFly sent me. That ranks the only time in history I ever listened to spam lol

 

[owntype]

I registered my first domain name in 1997... it's my ex-nick .com and let it expired in 1999 (and it's still available atm, lol).

Then I became a newbie domainer in July 2006 ... damn ...

 

[Seabass]

When they started charging in Sept. 1995 it was a two year requirement for $100.

Also, all domains had to be registered under different companies at first (until they realized they did not want to police the Net for every domain)....."one domain per company" they repeated over and over until they got frustrated keeping up.

I had over 300 "companies" in 1995.

 

[Archangel]

I had over 300 "companies" in 1995.

Wow. Are you one of those rich domainers? lol

 

[Seabass]

Wow. Are you one of those rich domainers? lol

I'm no Frank Schilling or Rick Schwartz, but I should be.....I got distracted with development in the late 90's and took my eye off the ball for about three years and then woke back up in early 2002.

I did okay though. I'm not complaining...... except for these damn lower payouts lately. Even the biggest guys are getting hit.....nobody is immune to this.

 

[bilirkishi]

it is about $120 in my country...

just a .com

 

[labrocca]

I'm no Frank Schilling or Rick Schwartz, but I should be.....I got distracted with development in the late 90's and took my eye off the ball for about three years and then woke back up in early 2002.

I feel the same way. I was registering names in 1996. I had the chance to register a lot of dictionary words but passed on them since the conventional wisdom was to build sites. What kind of site could I build on "damage.com"? I owned and operated a small web development business under "InvisibleBrick.com" which I have since sold. It was built entirely from Flash back when Flash was 1.0 and new. That was nearly a decade ago.

Somewhere around 2003 I started picking up more domains and flipping them realizing there was a market there. Of course it was already too late at this point to snag dictionary names in the dot com space and I had not been savvy to the drop market for a couple more years. Now drops are really costly to bid on too.

I don't know...my post just depressed me. Makes me wonder wtf I am missing right now. Sometimes you can't see the woods through the trees.

Am I off-topic?

Ugh...netsol was the only registrar and it was costly...$70 in 1996 for two years I believe was the price. I remember when register.com opened and started to compete with better service but similar pricing.

The worst thing about netsol was just their customer service which is still an issue today. I remember wanting to transfer stuff out early 2000-2002 and they required a fax and lots of communication to make it happen. It was a real nightmare getting them to do anything. I had to fax forms, proof of who I was, my business certificate, and a note from mom. Totally sucked. I think one transfer took me about 3 weeks. To this day I hate the company.

btw..I am still depressed over my first couple paragraphs..fortunes could have been made for many of us that were in the game back then but we played it wrong. At least some of us anyways. Seabass has a much better portfolio than I do though. Jeez...I wasted over a quarter million dollars between 2000-2003 on a magazine that eventually folded and had I instead been domaining ...oh man...going now to slit my wrist!

*cries uncontrollably for an hour*

 

[Seabass]

Labrocca, yes......the stories could go on forever.

Me and a buddy were looking at domains in 1995 and we started to look at porn domains and we both told each other that we could do better than that.....no reason to stoop to that level. HOW STUPID?????????

I still remember looking at these FREE domains in 1995 (I may be wrong on one or two):

Porn.com, Porno.com, Ass.com, Whores.com, HouseBoats.com, Pecans.com, Abortions.com, Universities.com, SoftDrinks.com, and many others.

A domainer may look at some of those and say "I could have done better", but if you remember.....there was no gauge to evaluate domains.... no Google, no Overture, nothing. I just pulled out the Yellow Pages and started registering category titles. The biggest mistake I made was that I did not pay attention enough to the "market size", meaning how much money can you really make off of a domain like DentalFloss.com as opposed to Stocks.com? That was a bad mistake, but I still hit some categories on the head which saved the day.

The $70 domains I believe came out in 1997 or 1998, not 1996...right? A judge ruled there was an illegal $30 tax that Netsol had put on domains and he struck that part of the payment down. I thought I would get some money back....but the judge just let them keep it. Unbelievable, really!

Opportunities today? They are around, but not like I think everyone keeps saying. I don't think domains are cheap yet from the financial crash.....I just don't see it. Andrew at DomainNameWire.com was talking about BananaSplit.com being for sale for something like $2,000 and what a great deal it is compared to a year ago.....but I would not give more than $500 for that domain. The clicks have to be around .05 or less, so the only real salvation is if someone wants to use it as a brand somehow.

The drop lists have some good domains but I think, in general, everyone is overpaying and it will catch up to them. Only the domainers that thought through what they are really doing when they buy these domains will truly prosper....b/c they picked the right ones. It takes years before you REALLY know which are the right ones and which are the wrong ones. I think most domainers are acting like lemmings and just do what every other domainer is doing.....bidding domains up like crazy to 10 to 30 years PPC earnings. It's not smart......and I did it too for awhile until I got smart.

The real opportunities anymore I believe are in foreign domains. My favorites are Indian and Brazilian domains.

I just got my Brazilian tax ID.....don't ask me how I did it, I can't tell...... but I am an American and now can buy .com.br at Brazilian prices. I'm getting ready to go on a tear. That market is poised to explode. They are now beating the U.S. in production of beef, corn, soy, and other products and are getting ready to become the bread basket of the world.....it's the last place left in the world with vast expanses of unused land that can be planted. They just discovered an oil reserve off of Rio that will rival Saudi Arabia and they have a huge economy already with many very educated people. The U.S Gov't did a study of Brazil and concluded they will be a super power one day. Hard to believe, huh? Internet penetration is still at only 21%.......tons of upward room.

India is great too.....but mainly just b/c of population size.....but tons of very, very smart folks there too.

I just don't see as much opportunity in English like I used to. Everybody is working it already. The people that make the most money in this business are the ones that don't do what everyone else is doing.

I read an interview with Rick Schwartz and he said most of his new domains are hand-regs. How about that? Be creative today.....reap in 10 years.

 

[Premiere]

*cries uncontrollably for an hour*

Whoa! I'm no pothead but grab a bowl and sit and smoke brother!

Fortunes are made and lost every day. No sense in lamenting lost loves or lost domains. You're alive, you ain't broke and earth has not yet frozen over.

So what, you sunk money into a dotcom venture that failed? Join a few billion others (myself included). You had a 50/50 chance back then that your investment would have been worth billions. You made a choice, and it wasn't such a bad one, but the market was flooded with opportunities and only a few made it through the door. And there is no way of knowing if you would have been a better domainer then that you are now. Skill and experience has always made the difference.

 

[labrocca]

Porn.com, Porno.com, Ass.com, Whores.com, HouseBoats.com, Pecans.com, Abortions.com, Universities.com, SoftDrinks.com, and many others.

Do you remember that back then netsol didn't allow you to register certain questionable names. No F word or Shit or anything like that...so most serious income domains just couldn't be registered. Stuff like c*nt right now must be worth some serious cash. Just check it and it has reg date of 2001! For crying out loud OMG PIZZA ZORK HELP!

sh*t.com 1999
c*nt.com 2001
f*ck.com 2001 (one has to shake their head on this one)
f*ckme.com 1999

If you tried to register f*ckme.com netsol would deny you. Anything with the F word was pretty much automatically denied. Some got around the filter but not that many. Would be interesting to run a query finding the earliest reg date for a domain with that word.

Fortunes are made and lost every day. No sense in lamenting lost loves or lost domains. You're alive, you ain't broke and earth has not yet frozen over.

I didn't really cry for an hour.


Seabass you never seemed like a developer type to me so that's probably why you are looking toward non-english domains. I develop strongly so getting indian domains for me would be worthless. I agree with your advice though for those looking for parking or possibly resale value from a domain. Heck if you can develop an indian domain too it's probably a good time to capture traffic and create a niche. India is just booming on the internet and I see some new crap sites just getting thousands of visits per day.

Anyhoo...good discussion.

 

[Jasonn]

I started regging in 1998 but it never crossed my mind to buy names to simply "sit" on. There was no such thing as parking and most businesses didn't have a website or even know what it was or how it could help them. At the time all I did was adult websites and the domain name really didn't make a difference. I could make tens of thousands per month off any domain name. Looking back there is plenty I could of regged but didn't. Although, there weren't that many quality names available in 98 even. Most you see now with 99, 2000, etc were dropped at some point. I remember emailiing people trying to buy some good adult ones but everyone wanted hundreds of thousands so I gave up. I didn't really get into regging names for the sake of reselling them until 2006. Such a shame. I could of been a somebody, I could of been a contender. Ah well. As long as there is a future, there is hope. However getting excellent .com domain names were a once in a lifetime opportunity, never to be repeated. If you were in the right place at the right time, right age, etc...you were one of the "lucky" ones.

 

[shinysign]

I agree, getting those first names was like walking into an empty Manhattan and buying land for $100 an acre. Once they did it, all they had to do was wait and were set and still are. But there are still plenty of opportunities out there, you would just be hard pressed to find one that pays off reg fee 50,000 times over or something. The fact is if anyone knew ten years ago what we know now about any market they would be very rich. It's like imagining that the past is the present and that we can simply tell our past selves what to do and alter the past, like telling my past self from 10 years ago what stocks to buy based on the graphs I can see today.

 

[akcampbell]

I can empathise with the OP. I started using the Internet in 1994 but was more interested in finding a well stocked chat room and reading newspapers for free than domains. I remember thinking Netscape would be the biggest beneficiary of Internet growth so if I'd had money back then I might have lost the lot. I didn't give domain names any thought whatsoever, everything was about the site, not the name.

The comment about BananaSplit.com was bang on the buzzer. I didn't start regging domains until 2006, initially I was into buying what I thought of as "emotive" .coms like BananaSplit.com because they were relatively affordable. Two of my earliest buys were Dearly Beloved (dot) com and Impossible Dream (dot) com.

Where new opportunities lie is a tricky one. I decided .info by the end of 2006 and more recently .pro. The downside to ccTLD's is you might not understand the market as well as a local and the prize might not be as big as you think. For example, the UK, is the world's fifth largest economy, you have alot of boffins, high Internet usage, 1,000 years of accumulated capital, but according to dnsaleprice.com only 7 .co.uk sales over $100,000, it's missing Cruises.co.uk which sold for $1.1m in May 08, but still, for the size of our economy and 7m .co.uk domains registered that's pretty lame. It means you've got a 1 in a million shot of scoring a 6 figure sale.

The problem with ccTLD is you are limiting your market size. There are 60m Brits versus 6000m people worldwide so you are selling to or developing for only 1% of the global population. For my money, a gTLD like .info or .pro that has a universally recognised meaning and 6000m potential customers is a better option for domaining or development than a ccTLD. Up until recently, .pro was very similar to .com in the early to mid 1990's. It cost $99 to register, there was effectively only one registrar, about 7,000 domains registered, it was tightly restricted, and loss making.

Registrations have tripled in the last 5 weeks, restrictions have been relaxed but are still a pain, there are about 3-4 registrar to pick from, and only about 21,000 domains registered which is where .com was at the start of 1993. I don't think it's heading for 77m registrations and global domination anytime soon but most people would admit that phonetically at least Name.pro is a purer sounding site name and online brand than Namepros.com.

 

[Seabass]

Seabass you never seemed like a developer type to me so that's probably why you are looking toward non-english domains. I develop strongly so getting indian domains for me would be worthless. I agree with your advice though for those looking for parking or possibly resale value from a domain. Heck if you can develop an indian domain too it's probably a good time to capture traffic and create a niche. India is just booming on the internet and I see some new crap sites just getting thousands of visits per day.

Anyhoo...good discussion.

Labrocca, I did not know that about f*uck and those words......huh! Here I am just learning that in 2008.

I do know that my buddy tried to register a domain having to do with Churches in 1995 and they asked him if he had a certificate showing that he was running a church. Apparently you have to get some kind of certificate to be tax-exempt like a church. He told them he had applied for it (total bull) and they stalled at giving it to him so he threatened them with a lawyer and they gave it to him. They had asked him to tell them the name of the form and he just happened to hear his grandma talking about the form a few days earlier and knew the name of it.......talk about luck.

I am not into any serious development anymore..... as I burned out on it and all the peripheral work required to do it right. Maybe I should try again...... I started in 1997 with my buddy and I writing software, buying IP's in bulk, getting enough money/computers to run a data center, trying to live close enough to the "switch", renewing expensive domains, lack of income (just too early in the game), managing employees and contracted help...... all took its toll on me. I think I would have been better off if I had either just kept buying domains or developing in 2003 instead of so early on. But, if I had started developing in 2003 I would have missed many domain buying opportunities. I have made a lot of money since 2003 knowing what I know about domains now.

Also, I was working so hard back then, still am, but much harder then. I also had a construction company that was a type of franchise....... and was talking about 7,000 minutes a month on my cell between my Net ventures and construction company, not including office phone calls, sleeping four or five hours a night. I was also speaking three languages everyday.....English, Spanish, and Portuguese b/T all my construction workers (believe me.... changing up b/t speaking in three languages is tiresome). Then one day I was at a friends house and everything I looked at started looking like an images in a frames and I felt a eruption of anxiety and I just passed out and hit the floor. It happened many more times over the next hour. My friend drove me to the hospital and they checked me for heart attack, stroke,etc........ Nothing was wrong with me. The doctor told me that working that hard can do that kind of stuff. That was a pivotal point for me......I sold the construction co. and concentrated on the Net. I now make sure I get sufficient sleep and take some breaks. When I was young I thought I was invincible.....I sure learned.

The guys that are most successful in this biz.....Frank, Rick, etc.... are the ones that never took their eye off of domaining. The ones like me that went on a tangent, like developing did miss out somewhat.

I want passive income at this point........ I want all my time to look for new investments. I'd prefer joint ventures at this point where I don't have to be involved in trying to grow a company, just lend the domain and its power to the deal.

 

[Archangel]

A friend and I talk about all of these things constantly... where were we back in the 90s? Man, we could have been rich lol but NO... we, like most of you, passed this up...

 

[akcampbell]

I think there's a tendency to over-lionise the most successful domainers like Rick Schwartz, Frank Schilling, and Kevin Ham and people rue the wrong moves they made in the early and mid 1990's. However, in my mind starting a magazine and blowing $250k is more commendable creatively than getting in at the beginning of what is essentially a pyramid scheme and flogging a $XXX,XXX+ .com now and again.

 

[Seabass]

Buying those early domains was not creativity.....it was insight and guts.

The only thing close to pyramid schemes is all the trend buyouts like .mobi, .cc, etc......... where noobs get burnt. No offense...... after all it is just a matter of opinion. Most domains are not worth $1 million to other domainers.....just end users

If anything domains might get marginalized by other venues or tech applications on the Net........ but hey, that's investing and it is like that in every investment. There are risks. The key is the exit plan and jumping on a new investment ready to rise, if you think this horse is getting ready to buck

Rick is selling. Does that mean something? He is a pure investor and a different animal than a developer is.

I think he is diversifying ..... b/c he is worried. JMO