David Wells
Established Member
- Impact
- 50
What’s your name?
A: David
Where do you live?
A: Near Fort Lauderdale
What’s your level of expertise?
novice, intermediate, expert, etc.
A: Not sure, probably somewhere between novice and intermediate
How much experience do you have in the domain industry?
years, experience, etc.
A: have been buying domains since around 1995 but mostly for personal / business use, started buying .com domains like lottery tickets from four or five years ago and have had thousands of them but not very good at selling them. Tend to let a lot of them expire when i can't figure out what to do with them. My background is in technology, I've started several successful e-commerce businesses and look at domaining as more of a hobby than a business.
What would you like to specifically learn first?
how to buy a domain, domain history, best selling strategies, government policies, etc.
A: Experimenting with parking domains at the moment to see if I can make more money keeping them than selling them.
Are you currently working on any projects or ideas?
A: Have 250 or so domains on DomainZaar trying to see how that works as a parking platform, it's been fun so far but haven't made much money yet.
What are your short-term goals in the next year?
A: Need to figure out if there is a way to drive traffic to parked domains that doesn't break advertiser rules.
What are your long-term goals in the next 5 years?
A: Would love to eventually sell a domain name for a few thousand bucks just to convince myself this wasn't all just an expensive hobby.
What was your first domain you purchased?
A: Honestly I can't remember. I seem to recall that back in the 90's I might have owned yellowpages.com and something like internetauctions.com and setup something like yahoo on the first and something like ebay (although nowhere near as good) on the other. Both bombed since back then it was next to impossible to get any traffic at all.
Why did you start investing in domains? Please tell us the story.
A: Well, once dot com domains really took off and it was nearly impossible to get one I realized that I might have missed a boat (or two) by not buying more of them early on when I could still get them. So I started picking up a few here and there when I saw a buzzword in the media and found I could get the domain name. I got a few domains that were names of famous people and setup fan sites for them which was kind of fun. Ended up giving most of those away to either other fans or to the agent of the famous person who thought they could build a better site. (sometimes they did, usually they just parked it). I still like to build websites for charities occassionally and have gone through a lot of domain names building blogs for various friends and family. Lately, I've seen interest in .com domains seems to have died down a bit and there is a lot of competition from other areas (facebook, twitter, tumblr, etc.). I noticed it's possible to get fairly nice domains for $8 again so it's kind of fun again in a lottery ticket sort of way. I still don't know how to sell them properly which is why I've decided to try to learn how to park them instead. Looking forward to meeting some people and sharing some stories on here.
A: David
Where do you live?
A: Near Fort Lauderdale
What’s your level of expertise?
novice, intermediate, expert, etc.
A: Not sure, probably somewhere between novice and intermediate
How much experience do you have in the domain industry?
years, experience, etc.
A: have been buying domains since around 1995 but mostly for personal / business use, started buying .com domains like lottery tickets from four or five years ago and have had thousands of them but not very good at selling them. Tend to let a lot of them expire when i can't figure out what to do with them. My background is in technology, I've started several successful e-commerce businesses and look at domaining as more of a hobby than a business.
What would you like to specifically learn first?
how to buy a domain, domain history, best selling strategies, government policies, etc.
A: Experimenting with parking domains at the moment to see if I can make more money keeping them than selling them.
Are you currently working on any projects or ideas?
A: Have 250 or so domains on DomainZaar trying to see how that works as a parking platform, it's been fun so far but haven't made much money yet.
What are your short-term goals in the next year?
A: Need to figure out if there is a way to drive traffic to parked domains that doesn't break advertiser rules.
What are your long-term goals in the next 5 years?
A: Would love to eventually sell a domain name for a few thousand bucks just to convince myself this wasn't all just an expensive hobby.
What was your first domain you purchased?
A: Honestly I can't remember. I seem to recall that back in the 90's I might have owned yellowpages.com and something like internetauctions.com and setup something like yahoo on the first and something like ebay (although nowhere near as good) on the other. Both bombed since back then it was next to impossible to get any traffic at all.
Why did you start investing in domains? Please tell us the story.
A: Well, once dot com domains really took off and it was nearly impossible to get one I realized that I might have missed a boat (or two) by not buying more of them early on when I could still get them. So I started picking up a few here and there when I saw a buzzword in the media and found I could get the domain name. I got a few domains that were names of famous people and setup fan sites for them which was kind of fun. Ended up giving most of those away to either other fans or to the agent of the famous person who thought they could build a better site. (sometimes they did, usually they just parked it). I still like to build websites for charities occassionally and have gone through a lot of domain names building blogs for various friends and family. Lately, I've seen interest in .com domains seems to have died down a bit and there is a lot of competition from other areas (facebook, twitter, tumblr, etc.). I noticed it's possible to get fairly nice domains for $8 again so it's kind of fun again in a lottery ticket sort of way. I still don't know how to sell them properly which is why I've decided to try to learn how to park them instead. Looking forward to meeting some people and sharing some stories on here.
