news Verisign Blog Calls Us All "Domain Scalpers"

[Bob Hawkes]

It appears that Verisign are feeling pretty secure now that they have their 6 year agreement with 4x7% price increases on .com and their stock popped up 18% today. In a blog post today Verisign say:

"Flipping domain names or warehousing them to create scarcity adds nothing to the industry and merely allows those engaged in this questionable practice to enrich themselves at the expense of consumers and businesses." - Verisign today​

Andrew has written an excellent column on it here, or you can read their blog post (I wonder if it will get revised?) here.

As Andrew points out:

Verisign has been catering to this market for years. Sponsoring its conferences, promoting domain investing, creating the very tools designed to let domain investors know which domains to register…and now it wants to pretend it has nothing to do with this “questionable practice”. C’mon.
​

This is almost unbelievable and I can't believe it will not anger many. At least for those of us who were trying to decide whether we call ourselves domainers (not a dictionary term),domain investors, domain service agents, domain experts, domain originators, etc. no longer need to worry about that. We are all scalpers according to Verisign.

Seriously, amazingly insensitive of Verisign.

Bob (grrrr... feeling angry )

ps I always try to find the bright side of everything. A good day for ngTLD and country code extensions I guess?

 

[DanSanchez]

Absolutely disgusting piece, every one of you should be commenting and sharing your thoughts on this attack piece by someone who willows in her own hypocrisy.

 

[bmugford]

Verisign can fuck off. They have a no-bid contract for something any number of companies would be willing and able to do far cheaper.

Special shout out to Phil Corwin from a member of the ICA. He sold out and joined Verisign. From an outspoken critic to working for them. Any good work he ever did for the ICA was washed away with that move. Pathetic.

Brad

 

[Kate]

The reasoning is so flawed that I don't know where to begin. VRSN have a license to print money, and they are trashing their customers who risk their own money. Do they want to swap places ? Of course not, they are in such a privileged position.

Then they are suggesting we are disrupting the market, extorting businesses. But nobody has any obligation to turn to a domain speculator for their domain needs. People are free to buy any unregistered .com for $10. That's the truth, few end users are paying more than regfee for a domain name.
On the other hand we have seen their business model in .tv in the past. They rendered the good names unaffordable.
What is at stake is not only the need to keep registration prices 'reasonable' but maintain predictability. The gTLD pricing debacle should serve as a lesson. If the registries are allowed to this creates disruption.

They are in the position of a casino, they cannot be allowed to change the rules all along or make different rules for each player.

They are starting to behave very much like government, a cozy monopoly that thinks it can afford to ignore the people it is supposed to serve.

And they have the nerve to complain. Hypocrisy at its finest.
The bottom line is that consumers are being ripped off because of Verisign's monopoly and the complicity of Icann. They could save well over $1 billion every year. And I too have a simple solution to this problem

 

[DanSanchez]

It's no surprise the person tasked with this "job" has very little clue what makes a good domain to begin with, how has she been employed at Versign for so long? I guess "coordinating global content marketing" with a major monopolist corporation doesn't involve the strategy of actually naming anything... Check out her "domain collection." Like many newbies, she has not a clue.

 

[creataweb]

@ Verisign

 

[sbweb]

Biting the hand that feeds them. Without the aftermarket, they would be making a lot less money. Maybe we should grant them their wish.

 

[bmugford]

It's no surprise the person tasked with this "job" has very little clue what makes a good domain to begin with, how has she been employed at Versign for so long? I guess "coordinating global content marketing" with a major monopolist corporation doesn't involve the strategy of actually naming anything... Check out her "domain collection." Like many newbies, she has not a clue.

DailyDoucheDigest.com. What a gem.

Brad

 

[Brands.International]

They have us all on their hands; that's why they can get away saying stupid stuff like that. Sucks.

Except me...I invest only in new gTLDs, no .com here
And so far I was not called "scalper" by any new gTLD registry.
So...maybe it is good to have your eggs in more then 1 basket...

 

[Bob Hawkes]

On the positive side, it is nice to find a topic that I think the vast majority of domain name investors can all agree about.

Trying to be positive, why don't we put together as a community a comprehensive, compelling argument about what we do add to the business and organization community. I am having trouble finding it, but I recall reading an eloquent post from @Kate some months ago on the topic on some thread.

So what do domainers do that is positive?

Bob

 

[namemarket]

What with expected 28% dot-com price increases coming and all the other negative stuff it may be best for many small to mid-size and large domainers to set many of your domains on non-auto renew, possible most and let expire. The list below is long and quite depressing but we need to face up to it all...

parking revenue is down an estimated 95% and ongoing decline compared to 7 to 10 years ago, imo,

plus many if not most affiliate programs are doing much worse over time

in addition domain traffic in general seems to be down (except several major sites which are sharply higher)

type-in traffic in particular has dropped big time due to various issues over past 5 to 10 years

Googles plan to remove the address bar window can cause more major damage in the near future

recent need to be https compliant is complex and costly what with buying and installing SSL certificates

parking firms ignoring https due to high cost is another issue causing more drops in traffic and revenue

a giant drop in Chinese Chip sales and values which market appears to have vanished

the apparent decline in bitcon/crypto sales and values (look at all the sale threads here without offers)

what seems to be a decline in brandable name popularity and sales is now here or arriving soon, imo.

all the new extensions have caused major problems with over-supply and great market dilution

A much bigger issue than realized is when a buyer goes to Godaddy etc to reg a name he sees the desired domain is for sale at a high cost but on same page GD and others suggest dozens of alternatives for far lees or reg fees. So more often than you know buyer decides to not buy/offer your domain, which happens frequently.

 

[wwwweb]

It appears that Verisign are feeling pretty secure now that they have their 6 year agreement with 4x7% price increases on .com and their stock popped up 18% today. In a blog post today Verisign say:

"Flipping domain names or warehousing them to create scarcity adds nothing to the industry and merely allows those engaged in this questionable practice to enrich themselves at the expense of consumers and businesses." - Verisign today​

Andrew has written an excellent column on it here, or you can read their blog post (I wonder if it will get revised?) here.

As Andrew points out:

Verisign has been catering to this market for years. Sponsoring its conferences, promoting domain investing, creating the very tools designed to let domain investors know which domains to register…and now it wants to pretend it has nothing to do with this “questionable practice”. C’mon.
​

This is almost unbelievable and I can't believe it will not anger many. At least for those of us who were trying to decide whether we call ourselves domainers (not a dictionary term),domain investors, domain service agents, domain experts, domain originators, etc. no longer need to worry about that. We are all scalpers according to Verisign.


Seriously, amazingly insensitive of Verisign.

Bob (grrrr... feeling angry )

ps I always try to find the bright side of everything. A good day for ngTLD and country code extensions I guess?

I guess Verisign is the biggest scalper of them all then. Very interesting how they got this agreement in place, without having to give up much.

 

[wwwweb]

ICA's Corwin leaving to work for Verisign had all the earmarks of what was going on behind the scenes. How can one person question everything one organization does, only to join their payroll, and go silent against what they were so previously passionate about.

 

[bmugford]

What value does Versign add? Maybe they could justify their own business model.

They are given close to a billion a year to essentially manage a database.
Seems reasonable....

They are just the typical company benefiting from taxpayers with a no-bid contract; one that many other capable companies would be willing to do for far less.

Brad

 

[equity78]

Mike Berkens called me today to go over the post and to him this was all calculated, because the end goal is no price caps.

I said years ago, Verisign must look at new gtlds and be like WTF? We invented this model with .tv. They are playing the long game here.

https://www.thedomains.com/2018/11/02/verisigns-potential-long-term-goal/

 

[Bob Hawkes]

Domain investors creatively come up with word combinations that are effective, original and valuable, and bring these combinations to the attention of those in branding, marketing, and management that could benefit from their acquisition.

Domain name investors make domain names available in an orderly way through marketplaces, brokers, company websites, and other means. Without domain name investors it would be much more difficult for companies or organizations that want a name to find it, and domain investors also efficiently make the variety of available alternatives obvious so the best business decisions can be made.

Domain investors have expertise in the value and importance of digital assets, the regulations surrounding domains, new trends and opportunities, etc.

My start to a list I hope many with long term expertise and involvement can improve and add to. What do we do of value?

Thanks,
Bob (not a scalper)

 

[Bob Hawkes]

The Verisign post in essence argues that businesses are paying much more than they should for domain names because rather than paying the regulated base price they are paying a higher retail price. It tries to estimate the amount this is 'costing' and promises in a second post to show a simple solution to this problem.

To support the argument, it uses example prices from HugeDomains to show how unreasonable prices are (some examples in the millions of dollars). While it does not explicitly say so, it implies that businesses are paying these prices. I think one important point to point out to anyone from outside the industry that reads the post is that in most cases prices are nowhere near this value. The average .com price in 2018YTD is $1232. (NameBio data). This average is heavily influenced by a small percentage of super high sales. The median price is below $400.

Her post seems to imply that this has got increasingly so (high prices due to speculation) in recent years but actually the data supports the opposite - average resale prices are going down. She also implies that obscene profits are being made, which is simply not true. While she targets specific big players, she implies that all "speculators" perform no useful service.

The real estate analogy is often used in domain name investing. If we applied the reasoning of this blog, land that was purchased 30 years ago should still be sold at the price of that time, and it would be wrong that someone who saw that a parcel of land would become valuable decades ago now profit from selling it. Or that if governments limited the price of lumber, that houses should sell without markups. There have been real costs of holding them often for long periods, and portfolio wide costs related to the fact that many will not sell.

The other argument she makes is that those holding domain names perform no useful service I had hoped my previous post would have yielded some answers on why this is not true. I do think our industry must evolve to more of a service role, but for some time many have rendered a whole host of user added services to end users such as locating available names, suggesting innovative uses, help through the process of transfer, brand protection and defence related assistance, etc.

Bob

 

[bmugford]

Since many new registries apply premium renewal price scheme to certain keyword domains and short-length domains. Even Google do the same thing to their .APP domain and it's now somehow became the industry norm. It make Verisign have a justified reason to do the same thing on .com domains.

The big difference is Verisign did not create the .COM extension. They do not own it.
They are just contracted to manage it. They are essentially just managing a database.

There is zero justification for them to charge a premium price for a domain as it doesn't cost them anything extra to maintain that data. Even they should know that is a bridge too far. Many much larger companies like Google, Amazon, and others own giant portfolios of generic top tier .COM domains.

Brad

 

[TauseefKhan]

Here I am interested in sharing a story. The Internet has different versions. But, I am sharing this one

"There was once a rich businessman with a broken beloved car. Despite several attempts, he was unable to fix the engine of that car. He called several engineers but no one was able to fix it. Finally there was an old mechanic who visited him. That old guy inspected the engine and asked for a hammer. On front side of the engine, he tapped few times with his hammer and brrroomm…brroom…It started Working!

Next day, the old mechanic sent his invoice for $1000. The businessman was shocked.
He said, “ This was merely a $1 job. You just tapped the engine with your hammer. What’s there for $1000 that you are asking?”
The old mechanic said “ Let me give you a detailed invoice.”
The Invoice read:
Tapping the engine with hammer: $1
Knowing where to hit the hammer: $999 !!! "

I think, established domain investors are like that old mechanic who knows exactly which domain name may work well for the business. And, what they charge is for the expertize/thoughtfulness/forward thinking and not the original cost of the domain name.

 

[DAN.COM]

Verisign feels emboldened by the new contract they got. The namecalling of industry players in that blog post is also repulsive. It almost feels like they want to get in the secondary market themselves and are setting the ground for it.

The timing is interesting as well. With all the new gTLD's launching you'd think they'd feel threatened, however, it seems they're not and betting big on .com remaining dominant for the long term. Their recent actions will backfire on them, it's now clearer than ever that they've become too dominant and are willing to abuse their position.

It's good they're so transparently conveying how they feel about the secondary market. Now we can't say we didn't see it coming. It's up to us to form a strong union against them.

Interesting times ahead...

 

[Corey]

to be honest, I don't let stuff like that fill my head or my thoughts - I try not to think about it

Cheers
Corey

 

[Bob Hawkes]

I totally understand the concern and anger, but please let's not lower this to an attack on individuals who work for Verisign, please.

I think our community should work together to develop a compelling argument offered in a unified voice showing how wrong the statements in the blog are, and the value that domainers offer the broader community.

I think this could be an opportunity to educate a wider group on what services domainers can, and do, offer.

I realize I don't have nearly the experience that many on this list do, or the expertise, nor the investment in a large portfolio. I feel ultimately if we take the high road of saying why the statements are inaccurate and incomplete will have more effect long term.

Just my humble opinion, and I totally accept that others can view this differently.

Bob

 

[DomainRecap]

Her post seems to imply that this has got increasingly so (high prices due to speculation) in recent years but actually the data supports the opposite - average resale prices are going down.

Not to mention she delves into the fairyland idiocy of proposing that without domain investors, that every name would be freely available to anyone who wants to register it, and we'd all frolic in the fields with the unicorns.

She is not only living in a strange fantasyland, but she ignores that large corporations also stockpile relevant domains as both protection and as digital investments - do you really think that even in her fairyland, that Amazon, Google, Microsoft, et al wouldn't have already scooped up all the LL and LLL and dictionary words?

They'd be long gone honey, and everyone knows it. Someone would buy them, as they are inherently valuable.

 

[Crysis]

Well..She updated her LinkedIn Profile!!

 

[alcy]

so is me domain investor or domain scalper now?

I wanna know if I should update my cv.. I wouldn't wanna seem like I'm not keeping upto date with latest trends.. and stuff like this.