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Math Geek, Word Nerd, PhD Candidate, Computer Scientist, Researcher, Wife, Mommy, Bargain Hunter, Home Maker, Baker, Budding Photographer, Crafter, Domestic Diva Wannabe and 
Posts Tagged ‘Domain Names’
December 24, 2011
Owning My Own Name
It’s finally mine! I have my own name dot com!
Shortly after graduating from college, I decided I wanted to register my name as a domain name. Up until that point I had been using a pseudonym online. I was proud of my accomplishments and wanted a more professional presence online. At the time, the only combination of my name not available was “styler.com”. After debating about it for a few days, I went with sktyler.com, since I always use my middle initial and my school email address was ‘skt’. 18 Months later, I decided I wanted sarahtyler.com as well, but it was already gone! 18 months was all it took.
About a year ago I noticed the other Sarah Tyler was letting the domain name expire. I decided I wouldn’t let the opportunity to register it pass me by again. Exactly one year ago, Domingo and I set up a backorder (a service that tries to grab expiring domain names immediately as they expire). Apparently I was being naïve.
There’s only a small subset of people who would be interested in a domain name like sarahtyler.com, however both the .info and .net were already registered. Thus, from a speculator’s standpoint, it seems like a desirable domain name. After all, at least two people out there would probably register the dotcom given the opportunity. Someone may be willing to pay a premium for the domain name. As a result, one of those automatic domain resellers who specialize in acquiring and reselling expiring domains grabbed at it to, and was able to register it before we could. They were happy to sell it to me, for the $400!
Well there was no way I was going to pay that much so we thought we’d wait it out, hoping the automatic domain reseller would either let it go, or reduce the price. Afterall, there aren’t that many Sarah Tyler’s out there! I tried to be sneaky, never visiting the domain directly or giving any hint of my interest by searching for it. I’d visit the reseller’s website and do a series of searches, always trying to hide my true objective. I’d search for ‘sara’ rather than ‘sarahtyler’, and scan the results to see if the price change. (If the reseller knows someone wanted the domain, they have no incentive to lower the price, so I couldn’t just search for ‘sarahtyler’!)
Perhaps I wasn’t as sneaky as I thought, or maybe someone else was eyeing the domain name too. The next thing I knew the price climbed all the way to just shy of $1000! At that point I decided to let it go. I wasn’t willing to pay $400, and I certainly wasn’t willing to pay $1000!
Well, this past week I decided I’d give it one more shot. The price had dropped to $100. It was time to strike. All total with the back order, I spent $120 acquiring the name. Had I registered it in 2004 when it was available, I would have paid roughly $80 over the years, so at least my mistake isn’t costing me too much extra money. Could I have let it go and tried to get a lower price? Sure, but at some point I would have run the risk of another Sarah Tyler wanting it, and then I would be back in the same spot I was in seven years ago.
I also have two ‘lessons learned’ from the experience, if you’re in the market for acquiring domains:
(1) Backordering can be pretty worthless. I’ve had success, and heard of success from others, when the company being used for the backordering is also the same company the domain is registered through. In thesis instances, the register typically does not release the domain, just changes the registry information. Otherwise, domain resellers and squatters typically win backordering attempts, as they have more machines and more resources dedicated to acquiring a domain the millisecond it becomes available.
(2) If the domain is available, and you think you might want it either now or in the future, register it! It really should have occurred to me to register SarahTyler.com when I saw it was available. $10 a year is not that much in the grand scheme of things, and once you’re domain is registered there’s no guarantee the other person will ever be willing to part with it!
Posted in Internet | Tags: Domain Names
March 1, 2011
What’s in a name?
I recently came across an article on the internet claiming that .co’s were going to be the next big thing for domain names. The argument is the .co is close to .com, and looks like it’s short for “company”, even though .co is a country code top level domain (ccTLD) for Republic of Colombia. The top level domain .co’s aren’t new (although the ease of registering them is), and neither is the logic. The same statement was rehashed for .biz’s, the .us’s, the .cc’s and the .ws’s (some claim .ws is meant to be “website”, but it too is a ccTLD, for Western Samoa), and will be repeated as new TLDs are created. The argument is simple: we’re running out of good .com domain names, so surely some other extension must become popular. Yes, it’s true that thousands of domains are registered a day, the lion’s share are still the .coms
As I see it, there is one critical flaw in the argument to register non-dot coms: for companies, it’s all about brand. No company wants their brand to be confused with someone else’s – unless they can profit from it, of course. Go ahead, I challenge you to come up with a domain name which has been registered with two different top level domains, and belong to different successful companies. I’ll even let you define successful.
Sure there are some examples of famous companies with non-dot com names. The most famous example is probably del.ico.us. But if you notice, del.icio.us now forwards to delicious.com. Once del.ico.us had enough equity, they purchased the .com. I recently discovered binged.it, which is also very clever and also redirects to bing.com. The fact that del.ico.us is the defacto non-dot com example used also shows how hard it is to come up with a creative non-dot com name. Wikipedia, slashdot and others use .org, but they also have the .com registered, and can redirect traffic to their .org as need be.
But don’t take my word for it that dot coms aren’t going anywhere, let’s look at some numbers.
The percentage of newly registered domains that were dot-coms only slightly decreased from 67.7% in 2008 to 65.0% in 2010. This number accounts for new registrations, and does not including existing registrations which are already dominated by .coms. To reach this conclusion, I used HosterStats from 2008 and HosterStats from 2010. The top level domains .us and .co as were not available to this particular register in 2008 and .me, .asia was not available in all of 2008. Often individuals and companies buy “add-on” domains to prevent anyone else from owning them. As new top level domains come online, we expect a bump in registration the first month it is available. We didn’t want this “Add-on” bump to affect out analysis, so we removed .co’s, .us’s, .me’s and .asia from analysis. Simply put, over half of newly registered domains are .coms.
Even accounting for add-on bump, the popularity of .co’s is less than random. Using the August to November statistics from 2010 HolsterStats, the percentage of domain registrations in August, September and November are .co’s are 4.5%. The registrar has 19 different top level domains. A randomly selected top level domains is 5.3% likely to be .co. Thus, when users have a choice, they prefer .co’s less than a user who selects a top level domain purely at random. There is not a strong preference for .co’s.
On the other hand – of the other domains, .Info is growing in popularity. While there are fewer .info’s than .net or .orgs, newly registered domain name are almost as likely to be .info than .net and .org, combined. We see this to be true in DomainTools. According to HolsterStats, domains with .info made up less than 1% of all domains registered in 2008, but 14.1% in 2010. This finding has peaked my interest since .info’s have been around since 2001 and were always easy to register. Why then are they now becoming popular? Is this localized to DomainTools and HolsterStats, or a more global phenomenon? Of course, in terms of raw numbers, .net and .org are still more popular than .info.
Do does this mean every single new domain should be a dot com? Clearly not. There are a number of successfully branded non-dot com examples, and .infos seem to be raising in popularity. But dot coms are still the option that is strongly preferred by the internet community. It still seems to be the de facto standard.
Posted in Internet | Tags: Doing the Math, Domain Names