Back in the days ( late 1990s ) when the mass had just become acquainted with the web and newly born Google hadn’t quite earned the attention it receives today; when popular websites had to have the letter E or word cyber in front; a simple search on Yahoo took 2-3 minutes just to load the search result. Before the introduction of search navigation such as Real Names, many surfers simply typed a keyword and then .com to find what they were looking for.

At the time, generic domain names such as loan.com, men.com, travel.com, mortgage.com, sex.com, casino.com, gambling.com, poker.com, and business.com were selling for millions more than real estate.
Before Godaddy.com and before other high profile domain name registration sites entered the E scene, I remembered a specific television spot luring prospects to register their dreams, register their pet names, register their hobbies and passions, and register their business online. Basically, any person from anywhere should register a word s/he wanted with the word dot com after it. That was the push. All they had to do was visit Register.com.

As I write this, the domain candy.com had recently sold for $3 million, insure.com $16 million, webcam.com $1 million, sever.com $770,000, screensaver.com $330,000, musicvideos.com $225,000, and biking.com $250,000. Yahoo.com recently acquired OMG.com for $80,000. Who would have thought that something that cost as little as $10 a year could sell for hundreds of thousands, even millions?

Well it’s true. A domain such as Candy.com could sell for $3 million because a thousand or more people a day type in candy.com. In fact, more than 850,000 webpatriots every month search the keyword “candy”.
The name is easy to remember and easy to recall on radio, it’s short and it’s what people search.

Increasingly, entrepreneurs are paying top dollars for good domain names and many are building businesses to capture traffic and/or build businesses for resale. A visit to Spanish.com and you’ll see a website that provides a “search engine” experience for things related to Spanish. Candy.com has become a virtual store for everything candy and loan.com provides a loan comparison and searching site for everything related to loans.

While it’s true that a great domain name isn’t necessary for commerce and portals such as facebook, twitter, yahoo, amazon, google, and myspace have proven it — businesses with a penchant for protectionism or young enterprises desiring a piece of the pie would do well to seek short, easy-to-remember, and category specific or generic domains. As the internet become even more mobile in the months to come, domain names will increase in value as fewer surfers will want to search.

Candy.com, for example, offers greater pulling power than a keyword search for “candy” on google or yahoo. It’s easy to remember on return trips and reduces marketing and promotional cost. Which is why the new owner of candy.com happily paid $3 million. Clearly, domain-driven businesses have their advantages.

Domain driven commerce has been at the right time, ten years and counting.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 25th, 2010 at 6:08 am and is filed under Marketing, Process, Product, Revenue Model, Supply Chain. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.