The Rick Schwartz Domain Name and Traffic Blog: RicksBlog.com – Home of The Domain King®

Afternoon Folks!!

All things come to an end. What you have grown comfortable with in our small pond is coming to an end. Sadly there is nothing that can be done but remember the good ole days. Folks, this is the sunset of the good ole days. Things are changing that makes our pond something that we will just remember. It's not in our control and it is not our fault. But progress and age are going to rewrite what domaining looks like.

There are two keywords you are hearing of this year,'gTLD' and 'Leasing'. One will cost you money. One will make you money. That's how I see it. The next phase is coming at us faster than you might think and the WORST mistake I could make at this stage is be LATE to the game. To the landing of this new phase.

I have patiently been waiting on the beach all these years. Now it is time to prepare the runway. Build the infrastructure. Get ready for the assault. Why now? Because the movement is already in the air. The plane has taken off and now it is just the time to travel here and land. 18 years of waiting STANDBY at the gate waiting for the plane to taxi on the runway. That plane has finally taken off. There are 1900 bumps along the way so it won't be a smooth ride. But when we emerge on the other side in 2-3 years, folks will look back like it was always that way and new folks coming in won't know any different. They will just think it was always like that just like many of you think there was always a domain aftermarket and auctions and unlimited places to register a domain name as opposed to one that did not work well. Working like your local DMV in those days. But 'Horrible' has its privileges.

In 2-3 years nobody reading this TODAY will even recognize the 'Domain Industry'. It is about to change in an uncontrollable way and voices like mine will be drown out by thousands with an agenda. Including myself and maybe you too. That is the way of the world. That is evolution. We can't control it but we CAN HARNESS IT!!!!

It is that 'Drowning out' that will elevate great domains names to their proper place in the eco chain of business. The more everyone yells me, me me, the more the domains will stand out as a way to.....stand out!

See it is the gTLD''s that will make leasing a viable option. It's just so simple and that is why you are seeing a WAVE of folks focusing on this area. Progress is not to be feared. It is to understand what happens when something new is introduced. ALL of our voices will soon be drown out by 1800 STAFFS of 'Cubicle Whores' each with their job spreading great rumors about their extension. There will be announcements of multi million dollar deals and maybe NONE will actually be done from an arms length. 1900 competing motives. They will rip each others eyes out trying to survive. Let's see how long t will be until 'Consolidation' begins. I suspect very quickly. Each consolidation is an exclamation of failure!

That's the difference going forward. It won't unfold the way 99.9 expect it will. It could be ugly. All I know is you will see a lot of caucuses lining the road to the future. All with high hopes. Most based on the second coming of something that will never be repeated. Each step only fortifying and increasing the value of .com no matter what they spew in their own self interest.

Have a GREAT Day!

Rick Schwartz

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Morning Folks!!

My JointVentures.com partner Danny
Welsh has got something to share today about the incongruity of the salary of
Babe Ruth versus the minimumleague salary today, and the maximum money
paid to the top guys in the majors today. Who was the better baseball player?
Does it matter? What’s it have to do with valuating the BEST domain names?
Every time YOU fill the stadium with people, how much are you paid? This was
one of the first posts Danny wrote but we’ve saved it for today, for a reason I
think will become clear soon enough.

Rick Schwartz

By Danny Welsh:

The PRICE paid to hire Babe Ruth vs Alex Rodriguez’s salary…and who owns the LEAGUE of a business full of players online?

My mentor Rick Schwartz has taught me that baseball salaries
over time are a great analogy to point to for valuing domain names, just like
Babe Ruth famously pointed into the stands predicting a home run shot. What
does it mean that in 2013 the *average*
salary per player in MLB is $3,200,000 US Dollars-- compared to the
highest annual salary EVER earned by the Great Bambino himself, the MVP of
his age in the 1930s, at $84,000 per year?

Can we chalk it up to “inflation”? Nope. Sorry, but if you
use this lens to explain the value of your best domain names that “inflation”
statement will be a weak answer that weak and/or dishonest people with an
agenda will resort to in attempting to refute YOUR assertion that the times
have changed not only in baseball but in all kinds of commerce as the world has
EVOLVED.

Today I’d like to talk more about how TRUE VALUE is
intrinsic, while “price” is variable with the times and how things unfold. Yes,
it’s the same line you’ve heard from me throughout this series of guest blog
posts Rick has allowed me to make— the truth savvy investors see shown again
and again through a different lens, and if my job is done properly with
each lens shown the bright and blinding truth Rick revealed to me will grow
more magnified as more and more folks in the domain universe “get it” and see
what Rick Schwartz saw long before I was a blip on the radar coming along to
simply articulate these truths we both see maybe a little better than he can.

In my inaugural guest post on RicksBlog I said I’d be
posting in the future to answer this question:

“When exactly in the
maturation of premium dot com category domain name values are we currently
experiencing in 2013 along the scale paralleled by premier baseball player
salaries, Babe Ruth's earning less than $1,000,000 over his entire
1914-1935 career or the $30,000,000 in salary paid for Alex Rodriguez in 2012
alone?”

You see, if we ignore the internet and “domain names” and
just look at the lens of commerce through the lens of just ONE
category/industry, is the BUSINESS of
“Baseball” more or less profitable in 2013 than in 1995? That was when
many of the best generic commercial and social domain names such as
Baseball.com for example were first hand registered by who I feel are some very
smart visionary entrepreneurs.

In case you missed the $250,000,000 contracts paid for a
single player, the “salary cap” attempts of some sports to create parity among
a rich ball-team owners’ game, the World Series ratings and TV commercials
bonanzas, billions and billions in merchandising and endorsements, or the 60,000
person baseball stadiums costing up to $1.5 BILLION to build according to
MLB.com (Yankees)…

That was a rhetorical question.

Of COURSE, the business of baseball
has become more profitable over the years.

The Chicago Cubs play in a stadium built in 1912, costing
$250,000. I love that stadium! Wrigley Field is the past history of baseball
wrapped up in all its splendor and tradition.

But the future of baseball as a business is more and more
going to be about merging tradition with MONEY. Money flows downhill to VALUE,
no matter what people want or believe. How many multiples is it from that $250K
1912 Chicago stadium to the $1,500,000,000 2012 New York Yankees stadium?

Let me do the math for you, since it’s probably really early
in the morning when Rick will be posting this blog post for everyone to read. J

The 2012 investment in a stadium was
6000x the 1912 investment in a stadium.

And those are BOTH buildings meant to accomplish the same
things…give people a place to SIT while they consume a company’s products.

There’s yet another “lens” through which you can see the
true value of a top-tier generic category-defining dot com domain name property
like Baseball.com, as an EXAMPLE.

The most valuable domain names like that one for the most part aren't
in the game at 2012’s Yankee Stadium. They're 'parked' in the lot
outside the stadium, selling hot dogs every day to passersby drawn by just the
HINT that a ball-game they want to see might be going on inside.

I’m not knocking domain parking as a way to make money.
Really, I’m not.

Many times these category-killer domain names make a LOT of
money, just as Rick’s Porno.com has made $1,000,000+ per year without effort or
work, parked and selling nickel-a-pop peep shows by the click to passersby that
more often than not will never come again.

(no pun intended)

But even with 7 figure earnings possible on the higher ends
of the spectrum for a single domain name…and with many other $xxx,xxx to
$xx,xxx,xxx VALUE domain names earning
$xxx-$xxx,xxx per year or whatever …STILL nobody I know thinks domain parking
is the BEST MONETIZATION strategy for a great domain name like that, do they?

Nope.

Just like nobody who gets “inside” after visiting a parked
domain thinks they got their ‘money’s worth’, even spending NOTHING as they
click-and-go elsewhere to find what they were looking for, do they?

We all KNOW that a truly great domain name DESERVES
something BETTER.

Truly great domain
names deserve to be
IN THE GAME and not in the parking lot.

So you witness the search for real, solid solutions by Rick
and others among “the 500” for many years.

The first innings of this game are over. The middle innings
are ending.

We’re in the 7^th inning stretch of a 20 year plan
and a ball-game Rick Schwartz predicted how it would end…20 years ago, right
there in his virtual living room before the first strike-out of “.whatever” (of
which there will be MANY more in the coming years, littering the stadium of
business like discarded popcorn boxes filled with kernels of popcorn that were
sold and never POPPED).

So far as I can tell, the biggest “curve ball” Rick swung at
personally and missed was the .mobi fiasco…and he admitted that mistake when so
many self-promoters never tell you the bad, only the good. Personally, I like
that in a guy I’m doing business with. Don’t you?

TIMING IS KEY TO HIT THE FASTBALL OUT OF THE PARK.

A number of people
in the domain community have seen what Rick and I are doing with
JointVentures.com and have brought up this company or that company that has
“tried” domain leasing and failed. Others have been and will continue
to jump into the domain leasing game as we shake the bushes and demonstrate
deals (don’t be surprised to learn many of the domain investors the smaller
players all look up to have been doing this quietly for YEARS).

There may be many variables for the companies that FAILED to
“represent” domain leasing as brokers or 3^rd party platforms, and
specific companies could have a most
important factor each for why they failed.
The biggest GENERAL reason if you ask me would be TIMING.

Same reason it doesn’t matter who was the BETTER player,
Babe Ruth or Alex Rodriguez.

It’s not comparing apples to apples, even when BOTH played
in the BIG APPLE of New York City.

Timing is what determined the difference in price of each player’s
salary, not the value of the player.

Hell, Rick himself fought an uphill battle early on trying
to get mainstream business owners to see the value of premium generic domains
in the 1990s. No one listened except for the adult entertainment people, and
Rick made them a lot of money.

The commercial business owners were being told by their
“webmaster” that a 10 digit numerical IP address was a perfectly good online
address for a website, and by their “advertising agency” that branding was more
important than sales.

Today, more and more they
know differently.

And they COVET what
“the 500” have, those of you who like Rick had the foresight to grab
Baseball.com level generic category-defining domain names before companies in
the mainstream had a clue.

They also COVET the best domain properties owned by select
other smart domain name owners—myself included-- to a significantly lesser
degree at THIS TIME-- but the next couple years TIMING and the movements made
in the market by “the 500” are pivotal in whether the end user businessman of
the future pays FULL VALUE to get what they covet ala Alex Rodriguez’s
salary…or “today’s price” in between Babe Ruth and that time in the future when
people will look back and say with disbelief “Baseball.com made HOW little
money per year?”

Rick and I predict that in the next 3 years these companies—
both established companies looking to increase their presence online and small
start-ups looking to get an edge over the competition— will continue striking
out with “.whatever” domains and we believe that it’ll become obvious VERY
quick that .com is here to stay and .whatever is the minor leagues for any REAL
business with REAL ambition.

Others will end up choosing to play only in the minor
leagues using made up words as their business name online, using hyphens and
numbers and modifiers like “My”, “The” ETC ETC cutesy little attempts to get
around the guy “sitting on the home-plate” of the very BEST generic domain name
they’d have and want if money was no object.

Many will build companies (and have) on domains they’ll want to
“truncate” and trade-up from a lead-off hitter to a CLEANUP BATTER.

Many will dislike the guy they see as blocking anyone from a
grand slam score without paying what they feel is an exorbitant sales cost to
get past…

But it only takes ONE
PLAYER IN EACH LEAGUE to see what we see, one business in each niche that knows
the true value of NICHE.com, and soon every great domain name that deserves to
be a part of a great business CAN be the MVP of a great business.

So long as that guy sitting on home-plate where
he knew everyone would want to be one day sets up a toll-booth instead of a
cash register because he REALIZES that one day he’ll be recognized as a
visionary business leader and not a “cyber squatter”.

So go ahead, we invite all businesses looking to do big
things online with either big ideas and talents OR big resources to point to
the fences and “call your shot”.

Hit a homerun, start-ups!

Hit a grand slam, established companies!

The more you win, the more we win.

Rick Schwartz and the 500 domain name league owners will be
waiting patiently at home-plate where the crowds are going to be showing up
daily no matter what else may happen in the next couple years.

Meet you there!

Danny Welsh
JointVentures.com