An Outsiders View Of Domain Name Drops

Tonight I had the pleasure of speaking to a group of people in Perryville, MO interested in growing their business with a specific interest in how to use the Internet to their advantage in doing so. The invite to speak came after one of the members of the group attended a seminar a couple weeks back and thought that the information would be useful to the group she organizes.

During the presentation there is a point where keyword domain names and domain name education in general comes up, when presenting this I work to make it as non-technical as possible but usually enjoy when questions arise since I obviously have a deep interest in domain names and I always find it very interesting to discuss domains and the power of selecting the right name for someones business.

Tonight was very interesting in that one of the members of the group started describing something she ran into, this was the first time I had every met  someone from the "other side" directly that had ran into this, a bit of paraphrasing below:

"I used to own a domain name for my business but then I got an email to pay for a renewal or something and thought it was to technical so I did not do it, I thought if it expired I would just have my son do what ever computer stuff needed to be done to pay for it when he got back from college. When he got back and went to get it someone else had it and it had a bunch of links to things on it and a place where I could offer to buy it for $2,000."

As domain investors we understand the value of keeping our names renewed, it is interesting to see the lack of understanding in how important keeping someones web presence consistent over time is. This person was willing to take the chance of not renewing her name because it was "too technical."

I explained a bit about how the process works and that ones name must be looked at as real estate, that the proper domain name is no different than owning a key piece of property. Once explained in that manner it is amazing how well people relate. What was really nice was that out of the group no one had anything negative to say about the practice of domain drop and catch and in fact thought it was pretty savvy business. You never know how a group will react.

One of the other interesting conversations was about how much it costs to buy a domain name, one of the people had ran into a name she wanted but once she saw the price was in the thousands she chose not to get it, not because of a mid $X,XXX price but because she knew domain names had renewals yearly on them and she thought if she paid that price she would have to pay it every year. I can honestly say I never thought this would be an issue someone would come up with. It was nice to help her out a bit and explain that the price was only for the initial purchase and after that she would pay the yearly renewal fee at whatever place it is registered. I wonder how many deals have not happened due to this.