It was 1994 and I was at the popular COMDEX show. Nerds of all kinds had gathered, not drinking or gambling at all. One guy asked me, “Are you buying domain names?”
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\nI replied, “What? Those Internet things?”<\/p>\n
“Yep! I own . . .” and he rattled off the names of major US corporations he registered, as well as some delicious words. “You’ve got to start registering domain names,” he urged.<\/p>\n
“Why?”<\/p>\n
“Because you can sell them! I just sold [major department store] their own Domain name. It cost me $125 to register the name and they bought it for $10,000!”<\/p>\n
I thought the guy was a scumbag, so I never followed-through. I did buy Consider the popular web sites.<\/p>\n Everyone knows that Sites like eBay, Flikr, Zillow, Netflix, GoDaddy, and so on, are pretty well-known despite the fact that their name has little relationship to their function.<\/p>\n Okay, some names are close, such as Netflix, but what about When I chose Squatting on web sites paid off for The only exception I can think of is the sordid story of You would have figured that gookin.com<\/code> and dangookin.com<\/code>, which I thought was prudent. But that guy? He made a ton of money squatting on stuff that he didn’t really own. It turns out, nearly two decades later, that you didn’t actually need to own some of those cool domain names.<\/p>\ngoogle.com<\/code> is where you go to search. Even “Google” has become a common word for searching. And the number two? That’s bing.com<\/code>. No one ever considers going to search.com<\/code>, do they? Yet I bet the guy who bought search.com<\/code> back in the early 1990s thought he was being so clever. Too bad.<\/p>\nmovies.com<\/code>? I’m sure someone bought that domain and figured they’d make a bundle. Did they?<\/p>\nwambooli.com<\/code> as my primary domain, people told me it would never work. My readers would look for dangookin.com<\/code> or gookin.com<\/code> or something more obvious. I didn’t listen and went with Wambooli<\/em>, because I liked the word. In a way, my theory worked because Internet users don’t necessarily associate a destination’s name with the destination’s purpose. (Then again, traffic here on Wambooli isn’t actually bringing the servers to their knees.)<\/p>\nmcdonalds.com<\/code> and sears.com<\/code> and other businesses, where it makes sense for the names to match. But for new online ventures, it didn’t make any difference. It still doesn’t: The dating site zoosk.com<\/code> is based on a nonsense word. It could have been any other of a number of real words or clever phrases, but obviously such a thing isn’t necessary to the online business model.<\/p>\nsex.com<\/code>.<\/p>\nsex.com<\/code> would be the number one porn site on the Internet. Yet for years, the ownership of that domain name was in legal dispute and is the topic of a book, sex.com<\/em>, published a few years back.<\/p>\n