The ICANNblog

The Domain Roundtable; Fostering Entrepreneurs.

May 12th, 2008

By Chuck Kisselburg

I recently attended the Domain Roundtable conference. As with my attendance last year I walked away impressed with the entrepreneurial spirit of people coming together to constructively define and grow an entire industry. With last year’s attendance of the conference I approached the conference expecting to see the wild west of the Internet. What I found was basically no difference in working with general entrepreneurs.

The key word I heard over and over was, “Development”. “Development, Development, Development!”

Parking of domain names, while a way for domainers to monetize their domains, is not necessarily the best use of domains because:

1). Visitors are not receiving that much value from a “traditionally” parked page.
2). Visitors are recognizing a “traditional” parked page and thus getting more irritated and seeing less value.
3). Development means more than simply parking a page.

As stated by Dan Warner, “Something that is rare AND valuable equals sustainable”

The basic principles of domain development include:

1). Obtaining unique and “clean” assets of domains.
2). Provide content that is original.
3). Develop community around your respective domain.

Development means finding a way to provide better, more relevant content that brings value to the visitor. Value means creating something where visitors to a particular domain will want to return. Return means value and value means return. So whether that is development through continually working to find a continual means for providing “relevant” content or developing partnerships with other organizations that may benefit the visitor, suddenly the definition of “development” looks like the more traditional forms of an entrepreneur developing and growing their business.

One of the speakers at the conference was Matt Cutts of Google. Matt’s basic recommendations to the Domainer community were:

1). If a user lands on a page, will that user be happy? Does the page match the topic the user was expecting? Is the content for the visitor relevant?
2). How much unique content might there be when compared with other sites? In other words, is your content stale or is it constantly being updated?
3). Bottom line, for the visitor, does your site add value and is the content unique?

Another speaker at the conference was Gary Kremen. Gary may be most notable to some through his ownership, and subsequent legal battles over sex.com. However, Gary also took one of his domain names, “Match.com” and developed this into a complete business. The basic nuggets of information I took from Gary’s talk were:

1). Is there a business that can be created using a domain that is more than the domain name it was built upon? From my perspective, Match.com is a classic example of this.
2). Are you creating other intellectual property along the way as you develop your domain name(s)?
3). Think about how this business will solve a problem and use this to develop your business plan.

Gary added another element to his discussion that I had never heard before at other domain conferences I had attended and that was “VCs” – Venture Capitalists. This gets into the whole discussion of should you continue to bootstrap what you are doing or does the next step of development require having an outside investment strategy and how outside investment can affect the company you are developing.

While I have the extreme benefit of talking with people across the entire ICANN “community”, I hear peoples’ perspective on what they think of ALL “domainers”. However, when attending a Domain Roundtable conference where speakers come from outside of the “traditional” sense of the Domainer community, I continue to respect the fact that:

1). An industry has formed with little guidance or direction.
2). This industry is trying to provide its own guidance for the betterment of the industry.
3). This industry is more than simply acquiring domain names, sitting on them and later selling them for a profit.

If a Domainer is to be successful, it is simple:

1). Have a “clean” domain portfolio that does not infringe on any trademarks.
2). Trademark your domain.
3). Develop your domain so that what is developed brings value to the visitor, both through adding value and uniqueness of content.
4). Develop your domain such that it solves a problem for visitors to your site.
5). Develop your domain so that you are creating intellectual property along the way.

As such it is my personal opinion to see more of the traditional organizations starting to diversify their portfolios through acquiring their own domain portfolios.

As for the conference itself, it was held to coincide with the AdTech conference. Smart move as several who attended did so because they were able to bundle this in with their trip to AdTech. Another new thing for this conference was the addition of daily passes. While attendance at the conference “appeared” light I ran into numerous attendees who took advantage of purchasing a daily pass so as to attend what was of interest to them. So while the conference as a whole did not seem to have the normal crowd, the “crowd” was there, only more strategic.

Entry Filed under: Site News, TLDs, domaining, Business Strategy, Parking, Registrars