In a Blog Post that appeared on WSJ.com today, Jason Chicola, founder and CEO at Rev.com had some less than kind works about domain investors.
In the post where he chats about finding a great starter domain name, he says;
“Naming a company is tough. ”
“Buzzwords come and go, but a great name should last decades. ”
“A great name is short, easy to remember and evocative — think Apple or Amazon.”
“But not only are great names hard to come up with, all the good domains are held by squatters.
Later in the story he goes on to say:
“If you can’t afford your ideal domain, say acme.com, you might start with acme.co or getacme.com or acmeapp.com. But a word of caution – if acme.com is the perfect domain for your startup, and you launch with acme.co, beware of domain squatters.
Domain squatters are sharks, and they’ll know you need it, so they’ll charge you a premium for it.
Hum
Interestedly he doesn’t mention all the lying deceitful buyers who are all “college students” or “recently unemployed” people with only $1,000 to their name, or “starting a non-profit”, who are more than happy to tell a domain owner any story they can think of to get a domain owner to sell a domain for pennies on the dollar.
Sorry Jason if some domainers are simply good businessman that refuse to let their assets go for a fraction of their value.
I’m wondering how many names he registered himself!
i wanted to register rev.com a few days ago but that POS squatter already had it. im’a gonna contact him and see if he’s as big a pussy in real life as he is on the internets.
Rat
I love it!
All the bad domains are held by whiners. 🙂
“Domain squatters are sharks, and they’ll know you need it, so they’ll charge you a premium for it.”
Duh!:)
an unenlightening comment…
WSJ is lowering it’s standards… seriously.
yeah, like people who bought land or homes in premium locations. they are sharks also because they won’t let others live there for cheap.
or people that buy stocks when everyone is afraid to buy and later want to sell them for 10 times more when everyone wants to jump into the wagon.
lousy sharks who take the risk.
Just because a domainer has several or more domains does not mean that they are squatters or sharks. Maybe a few out of the pack are just as in any group.
I bought HowYouMakeIt.com and HowUMakeit.com a while back with the intention of building out a website after I saw HowStuffWorks.com sell for $250 million to the Discovery Channel.
But my real estate investment business and other online business was taking up the majority of my time so I have placed the HowYouMakeIt.com domain on the market for sale. This does not make a domainer a squatter or shark. The .Coms are scarce assets and if you can get a hold of a .Com domain that you want – Go for it.
As soon as the economy gets stronger prices will climb as always so domainers know as well as anyone else that their domain assets will be worth more in value whether they keep them or sell them.
I bet he wanted so badly a great name owned by some domain investor but didn’t manage to get it, that’s why he’s that sour at domainers.
Hey domainers, I wrote the WSJ blog post. I was writing for first-time founders that haven’t bought a domain before. I wanted to give them a heads up that they’ll have to negotiate for a domain, and to consider their leverage as they approach that negotiation.
Anybody reading thedomains.com is probably a sophisticated domain investor. You guys know much more about the domain market than 99.99% of WSJ readers, so you guys aren’t really the audience. Of course your job is to maximize the value of your assets (I’m the last person to question how another man makes a living). I wish I had been smart enough to buy domains in the 90s.
The domain market, like a lot of markets, is one where people vary widely in sophistication. The guys that own the most big domains know what they are doing and what things are worth. I used the term “sharks” not to be critical, but to let first-time founders know the other side is savvy and to be prepared.
@Jason
That’s how it read to me, I saw it as a compliment.
@Jason Chicola
Your comment here at TheDomains.com is much more moderate, but your original article express quite a bit of sourness against domainers, starting from the word ‘squatter’. Squatters are those who register TM-infringing domain names and then try to sell them to their legitimate owners. Generic keywords, by definition, don’t belong to anyone so who buys them first owns them.
Jason
Thanks for chiming in here.
We see as part of our mission here at theDomains.com to educate the general public, and non-domainers on domain names.
We actually have a much bigger readership of non-domainers than domainers as almost all of our stories are picked up by Google News.
With the oncoming new gTLD’s there is more interest in the domain space they ever and there are a lot of people looking for information.
As a fan of the Shark Tank no offense taken
@Joe
Good catch. You’re right “squatters” is the wrong term. Certainly buying mcdonalds.com in 1992 is questionable, but buying shoes.com in 1992 would be smart.
As a non-domainer, my language was imprecise. Thanks for the tip!
@ Jason
No problem, errare humanum est. I believe a correction/clarification on the original article would be suitable. As part of the domain investing community, I ‘d like to kindly ask you to do so, that would be really appreciated.
“imprecise”
ja ja
For what it’s worth, Jen and I have worked closely with Jason and he’s only ever expressed admiration for the domainer craft. I personally think this is simply a case of using the wrong terminology because in our experience he’s been a stand-up guy and we have no hesitation vouching for him.
Cheers,
Mike
DomainGuardians.com
For what it’s worth, Fred Wilson commends this advice commented on his blog post, Finding And Buying A Domain Name:
“What You Need To Know About Your Next Domain Name”
with subheadings:Why .COM Is What You Need To Focus On
Tips On Finding a Good Domain For Your StartupAdditional Tips… never use hyphens and avoid numbers if possibleThe Art Of Negotiating A Domain Name PurchaseMany Domain Owners Think They’re Sitting On A Lottery TicketHere’s how you get their attention and get the ball rolling…- http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/04/finding-and-buying-a-domain-name.html#comment-193649096
You obviously enjoy a great 3-character dot com, Rev.com, so you know something. I don’t know much, but I like the comment and article linked to, above. 🙂 Enjoy!
@Miker R:
what part of this statement you find “admiring”?
“Domain squatters are sharks”
it doesn’t matter how you slice it : squatters + sharks
Not everybody here is naive nor an “arse kisser”.
The “imprecise’ comment hasn’t been corrected, so much for being “sorry”.