According to my lawyers however they said that there is no way anyone can sell a domain name and insist that they are not allowed to sell it afterwards. A deal like that wouldn’t stand.

The thing in this case is that when my clients domain name was small, it didn’t seem like a problem. It was only after his name got big that the problem grew. This happened for two reasons:

1) People figured out the .com version was getting a decent size of traffic.
2) The larger the traffic level got for my client the more traffic leakage that happened.

This is a good lesson for country level code owners. For examnple if you own the .ca (canadian) a lot of their traffic, as I speak from experience goes to the .com (North American) version. I believe we’ll start to see the same thing happening overseas but worse. The .cn will start to loose traffic to the .asia owners. They started with the country level being released first.

I don’t know if you where part of the recent .asia auctions but they were a fierce fight. There were several big players fighting for the main domain names and paying amazing amounts. I saw some of the .ASIA domains going for over 100,000 on release. It got so crazy I couldn’t even spend my last 20,000 because all of the names went above that.

As I was bidding there were clues as to who was buying them since when people registered with some registers they used their real name as their username. I saw a lot of American, Australian and UK investors go in heavy.

I’m waiting to see when Moniker has their first .asia auction. I noticed they put one .asia domain name on auction a while ago. It was absolutely a horrible name and it fetched if I’m correct a little under a thousand.

It will be real interesting to see the way the domain world is represented in 20 years from now. What will fly and what will bomb. Already there are plenty of clues indicating each trend.

—. Com is a must for a US or global business
It is a must for US and north american business. I am willing to bet that over time .asia and .eu will rise in popularity in those areas. The problem with .com in asia and eu is that when someone does a broad search for something such as electronics Google shows some results for .com but mostly the country code. The problem with .com overseas is that when someone does a broad search in asia or europe, they aren’t looking for .com sites because most of them are north american companies. If I type in Cars.com or electronics.com north american sites that don’t apply to asia show up. That’s why type in traffic usually comes from North America for .com domain names. People that type guess type-in .com domains usually get what they are looking for and people that do it in asia get punished with an unapplicable result. .ASIA and .EU clearly tell Google that it represents a broad search in those areas.

-If .com, .asia and .eu came out at the same time this would have been an instant change. Since countries outside of the North America didn’t have a proper (broad) domain for their area they have navigated to the country code first but if you are doing a search for Office Supplies using Google.cn you often get restricted to a country level search when a cheaper store could be in the surrounding areas. If I was the German business I would also purchase the .eu since all it will take is Google to make this decision to start rewarding this domain more for these broad searches and everyone will jump in.

—Another thing – even globally, you can use something else than com and be more successfull than com. Example? Last.fm.

-Out of curiosity where did fm come from? Was it originally a country code also? I agree you can be successful but you will be losing a portion of your traffic to Last.com. I can attest to that since the only .fm domain name I am familiar with is WebMasterRadio.fm and when I first learned about this excellent site and tried to return several times I typed in WebMasterRadio.com instead. Naturally WebMasterRadio.com has always been a cash parking site but if it was a site that had the same content as WebMasterRadio.fm I would have been fooled. I actually have another client that ran into the same problem with owning the .ca country level domain name and not buying the .com North American domain name. Similar site taking their business one person at a time. This is especially common when the word of mouth comes into play.

When the UFC went with .tv, I was also fooled several times into typing in UFC.com. UFC have since changed their domain name over.

Finally if I were to ask you to name ten .fm and ten .tv sites would you be able to do so without doing a Google search? My guess is not since most site owners have realized the traffic leakage and switched.

—I really don’t think so. Last.fm is already a brand, and fm really suits that site – music.

-Well I agree with you to a degree. If the domain has a unique usable purpose it is usually more likely to succeed, however a domain also has to be developed quickly. With few sites most people don’t recognize .fm and most radio sites had a .com previously.

—Nonetheless, it also proves that you can something else other than com and be #1 in google.

-I agree. I do however think that anyone that has the .com has an advantage for a North American search if they play all of their other cards correctly.

—Speaking of google – sure, it is the most widely used search engine, yet msn, yahoo are still alive and kicking. And there are people who use them (I, for one, almost exclusively use yahoo for my searches – why? because i have always done so, since yahoo was born. Kind of like .com addiction :).

-I notice this. I notice that when you look at traffic figures coming in from search engines, obviously the majority come from Google but there are also still a lot of people using Yahoo. This puzzles many people in Canada as the search technology is no where near as accurate. I agree with you however that when you get accustomed to using something else, there is an inertia changing. I still use hotmail even though I hate hotmail and would rather use another account for my signups. What is surprising is the fact that Google searches way better and I thought people would change over.

—And I don’t know if you know that, but both msn and yahoo don’t care all that much for com – they put a lot more weight in the domain name itself, whatever extension it might have.

-I have noticed this difference in the algorithm. I find it very easy to get on top of these engines. They also are more likely to show pages with less content.

—So I guess what I am saying is this – if you have the money, go for .com. But if your budget is constrained, it is better to have a great .org or .tv name, or even .fm (if its about music).

-I would disagree and recommend a North American company to come up with the best .com name that is available. I would then recommend that they buy the .ca if they are Canadian since Google has already put preference on Canadian searches. A .com version of your domain name is always going to haunt you so spend what you can and come up with an original. .org if you are a charity, pass on the .fm or .tv.

The change I’m talking about will cause a spending frenzy and lead to all seo books being rewritten. Domaining is about to have a explosion of values. As technology has wiped out many old ways of doing things, domaining will evolve in the new year playing a key roll in completely changing the way we do stuff.

Getting back to your article, the way domains suffixes have been released has been horrible in my opinion. It has created a lot of problems and some domains that are comepletely useless. i.e. .net

What is .net? How can someone use a .net? Where would someone use a .net? When I see some of the auction prices for .net domain names I am shocked that someone would pay that amount.

Anyone that uses .net for a website or company name usually changes it over time when they realize the amount of traffic they are losing to the .com version of the domain name. It is even worse when someone develops a .com version to something that is similar to your site.

Again I am reiterating the fact that developing is the best option and coming back to selling it later. This is one of the good options and is debated extensively in many discussion forums.

–Of course. It is like saying developing a house on a piece of land will get more value than selling the land without the house.

It is still possible to buy a good piece of land and flip it for a profit but with a developed site you should get more financially.