Re: co.za domain parking question

Jaco van said on Tuesday, February 08, 2011 :
> 
> So is parking a domain in hope of a future sale a valid use case
> according to the T&Cs ?  Does putting up an adwords portal on the site
> (while waiting for a sale) make it valid (more so).
> 
> Am I just grasping at straws here?
> 
I apologise for the overly defensive tone of my previous answer. I feel
threatened by a minority of people in this community, the press/media 
and daily emails I receive that frequently "demand" that I transfer a domain.

This very morning I received a letter from an actual lawyer telling
me that I have to transfer andre.co.za immediately to some pop star?
(i think) as it is his domain name and not mine and I am not really using it
as the website has been the same now for the past six months.

I am also upset about the leading articles in populist media about
the "theft" of facebook profiles.
(There was no theft, I do not have an emotional opinion about the
dating site that scraped facebook one way or the other but the
content TAKEN from facebook was offered up publically.)

Anyway, thread hijacking, no... back to your problem:

This being IOZ and not marketing 101 and your original question
being related to generic domain names and you still not really 
"getting it" let me try answering better. (Of course if you are an 
obvious arrogant, ignorant and truly pathetic person, you could 
add </me stop reading here> - and just ignore the rest of my email) 
instead of reading through it and helping/correcting me where I may be 
wrong or making a mistake like one would do in a REAL community 
(I, just like you am human and am wrong quite often but I know this and 
am always trying to improve myself, my information and form decent well
adjusted opinions)

Regarding the use of a domain, this has been talked about on this
list before, many, many times, but there are many, many uses for a name.  
It could be argued that just by registering a name certain uses are 
already implied. But even if someone should register a truly generic 
domain name just because they wish to resell it, that is also a use of it. 

If a registrant should register a generic name just in the hope
of selling it it would not really make economic sense as the
registrant would have to pay R50 (in the case of co.za) every year
and if the registrant were to rather invest R50 (plus hosting costs)
every year for 10 years the compound interest would give him/her
a four figure return, whereas if they registered a name like example
potato.co.za, as a keyword it is only worth about R250 in total and the
registrant would be wasting lots and lots of money in renewal fees.

If the registrant registered something really great like weather.co.za
the keyword is really really valuable and they would gain the most return
from developing the domain properly, even just parking it at Sedo or
Google etc. would only result in a few thousand rands per year whilst
as a content developed name on the web portion alone it could earn
thousands per month. 

If you are still reading at this point :)
There is also a lot of work (and risk) involved in registering names
for traffic, Zeitgeist aside, there are at least adverts running on something
that someone could be typing into a browser. Then some names
are solely registerd for use as dns (example ox.co.za) and some names 
are solely registered because they are someone's name - VANITY,
yes, vanity is evil, but it is also nice to have a cool email address
But is it up to you to judge whether my vanity is worse or better than
yours? Can you truly say that you are a perfect person with no flaws?
Yes, I am full of flaws, but I am not evil or doing anything that my bona fide 
peers judge to be wrong by owning, managing and capitalising on generic
domain names, in fact it is as an acceptable profession as to sell 
someone artifical bandwidth. Maybe we should look at how you make 
your money and find the evil in that? (Who says that your company should 
have been allocated that frequency, had I known that you bid R1000 for 
it I would have bid R1001) Who says that you can sell bandwidth? etc. etc.
(Even if you are a butcher you are capitalising on killing poor innocent 
animals, where would you like to draw the line?)

Back to generic names - Generic keywords with great and regularly updated
content, generates answers in organic search results, which in turn brings
additional traffic as well as income from advertising. For example, even 
though one of my names may be "parked" at sedo/google or wherever I know
 that I can earn R1500 per month from a keyword name when it has content
on it. Let me give you a real example: http://baking.co.za  -- Now 
baking.co.za was also PARKED, about six months ago? same as germs.co.za
But germs.co.za I am only developing at the end of March 2011, I have a 
schedule, (budget etc.) and can only develop so many names per week)

So even if I have 700 odd co.za domains and only 146 of them have content
on them, the others will also be developed over the next few years. This 
doesn't mean that I just willy nilly go and register names, I look at the 
keyword, do proper (overture etc) analysis, and evaluate its worth in terms
thereof. I constantly buy names as well, heck I have recently paid as much
as R50 000 for a name. (It is worth ten times that if developed and only with
adverts "parked" as you call it, it earns a few thousand per year.)

The really cool names for internet businesses as Joe said, are original
names that you have thought out yourself, names that are great are as
you know, google, yahoo, twitter, amazon and not books.com 
or in Joe's case frogfoot, now that is original.

It is time that people start accepting that generic keywords/names are exactly
just that. I own .de .com .org .net .me .co.uk and many more names, only
in co.za is the confusion so great. Maybe this is done on purpose to
destabilise the co.za space? 

To create FUD (fear uncertainty and doubt) and maybe the innocent 
questions asked are sometimes not so innocent as they seem.

Maybe people are not just openly arrogant and obnoxious? Maybe they have
a different agenda?

And if you are still reading at this point you need to get a life :)

 


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