Mike: If it's a long-term thing, in any business, if it's a real business, you need to look at it on a long-term basis. You can't look at it as, "How did I do last month? Is it successful or not successful?" It's more of a long-term deal. When you look back over whatever period of time you've been doing it, if it's been for a year or five years or 10 years or whatever that period is, overall, how have you done? Are you successful? Is your portfolio better than it was last year? Are you making money? How's your return on your investment? You need to look at it as an overall accomplishment or failure rather than looking at each singular domain acquisition or sale.
Jeff: Right.
Mike: You certainly will wind up selling a domain way under what you should've sold it for. You will buy and spend way more on a domain than you should have. It's just part of the business. You're going to pass on a tremendous amount of names that you'll see somebody else get and sell and make a lot of money on it that you could've made. That's the way it is.
Jeff: In looking at the other side of what you do, in developing names and products, you have a bedding domain business, one where you never touch product. Even your partner doesn't touch the product, yet you increased revenues 400% by just parking the page. It seems contrary in many ways to current wisdom. Give us a little bit more insight about this and tell us how did you know this is something that might work?
Mike: You don't know it's going to work, but you have to try things in life and see if they'll work. If it makes logical sense that it should work, then you have to try it and give it time for it to succeed. We had a name, LuxuryBedding.com, which was parked, and we were approached by a guy who does web development in the bedding arena. He actually does Bedding.com and a lot of other high-profile bedding sites. He's put up a page for us, custom designed it and made it into an e-commerce page. The name is doing significantly better than it did as a parking page.
Again, this is not an overnight situation. This is a situation that takes a little time to develop, so you have to be somewhat patient, because when you get it off of parking, you have the opportunity to get it ranked by the search engines. Again this takes time, especially once it was a parking page. A year later, now that it is ranked by the search engines, I think it has a Google page rank of four the last time I looked. Last week when I looked also, it was on the first page of Google under luxury bedding was LuxuryBedding.com. For a while it was the first one. I'm not sure where it is right now. It switches around a little bit.
The name's doing substantially better than it did as a park page. Of course, I would argue that it's a much more valuable name than it was as a park page because it now has a Google page rank. It now has a lot of repeat traffic and visitors. It's an e-commerce site. We also did this with the domain name HomeFashions.com, and I just bought DiscountBedding.com off of a NameJet auction a few weeks ago for the specific reason to accompany the LuxuryBedding name and to develop that into an e-commerce site as well.
Jeff: Interesting.
Mike: I think all of us who have been doing domaining would agree. In real estate, they have the term that's used, the highest and best use. I think we all know that parking is the lowest and worst-use, but it's easy and it's scalable to thousands of domains or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of domains. There's no other solution out there yet that's scalable to thousands or ten thousands, etc., of domains.
Jeff: Right.
Mike: You would think the parking companies should be working on this, but I'm not sure they are. There are other companies working on it.
Jeff: Right.
Mike: We're testing with some of those.
Jeff: Along those lines, how do you view partnerships? Whom to enter with, what to develop? I'm sure you get plenty of offers of people saying, "Have I got an offer for you," given your portfolio and what's out there. How do you view the development angle and whom to partner with?
Mike: If you want to partner, you either need to come with one of two things. You need to come with a track record, something where we can look and see what you've done and see that the sites that you've built are successful. That would give you credibility and validity and would move us to try things. Or you'd have to come with cash and make us a deal so we feel comfortable that we weren't going to be the only ones to lose money in the equation. Come with a game plan that made sense and is reasonable and present some credentials that we would have confidence that you'd be able to achieve some of this.
I wrote about a gentleman who started Offers.com this last week on my blog, which is a guy who was a domainer first, a part-time domainer, and then became a developer and an SEO guy. He went ahead and bought the domain name Offers, I think, back in 2006, for the purpose of developing it into the site that it is now, if you want to go take a look at it. Basically, it's an interesting concept. What I'm talking to him about is that you can take what he's done, build out all of the different verticals that he has and take domains and the traffic they generate and build out verticals that would normally have gone to parking, which should convert better than the parking pages do.
We're going to test it out and see. We'll give it a run for a while, and we will report back on the blog on how we're doing. I think that's something that domainers have been doing more and more and I think we need to continue doing that, is letting each other know what's working out there as times get tougher and tighter.
Jeff: What about that collaborative concept of just having it be a community? Some people see themselves as competitors. Some see themselves as a community out there to work together. Names came up in the introduction of people whom you've spoken with, people whom you lunch with, and people who you know well. Elliot Silver. Names come up. Skip Hoagland, Frank Schilling, Kevin Ham, Rick Schwartz. Very easily, some people can say, "They're competitors. I'm not going to work, talk, speak with, collaborate with, share ideas, use them as a sounding board." How do you view that in this world, especially with so much going to shake out, seemingly in the next few years?
Mike: Maybe because I come from the legal background and as a lawyer, I know a lot of people watch a show like "Boston Legal" and see these lawyers arguing and yelling at each other in a courtroom and calling each other names, and then after the case is over they'll go out and have a beer or have dinner or something. People have a hard time with that. I think that's the way it really works.
What you said was true. We are competitors, but we also are in a community and we have a vested interest in pointing each other into the right direction. There are some people that are really out there doing that for other domainers. You mentioned Elliot Silver. He's one of those guys. A young guy, a very impressive guy. He left a big New York firm, AIG, legendary AIG, well before the fallout, and went into domaining full time and he's done development. He's done domaining. He has his own blog over at ElliotsBlog.com. A really good guy, gives out good, sound advice, and he's gotten counseled by some other guys. I think that's how it should work and needs to work. At some point, yeah, we are competitors, but at other points, we need to work together.
Jeff: Let's spin it back to the very beginning. If you remember, a question I'd like to ask is what your first domain, acquisition, purchase, registration, hand-reg, whatever it was and what your most recent was and what's been the different thinking, how your thinking has evolved over the years between those two. Do you remember your first?
Mike: Absolutely not.
Jeff: [laughs] Absolutely not.
Mike: Absolutely not.
Jeff: What about your most recent?
Mike: I'd have to look, actually. I think, but to answer the more important question, the most recent name I got was at SnapNames today, which was GetFreeGas.com. That, I think, goes to my second-best domain philosophy. We all know Gas.com would be certainly a six-figure, if not a seven-figure name. FreeGas.com would be a six-figure domain, a high five-, six-figure, sure. GetFreeGas I got for 170 bucks. I could get thousands of names of that quality for the price of FreeGas.com.
Jeff: Right. Does that become a franchise for you? Do you look at GetFreeGas, GetFreeBlank, or do you tackle any way along those lines?
Mike: No. I think some topics of "get something" would be very appropriate, or BuyBlankBlank would be a very good name. We own BuyGoldCoins.com. I think that's a really good second-best name for gold coins. I'm not sure GetTshirts is a great name or BuyGunpowder is a really good name.
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