Register Domain Names

I spent last couple of days registering a couple of domain names I plan to use for Project BKO. Luckily, I got all I wanted without paying hefty premium. That sounds incredibly impossible in the post-doc-com era in which every domain name one can reasonably think of is already taken.

"How could that be?", you ask. Simple. Everyone can think of a domain name and immediately register it via authorized registrars for less than $10 a year. GoDaddy.com founded in 1997 was credited as the first registrar that made domain names affordable commodities. It claims that it has registered about 70% of the domain names.

Having registered the domain names, domain name investors will be sitting on them and waiting for big fishes who would offer to buy them. To get rid of unwanted domains, the investors can list their domains for auction and sell them to the highest bidder.

There are even domain parking garages for unused domains to park and collect money. How? The parked domains are set up as a one-page website decorated with advertisement links. The links work exactly like Goggle Adsense that shares advertising revenue with the domain parkers. The parked domains can also be used for affiliate sales. So, a well picked domain names upon which many surfers stumble may produce some decent revenue, while waiting for the big fish to arrive. Not bad.

I was totally amazed by how a simple matter like domain name registration has grown into such a viable industry. I'm not sure the birth of the domain name industry was by design, by accident, or by mistake. Obviously, the primary use of a domain name is to direct the Internet suffer to a website. Other than that, domain names are nothing tangible. Even stock shares represent a portion of corporate assets. The only industry I can think of that share some common aspects would be the casino industry in Las Vegas. A lot of people would disagree with me here, because apparently there are many making their living buying, selling, and trading domain names.