Morning Folks!!
Do you know how to read between the lines?? The single most important post in the domain industry in a very long time was posted last night. It is much more than a post. This is something you need to read several times and study.
This is the type historical parallel that should give everyone reading this the fuel to persevere and keep moving forward. This is OUR story. This is OUR future. This is OUR present. This is Franky's GIFT to all domainers.
This was not a blog post that was easy to write. I would think many days of thought went into this. Maybe weeks. Maybe been thinking of it for years and just did not know how to put it into words.
After you do that, you need to insert and also change some names. Let me interpret Mr. Getty's Blog post. Oh, my mistake, I meant Franky as he talked about Shell Oil. Or was it Google?
Either way, I interpret the words to have the most impact with PPC companies whose fate was laid out rather well.
I don't mince words. pay attention to this post more than any you have ever read. PERIOD!
Have a GREAT Day!
Rick Schwartz
Tommy
Inspirational, well written, creative, and so much more, but I feel like everyone is totally ignoring the mobile App / iPad App /”next must have device” App tsunami that is heading right for domain names.
At no other time in the history of domain names has the future been so unclear or bleak. To put it as simple as possible,”Apps do not need a domain name”. The killer app can kill the best generic domain name. Just like domainers preach that the Web will eventually eliminate all print, I predict the App will kill the”Value” of the domain name.
Kevin
@Tommy – No doubt the future in any sector of technology, including the use of domains, will be subject to change eventually. It’s just the nature of the industry and is every tech CEO’s worst nightmare, waking up one morning and seeing some new tech innovation in the news that obliterates your technoloy overnight.
Apps will definitely have some level of influence on domain useage and traffic. You can already see the effect from SmartPhones where you just query Google by voice instead of typing in keywords. It’s so accurate at finding what you’re looking for you rarely have to scroll even on the first page of results.
I’ve always felt our biggest threat is from the continually increasing power capabilities of the Net where it’s becoming more and more like a personal assist you talk to. The day will come when your PC or SmartPhone will be so powerful it’ll be just like HAL in the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey and it will find anything you want instantly without you lifting a finger to type or search. At that point names will only be useful for limited branding since HAL will store the IP content location numerically, not the domain info itself, and advertising/marketing will follow this direction.
Web Sites also will be a thing of the past eventually. Why should we have to surf the web based on a designer or site owners way of styling a page? Instead what will happen is real time assembly of the data in a site format you like. Your page style, your font style, your colors, your width, etc. The web will come to you in your own customized real time created format you like. This could be the biggest game changer of all for domains since the web will be flipping the way it works for users and you won’t need any web addresses. Everything you want will be aggragated into an instantly created site on the client end, not the server. Servers will just be vast repositories of content data. Advertising will be served by your ISP instead of all the sites when this happens, just like TV networks control and serve ads and not the TV show producers.
Anyways back to Frank’s post. It is an Excellent read and much knowledge can be gathered from it!
Colin @ ShopLocally.com
Domains are a fantastic tool to push users to an app. And now that a large percentage of the population has a fully-featured web browser in their pocket, I think domains are even more relevant and have more value.
Domains are both headlines and calls to action. Neither is ever going away. They are the most potent marketing tool ever created and type-in traffic is just the icing on the cake.
With 250,000 apps in the app store, marketing has never been more important or economically viable (low cost of delivery and the world’s best conversion process via the App Store).
As long as people have ideas and products to push, domains will have a place. IMO, the realization and land rush is just beginning.
owen frager
What Colin says. Every business, product, event, type of clothing, footwear, apartment building, gated community, cemetery, club, restaurant, child, movie, book… and more needs a NAME! Today brand names and domain names must match- it’s a no brainer for this guy who has spent a lifetime creating names for such things for a living.
AlanR
Rick, you know that I’ve been suggesting for almost as long as Google has been around that domain holders should unite by building and branding our own search engine….more or less, starting up our own oil company. That way, we would control the prices instead of Yahoo and Google. Maybe that is what Frank is now saying. If we could have built one long ago, then we would be in a much better position today!
scott alliy
And now for an opposing opinion. Apps will not kill domains. Here are two good reasons at least short term.
1) My iPhone already has many apps that I never use. How valuable or dangerous can they be?
2) More apps more processing power as apps get more complex my 8gb memory will max out like the phone wire in the ATT commercial trying to do too much broadband activity.
Colin @ ShopLocally.com
@AlanR – that’s essentially what Rob Monster is doing via the Epik platform. Quite brilliant, IMO.
Look at a name like http://www.icecreammaker.com and check out the links/logos in the bottom left corner. They are semantically linking relevant developed domains together (regardless of owner) in a way that makes domains make a lot more sense.
It has taken the domain community a long while to come together, but these are still the early days of the web. I’m definitely not counting domains as out.
Rick Schwartz
I wonder how much shit Getty took for not building cars??
Uzoma
There are two fronts that must be tackled, if Domaining is to be viable. We have never had a fair shake. First, the idea that a Company trademarked a name, say”Juniper Networks”, does not give it Juniper.TV, or Juniper.Com, or Juniper.De, because Juniper Networks is not the same thing as Juniper.TV. Unless a company actually Trademarked”Juniper.TV”, then it is not the same thing as Juniper Networks. Domain names should be like Fingerprints. Think about it, when say ABC trademarked their name, NBC would then be claiming infringement by ABC because the name contains”BC”, and we know that’s nonsense. The day Corporations won the ability to claim trademarks on names that is not theirs, is the day they suffocated this industry; and they did it while the industry was still in its infancy, NAY, while it was a blastocyst! This must be challenged. XXX & Company is not the same thing as XXX.Com, nor XXX.de, nor XXX.cc. These are all distinct domain names and have nothing to do with XXX & Co trademark.
The second trouble is what Frank Schilling wrote about, and the major culprit was just named by Rick. How on earth do an industry sit there and get paid pennies a month for all the trouble we go through? These internet hegemony must be tackled.
Lucas
@Tommy + @kevin
It’s a very interesting point that you make: technology will change the way people use the Internet, that will change traffic patterns and that will ultimately have consequences on the value of domains.
Nevertheless, an important trend in the development of commerce in the Internet since it’s birth is to emulate reality… (ok, not just reality, but a highly efficient version of it). But in any case, in commercial streets names and adresses matter, and so it will in the future Internet.
But leaving aside the previous reasoning, I agree with owen frager:”Every business needs a NAME!”
AlanR
I don’t think apps will be much of a threat if at all. To be on the net, you need an address whether it be a domain or just an IP number. One way or the other, the app takes you to that address. The way I look at it, apps will be a lot like all the existing or new extensions coming out. Just a lot of noise to distract and confuse people. What wins in the end is the fact that human nature likes simplicity which comes down to the basic fact of name recognition or brand. Nothing says that easier that a great dotcom! People will resist others from directing them to what they think they need. If you like Amazon.com, then you will always go there whether by typing it in or via SE or app.
Scott Alliy
Rick
I read the article. It’s what you’ve been saying for years. Domains have traffic value and the owner of the domain not some third party monetizer should determine how and for how much their traffic value should be sold.
Hopefully someone will step forward Soon and progress the search network populated with domainer owned sites idea.
Mike
I think the development of the domains is the key. I noticed a major difference just from moving from parking to a one-page site.
Danny Pryor
This is the kind of post that becomes a reference.
justsayin
Talk is cheap.
Great men take action.
Maybe one day we can read about that, until that time this record is broken. If people truly believed half the shit they said/blogged we’d see Frank take up a new model. Wouldnt his be the one to make the biggest noise, until then its just the biggest mouth.
philip
Apps or Google by voice, the keyword aligned with the brand status.com / country code. Your only permitted one & we all want what we cannot have.
ICANN = revenue No change there then.
philip
Must also add: The North American markets are massive but this is about global revenues, there are countries that are not even connected yet, vast economies yet to develop the economies of scale offered by online commerce. ICANN = revenue”Globally”
North American is a big pond, nevertheless a pond.
Steroids UK
no app will be more popular than the browser and the browser loves domains.
Rory Fields
Rick. Do you ever go on cam roulette? I was on tonight and saw a lot of penises being jerked which made it great fun for everyone!
Jon
So you’re saying that in the near future people will have desktops filled with Apps instead of using a web browser to get to where they want? Doesn’t make any sense. Either way, Apple only dominates a fraction of the computer user market.
Blogging
I don;t think mobile apps could be bigger than the dot com bust. Even the domains survive then.
Danny Pryor
Probably a great deal, but when you own the gas, you don’t need to spend money building cars. If you don’t own the gas, you have to build the car – and a symbiosis”develops” … ;-))
enko
Why not 24 Autohits Traffic Exchange Auto Manual Surf
Chris Nielsen
I admire Frank, but I think he is a little clueless on a couple of points. I’ll post about them on his blog.
I think I understand all of what Frank was saying. It was a lot to read, but clear enough. What I didn’t understand is what you were saying that he was”really saying”…
David C
Very interesting! However, would like to hear you comment on your concerns and predictions of the federal government taking over and controlling the internet and the ISP’s. If and when it happens, what effect do you think it will have on the domain name industry?