The Rick Schwartz Domain Name and Traffic Blog: RicksBlog.com – Home of The Domain King®

Morning Folks!!

I sold all my bitcoin a while back before it crashed. Timing is everything! But Bitcoin has lost a lot of luster since then and it may be poised to hit a 6 month low of $6000 from a high close to $20,000 last December. Crypto is depressed.

Will I buy bitcoin again? Not as an investment. I may buy to use as a form of payment, but that would only be in small quantities. I might still take bitcoin as a form of payment.

I pulled down a 7 figure total bitcoin gain in 2017. About half from coins I had bought during earlier years and then about half from those coins that I bought in 2017 up to the $5000 mark which was my cutoff and I wrote about it at the time. But I don't see that repeating itself anytime soon. I feel bad for those that bought at the high. Hopefully they cut their losses before they got hurt.

Supply and demand in real time. Supply is up, demand is down. Last year it was a HUGE Christmas gift. THAT is what I believe drove up the prices along with the momentum. Both are now gone and while I think there will be a modest rise during Christmas, it won't be a repeat of 2017 IMHO.

That frenzy is over! Looking for the next wave. The next thing. It's sitting there RIGHT NOW!! What do you think the next "Big Thing" is and how to get into it TODAY!

Have a GREAT Day!

Rick Schwartz

Morning Folks!!

The first question I asked myself was how do I carry these great domains for 20 years? 20 years because that was the timeframe I believed it would take for all this "Information Superhighway" as it was called back then, to hit critical mass. Most concern themselves first with selling the golden goose they just acquired. I wanted EGGS!

My thought process was how do I AVOID being forced into selling a domain name? My GOAL was to have as much of my entire portfolio intact in 20 years and only selling when the goose was perfectly Golden Brown.

My GOAL was NOT to sell domain names but to acquire and collect them until TIME ran out on that. It was a race against time. I was filling up my shopping cart. I was filling up as many carts as I could as fast as I could. The thought of selling was NEVER even on my mind. What was on my mind was demand for what I owned. The rest would naturally fall in place without me doing a thing.

But that was all BEFORE I began the process of monetizing those domains. That gave it an entirely new dimension. A profitable dimension. One I never expected in the volume it did. PPC raked in about $30 million over the years. Why sell?? Those eggs were being laid faster than I could count them or eat them. It was a windfall far greater than anything I had ever imagined.

At the time I had no idea which direction things would go. There was no mainstream and adult had barely begun. But adult was the only game in town for the first few YEARS!

Adult was the only way to pay for the domains I had and allowed me to keep buying more and more and better and better domains. I will never apologize for following the only trail there was at the time. I could have made tens of millions more had I had adult content. But I did not want the liability. Laws are murky at best. Any politician can decide to make an example of you. Just ask Sahar.

So I sent the traffic to third parties. I decided if they tried to make me liable for a simple link, then the entire Internet would just collapse as the Internet is all about links. I still believe that. Mugshots.com may have a problem, but try and go after somebody just linking to them. That dog won't hunt on this medium.

Fast Forward to today. My portfolio is still almost all intact (my original goal). The Golden Geese I have sold all made the DNJournal top sales list. Many in the annual top 10 or 20. I sold when those birds were golden brown which was also my original goal.

Thru all the naysayers I never veered off the path that I envisioned nearly 23 years ago. So here I am on the other side of my 20 year plan. What a fantastic ride it has been! Time for me to get back to the Geese!

I always believed that getting domains was like musical chairs. Once the music stopped, the best domains would be gone and never available again. So the key I really had, was a SENSE OF URGENCY!

Now when I see folks using that same game plan with GTLD's, I can only shake my head. It's just not the same. It's not even close. It's a bad dish with a terrible recipe and it has nothing in common with .com. Different time, different era, different demand, different needs, different audience, different EVERYTHING but these GENIUSES expect the same result. Not happening.

And as I write this it is reported that the biggest GTLD player, Famous Four, may be heading to bankruptcy. How much EVIDENCE would you like? Need more? Stay tuned as these folks start to DIE ON THE VINE!

Maybe it is time to question your sanity? If you want to have a real gut check, look at the domains listed on my post for GTLD's for sale. These are THEIR BEST!? Even I was surprised about the quality! A couple were ok. But by the time anyone ever hears of those extensions many of us will be DEAD! I never even heard of a few of them! I mean a nine letter extension to replace a 3 letter one? Really?? Why are 3 letter .com initials going for so much? Why are 3 digit and 4 digit .com number domains going for so much?

This entire Clusterf*ck is ass backwards as are half the extensions. Sorry, but verbs and adjectives usually go BEFORE the noun not after the noun. English 101.  .Best is one of my favorite upside down extensions. It's best this and best that. It's not this best and that best. DUH!

Here is the 20 year plan for new GTLD's for domain INVESTORS: You will all be broke and most of the registries will be as well.

Have a GREAT Day!

Rick Schwartz

Morning Folks!!

As I look at the current conditions of the domain industry I can only come to the conclusion that the industry is in major decline. It did not start yesterday or even this year, it started a few years back and it is just getting more noticeable. My vantage point may be different and probably much longer than most readers.

Looking back I would say 2005-2015 was the epicenter and also the peak for domain name investing. At least so far. Business is cyclical. Ebb and Flow. The very essence of business.

Now that does not mean domains won't roar again or continue to roar. But what it does mean is the market gets much more choosey and that affects our marginal domains. The domains of value will always rise to the top. Difference is the ones with no value will now fall all the way to the bottom as there will be less domainers to catch them and less cash chasing that garbage.

Now there are many opportunities that will come down the pike. All these Mergers will help to spinoff new companies and entities. These startups start out with $$$.

The Life, The Death and The Rebirth of the Industry of Domains is still how I see things. I just don't have a timeline for the rebirth mostly because of the new GTLD detour. But that detour is about to expire. That detour went nowhere. It wasted the time and money of domain investors and that is the primary reason for the decline. All those $$$,$$$,$$$ transferred from the wallets of domainers to the wallets of those that pulled the wool over your eyes and convinced you to buy a bag of worthless .crap. And btw, the majority of GTLD registrations I have seen are so bad that even with a .com on the end they would be worthless because just look at the junk posted for sale yesterday on my blog. Only a couple even made any sense.

Since 2004 I have maintained that registries and registrars are not your friends. They are nothing more that the Division of Motor Vehicles where you pay your damn tax and get your license plate and get the hell out. But Domain investors allowed them way too much control and influence and what was a thriving industry is now a totally splintered industry without direction or meaning.

Perhaps the thing that saved domainers last year was Bitcoin and Crypto. Does not look like that will repeat and demand/interest in those items have fallen considerably. The next big thing is not domains and it won't be crypto either. Those were the last big things. The ones losing their asses are playing a game that is already over. They don't look forward to tomorrow, they just keep chasing yesterday. They should just buy hula-hoops. That fad started in 1957. They still sell today. They would have better results even with that!

That all said, many of us will be domain investors for our entire lifetime. We have domains of great value that we plan to pass on even after we pass. We have to think like that. We play the long game and we play with blue chip .com names. We don't worry about making sales. We know they will come when they come. Personally, I look to just sell 1, 2 maybe 3 names a year. But for the rest of the group that has to hustle every day to make ends meet, that's a game that will get harder and less profitable as time passes. The steam roller of financial devastation is always close behind for so many. That's the decline I can visibly see.

Rick Schwartz