Morning Folks!!
As far as I am concerned, Domain Trade Shows are DEAD! They are run for the wrong purposes, for the wrong people and are just spamfests! They no longer have value. It really stinks when YOU pay and MOST don't! That makes YOU a FOOL! You got fooled!
So I think UNSPONSORED "Meetups" are far superior now and in the future. Forget about the spammy speakers. Forget about the travel and hotel and airplane expense. Forget about it!
Get 10-20 REAL domainers together and just have a "Dutch Treat" dinner and talk, talk, talk. Compare notes. Look for real answers that you can no longer find at the Spam shows.
See "Domain Investors" got overrun by all those companies like registrars, registries,and all related and allied fields. It is THEIR AGENDA not YOURS!
See there are less than 500 professional domain investors in the world. That's about it! There are 12x more people that work for Godaddy than all the domain investors in the world. So if you add up all the people working for companies that CAN'T MAKE YOU ANY MONEY, you will see it is in tens of thousands. Why are you wasting your TIME with THEM????
Look at the shows. You are lucky if a handful of actual Domain Investors actually show up. And it is watered down by perhaps a couple hundred folks that KNOW NOTHING about investing in domains. They know about trying to sell you something. Mostly WORTHLESS GTLD's.
So imagine you go to a show with 190 GTLD registries and a bunch of registrars and 10 domain investors vs a meetup with just those 10 maybe even 20 REAL domain investors. Which do you think has more value? Cut out the sponsors for your free lunch or free whatever and pay $100 for a dinner and do some business!
Non-profit meetups vs ????
Rick Schwartz
staff
If you’re getting ready to expand your connection base (or future buyers network) attend a conference such as Web Summit, The Next Web, World Summit AI, etc. And Specialized events dedicated to a specific industry / niche. Prepare vCard on your phone, make sure your website do not show / present something s.a. RailwayBirdCakeMaker com or AKJZBlockchain com or don’t show at all. Talk, connect, and learn. Expand! People tend to remember who helped them when they were in need, so … make an extra effort during these times. This blog, Rick’s Blog, can fundamentally change the way of thinking about domains and and wrong habits in general.
Jeff Libert
It’s kinda getting down to this across the board, with market saturation and decreasing ROI for all manner of digital related conferences: domains, WP, webdev, digital marketing, affiliate marketing, etc.
Years ago, close to 2 decades ago, people would discuss tactics for getting ahead on forums . . and forums spawned the early conferences.
Then came the quasi-private forums, as people realized not everyone was contributing value (for all the value that was given by the few).
Then forum contributors, often people who also ran businesses related to their talking points, moved to sharing their insights to their blogs, thinking that at least they might profit from what they had to share . . but then the blogs became echo chambers of one another . . or simply marketing media . . and real value again became increasingly scarce.
Then a segment of bloggers started to sell courses ~”secrets revealed” BS. (As if there’s such a thing on the W3. Sure, there’s always been a bit of STFU = “if it works, keep it to yourself”, but we’re at a point where those who know don’t talk . . because there’s no profit in it . . unless you’re selling something that worked . . yesterday, a/k/a a year or two ago.)
Then Facebook groups . . which have also devolved into people selling services, people wanting someone else to “do it for them”, and other time wasters for people whose time is valuable.
Meetups are an interesting idea. They’ve been going on for some time . . but there’s not been much talk about the better ones . . because they’ve been run on an “invitation only” basis. They are MeetUPs among a few close confidants . . folks who honor implicit NDAs . . folks who can deliver on a “you profit me / I profit you” economic philosophy are the ideal or sweet spot for ~~MeetUps.
There’s just not many such folks, especially in the domain space, who can deliver.
Maybe identifying a dozen regional MeetUp locations would start the conversation: Miami, NYC, Philly, LA, Austin, Chicago, Denver, Nashville, . . . I suspect that you, Rick, have a decent idea of where the regional clusters are centered, of domain investors who actually know the business and might care to talk once in a blue moon. That’s not to say it will happen. Honestly, there’s just not that much to talk about when it comes to domains. Maybe enough for some casual, once a year, exchange of insights, trend analysis sharing, whatever. Maybe a solid days worth of talking, in private, in a group setting, in a semi-formal format ~~individual to group sharing -> small plates + individual to individual talking -> one or two spontaneously assembled cluster-share~~panels -> dinner / drinks / smallish ~open-bar conversation.
Venue? I dunno. Did I or anyone else actually come here to discuss this? Maybe. Let’s see.
FWIW, if such a cluster exists around Philly . . . well . . I can be found just off Exit 2 of the NJTP. Exits, y’all ought to know by now, are a defining Jersey geo location thing. :p ;)
Jose
I’ve never been able to be in a domain conference in the US, Howard Neu last year sent me a tweet to communicate that the Dominions conference held in Marge (Orlando) he knows of years ago by an email that I send that I can not do Very long trips because I have cardio vascular problems in the legs.
Leaving this aside, what you read in some of domainers blog about these conferences or events and see pictures of what these share in your blog to us subscribers, I will be honest I have been in many other conferences of Science and Technology of Research, Marketing and Advertising in Spain and some European countries and I see some of them that are too storied and others more in line with the staff of the companies, etc.
It really is very different a conference of domains in Vegas I remember that I think instead of doing business here must be a bestial debauchery at the end of the night of dawn surely, negotiations of domains
I believe that few should have, maybe it is possible that not to be there if there were.
Happy Day.
Jose.