EP15: The Domain Name Convention Is Here!

Monday Domains – EP15

[00:00:00] More

Hey, everybody, welcome into Monday domains. It is a holiday here in the U S so not everybody may be working today. So we might have more holiday, uh, membership here today at Monday domains.

I think, um, I remember back when I was working full time and still [00:01:00] doing some day trading and things like that, it was the holidays that allowed you to, uh, to get serious about your hobby. In that case, it was, it was trading stocks. I remember the day after Thanksgiving was always a big day for, um, for stock trading sometimes because you had so many, uh, people that normally work, you know, trading, but anyway, it’s president’s day today.

Um, so our banks are closed. Our stock market’s closed, but the domain market is open 24 7. 365. It never closes the only thing that closes in the domain market or this customer support hours of the companies that try to make money from the 24 7 domain market. But that’s just a little pet peeve. I have anybody.

Yeah. Well, let a couple more people join [00:02:00] in. Uh, we’ve got a good show today on Monday domains. Um, for those of you listening live in clubhouse being part of our audience, I usually try to have a couple of things for the live audience. Um, And, uh, and then others of you are listening to this on a replay on clubhouse, and then others of you are listening to it as a podcast where you don’t even need the clubhouse app and you can listen to it.

You may be coming from domain club that’s who sponsors the talk Monday domains. And then we’re also affiliated with startup club and that’s the largest club on clubhouse. And we share content on startup.club website and the domain.club website. Um, I think it’s funny how. Names Kahn came out and announced that we’re going to have a live names come this year and it’s going to be in August.[00:03:00] 

And it’s funny because normally in the domain space, for those of you listening, I try to speak to three different audiences. People who own domains, you may have domain names. You may be in charge of managing domain names for your company. I speak to people that are investing in domain names, whether you’re investing in a low price names, uh, uh, names you can sell directly names, you list on aftermarkets.

You might be investing in high price names, or you might be a collector. Someone who’s familiar with the tech industry. And at different times I used to pick up different projects. And then the third audience is people in the domain name industry. So right now you’ve got a chance with names con coming live in August, which is about six months away.

Um, To put a live domain show on your schedule. And I think there’s a chance that I’ll have a virtual show between [00:04:00] now and then. Um, but I think a live show needs a much bigger runway to announce their dates because you have to figure out travel plans and conflicts. And I think this is going to be a holiday weekend here in the us the days following names con.

And so, um, you know, I think they’re, they’re kind of, they’ve kind of sent out a, save the date or put it on your schedule. Um, and because you have to track. Plane tickets for people traveling internationally visas and things like that. I think they need a much more runway. I may do my, my domain show again in June, and we may announce it in March because I think virtually we can coordinate our speakers and provide our value, you know, within a short period of time.

But anyway, I bought my ticket for names. For me, it’s a chance to see everybody, [00:05:00] uh, in person. Uh, I have various ventures in the domain space. Um, you know, I manage my own portfolio of nine or 10,000 domain names. So for me, it’s a chance to learn. Um, although in the past names con hasn’t been great at that part of it, but it’s certainly a chance to have meetings, see people in a centralized space and get an idea of what’s going on and have a good time with people I’ve done business with over the years.

So, um, they have an early bird special for names con I think it’s $399. And there was a time when names con predecessor, whether it was domain fast or when names con started, that that was the full price is 3 99. And the pre-sale price was 1 99. And I think that the. You know, those days are gone. You know, once the big corporation came in and bought the show out, they’re used to doing [00:06:00] the big cloudfest show, uh, in Germany.

And, you know, they seem to feel like they can take the price of the show up to a thousand dollars. And if you ever say that’s too expensive for beginning in domain investors, they’ll say, well, that’s how we keep the riff Raff out, you know? And, uh, we make it really expensive. Because I think there’s a certain level of access that you can get by going to names con where you may be in a room or at a table or in an elevator or in a lobby or at a social event with someone who you may not be able to connect with on LinkedIn or reach out to.

But if you get a chance to build a relationship and form a relationship or, or ask them a specific business topic, you know, you can do that when you’re live and in person and. And I think that that is, you know, that’s a reason that names con has become more of a [00:07:00] business development show for people in and around the domain names, space, where their company is probably paying their ticket.

They can afford the higher price. I’m not sure. And this is my own personal opinion. I’m not sure it’s always met the needs of a domain investor who was looking for kind of, to become a better domain investor. Now you’re going to get a huge amount of content, but I’m not sure the show was always geared to that.

Um, and because the price is higher now at a thousand dollars, um, You know, I, I think that’s a consideration, but you can mitigate that. They have a limited number of early-bird tickets. They may stand in the early bird. I don’t know, but if you know, you’re going to go, um, this is a good time to buy the ticket as I shared, uh, last week, I think that’s sure I had already bought my ticket last week.

Um, it used to be the best time to buy your ticket for names come was at the [00:08:00] end of the prior names con and you could get the biggest discount. And I think the second thing you used to be able to do is use to be able to, uh, get a ticket on the day after Christmas or the day after Thanksgiving black Friday sale.

And that was kind of a second chance to get a discounted ticket when the show was in January. But the other thing I wanted to mention about names con is. That normally the show is in January and you have a lot of companies raised to get their new product offerings out, to make announcements in and around names con um, they’re going to be going to names.

Con people are going to be asking them questions and maybe sharing concerns about their product. And I think that, uh, You know, that they may be, uh, feeling like, well, w we’ve solved that cause here’s our new and improved product and we really didn’t have that this year. So we’ve kind of just, we’ve kind of just moved into 20, 22.

And without this kind of reset that we [00:09:00] normally have when we all attend the names con, so I’ll try to help here with Monday domains to kind of bring what I think would be the main topics that are affecting every. But anyway, busy week, uh, we’ve got a couple auctions this week. We have the saddle option, which is ending on the 24th.

So that’s Thursday and say, do has, um, monthly auctions. They actually bought a brand called great domains. And so they still I think called these great domains auctions. And, um, these are auctions where people submit names. They’re curated. They use their same auction platform that they use for, um, auctions.

You can pay to start an auction. Anytime you want it, say two. And we’re going to talk about save you a lot today. Um, I hope I’m pronouncing it right. I don’t know if I am it’s it’s probably one of the great discussions in the domain industry where you have to say is it [00:10:00] Sea-Doo like the, the personal watercraft?

Is it say two? Is it, is there a German pronunciation, but. I’m going to go with say too. And, uh, and so you can start an auction at any time for a name. I think you pay $69 or something fee and you can be on their auction platform. The second thing their auction platform does is if someone makes an offer on a name, you know, they’ve got millions of names, registered and millions of names with their landing pages.

And if someone offers say a thousand dollars for a name, you can either accept the offer as. Or you can counteroffer, or you can send the name to an option. And what that means is that they’ll start an option with the first offer, being a binding offer at a thousand dollars. And I think an auction parlance, they might call this a stocking horse offer.

Um, and then you can obviously, [00:11:00] if no one else in the world wants to buy it, that knows about these auctions wants to buy it, you’ll sell it for the thousand, but there’s other people. If you feel like, Hey, this could be just way too cheap for the name. I’m at least going to put it out there and see if a sophisticated investor or a hobbyist that watches say two auctions, uh, wants to pay more.

But what they do, uh, once a month is they either have a theme doc or in this case, a great domains auction, which really doesn’t have a theme and they’ll have names of all kinds. So. Tend to a hundred thousand, our names I’ll have no reserved names. They’ll have CC TLDs, they’ll have IDs, they’ll have one words and two words.

So the say-do auction ends Thursday, and I think it’s become more of a wholesale auction over the years, you know, say two at one time, had the reach to extend into the real digital world. And what I mean by that is you might have expected them to do some advertising, like in [00:12:00] entrepreneur magazine or ink magazine or things like that.

And when they started, they really weren’t. Trying to capture all the benefits of introducing this idea of owning a good domain name to the most amount of people. But over time, most of these exchanges have cut back all their advertising, almost zero. And they’ve just relied on the fact that they have, you know, millions of names.

So someone will buy something every day and they’re able to, you know, keep, keep running and making a lot of money and paying their employees. But, you know, I’ve always been disappointed because they stopped aspiring to reach their potential, to, to make, uh, you know, buying domains easy and understood and something that businesses would learn to do.

Now I list all my domains at say two. And I’m going to talk about how you can, you can maximize your listings on, say do today. Um, I don’t work for say two. I don’t have an interest in [00:13:00] say I do, but I think you should, you need to know about them, you know, One of the original companies in the space they’ve been responsible for, uh, my second biggest sale of all time and a million dollars.

And they’ve been responsible for my biggest sale last year at $30,000. So I know after Nick has, seems like it’s the default leader and people say, Hey, what should I do with a domain name? You should list it at, after Nick and most people have a GoDaddy account and go daddy because they own, after Nick, they say, you need to go with after Nick and, and, you know, you hear after Nick, after Nick, after Nick, after Nick and, you know, say two is still out there.

And so I’ll talk about a little bit later how to maximize your say listing. But anyway, um, before I talked about the other auction, that’s ending, I think it’s this week, Scott, you may have to come up and remind me when your ending date is, but, um, uh, the great domains auction has become more of a wholesale auction and.[00:14:00] 

And I think that it’s not watched by a lot of people. I don’t think you’re going to get a Metta name for, you know, a hundred dollars. If it’s Mehta money.com. You know, it’s not like no one’s watching it. And, uh, and, and, and, you know, you’re going to get a screaming bargain on the most popular name. But I think if you’re in the world of names that you particularly liked, you particularly have a market for you’ve been successful with their value before.

You’re probably competing against some pretty greedy. And I mean that in a good way, some other bitters with really high expectations, cause you have to remember a domain investor going to an auction they’re comparing what they could buy in that auction with every other possible name they could buy to.

And every other auction and every other [00:15:00] marketplace. So the reason that, you know, we have such an attractive opportunity in domain investing to buy it wholesale. And the sell at retail is that when you’re buying it wholesale, even though the seller of that name would love it, if they were the only name for sale that day or on a platform, and that you would see all the goodness in their name and you wouldn’t have anything else to look at, and you would just spend the most money you could on their name, you know, picture going into a store.

And you’re, you’re in the mood to shop you’re at a shopping mall. You’re on vacation. You’ve gone to, you know, uh, you know, a store that you like, and there’s only one product. Well, you’re like, well, I dunno, I wanted to buy something today, so you may buy it. You may overpay for it. So, so sellers would love that to happen.

But in truth, you gotta think domain buyers at an auction or, or they’re at a big auction, looking at all the possible names to buy, and they’re comparing it with all the [00:16:00] possible names they can buy in other auctions. And they’re comparing it with the expectation or the hope of how much they’d like to pay.

Man. I, even though that names $600, I’d like to get it for 300. So sometimes when it goes to 700 or 800, you’ll see them fall away. So I’ve been able to buy names at the great domains auction for attractive prices. When I felt like I might have some unique edge on the name. Um, and I think I realized that my competition may not be everybody in the domain business, you know, Sejal tweet about it and they’ll do things like that.

They don’t always do the best job. I think people have become a little nose blind over the years because, uh, you know, after, you know, literally 15 years of say two great domains happening every week, um, you know, you kinda [00:17:00] see the tweet, you see the message and you might just kind of, well, you know, yeah, yeah.

That, that one, again, I’ll get to that, you know, maybe I’ll get to that. And, um, and so I think you don’t always have a lot of competition, uh, say two would love it if, uh, if they can say, oh, no, no, no, we have nothing but retail buyers, you know, we reach out to. You know, the, the, the, the buyers in the space and we get them to come to the auction and they’re all gonna, you know, compete with it.

Um, and, uh, but I’m not sure that exists. So section options that ends this week is Monte, who was with us last Monday, the right of the.auction. And I think this is another place where you have an auction that as good as they are at promoting and as good as they are with their mailing list. Um, it’s in the middle of the day on Thursday, it’s not something that people are used to doing every day.

So you may not have [00:18:00] every single investor, you know, lining up doing a thorough analysis of the entire list. And I think in that regard, I think, you know, you know, you’re looking to buy in today’s market where you don’t have a lot of competition. I think the other thing that I mentioned last week about the right of the dot auctions is they’ve done a little bit of your work for you.

And as a domain investor, um, you have some certainty that you’re going to get the name because the seller has already signed an agreement with right of the dots saying, if this name gets a bit above the reserve price, I agree to sell it. And. And not only is there an agreement in place, but I mean, that’s, that’s, that’s why they did it, you know?

And so it’s, it is, it is as opposed to even go daddy options lately, I’ve heard of times where you can win, but not win. I know in dining dot auctions, there [00:19:00] might be a 10 to 15%, um, rate where the previous owner renews the name after you think you bought it. If anyone’s ever been at some of other registrars is one registrar where I think it’s about one in three names that I win, um, the original registry and renews it.

And so you’ve got to go through all this separate to bid all this effort to wonder, uh, what you should bid. What’s a going to be, could you get it for this? And then it finally closes and you win or don’t win. But if you win, then you find that well, you’re not going to get it. And so you almost have to factor that in to the ones that you do when to pay you for.

The time you spent looking at the ones you don’t win. So I think what the right of the.auction, you’ve got a curated list where, you know, just like a GoDaddy options where you see the most active bid names each day. So out of 30,000 auction names, [00:20:00] you see the two or 300 with the most bids, I think with right of the dot, you’ve got the same thing where they review.

You know, whether it’s above 10,000 or below, if we’re doing an awful lot of submissions, um, you know, when they announced they’re going to have an auction and they’ve gone through and they’ve knocked out the ones with deficiencies, they’ve knocked out the ones with flaws, they’ve knocked out the ones that don’t have star power.

You know, they’ve got a limited amount of resources and effort and time, and they want to make sure that they put the right names up there. So if you’re thinking about real world domaining, which is all I can really speak to, um, you know, hypothetically, it’d be great to say, oh, in domain investing, like if you’re reading an ebook or something, you know, you can find domains for fraction of their ultimate value.

And you’re going to be able to get this great name, but you know, most of the time. You know, it, it’s going to be kind of in the middle. It’s going to be a [00:21:00] pretty good name. We’re pretty good value. And you have to say, does it match my investing style, putting yourself, putting myself in the shoes of a domain investor?

You know, is it an area where I think I have an advantage because I know some buyers already, or I’ve got experience with this name, or I really believe in this trend, or I really believe that this trend may be coming back. You know, you may be like I talked about last week, thinking that the back to work, the back to travel the back to social interaction, uh, you know, the shared economy may come back in a way that, uh, you know, the, that it was everything back in 2019, the sharing economy.

And then we got COVID and all of a sudden, I don’t want to share my tractor with somebody. I don’t want to share. My storage was somebody I could get COVID from sharing. So I think the sharing economy in many ways is one of the ones that we may see come back. Um, but also travel [00:22:00] and things related to work, uh, restaurants and work areas where maybe they didn’t have people for a long time.

Um, you know, even something like Washington, DC, you know, the Congress is still closed. If you can believe it. Uh, they have never opened up, uh, since the pandemic started. So they’re still, you know, not meeting, but there may be other businesses like that. But anyway, back to the right of the dot, sorry, got confused here.

Um, so you’ve got a chance to look at their list and here’s how I’ve been successful, but the right of the doubt auction. And hopefully I won’t tell you something, that’ll make you compete against me on a couple of names that I want, but pays what we do on Monday domains. I try to share with you, I think what are good real-world domain investing strategies.

And I think what you want to do is you want to look early at the list. And you want to look at the list first, um, a couple of days before the auction so that you can take your time and you can look at each name and you may need to, to [00:23:00] wonder, I wonder how many extensions are registered in that name. I wonder what’s, if it’s a.net or a.io or another extension, what’s on the.com.

Uh, is there a trademark for that name, have names like this sold? Well recently, and I think you not only want to pick out what you think are the 20 or 30 names you’re most interested in, but you want to have done your research because if you wait till the name may show that there’s no bids, I think most of the names are going to start at $500.

You know, I think you want to know, well before the auction, if no one bids on that name, And you may have a situation where the last 10 names, maybe none of them sold and, and people could be thinking, oh my gosh, nothing’s selling well, I don’t want to buy anything. You know, if you wait to have your opinion swayed by what’s happening during the auction, I think you may do yourself [00:24:00] some harm.

I think you want to ask yourself, do I like this name? And even if there’s no bid, do I want to bid 500 and not, is it just going to be okay, but would I be happy that I won this name for $500? I think now is the time to practice what I’ve shared with you before happy domaining, you know, ask yourself what I’d be happy if I got this name for this price and.

If you would, I think you should kind of have a happy price for each name. So if, uh, you know, I bought anteaters.com off the right of the.auction and I paid, you know, less than $2,000 for it. And that was a spot where some people will call it a no brainer. But for me, even though I didn’t maybe know exactly what I was going to do it, I do now, you know, I’m going to use it for an NFT project, but at the time I was like, no, I’d be happy to do it.

[00:25:00] I know what I think about the name. And I think if you wait until the day of the auction, to your opinion might be skewed about you just lost an auction at GoDaddy. Um, so I think getting an early read on the list, download. Ranking the names, noting the ones you really want doing your research. Even if the name doesn’t have a bid right now, when it’s going to start at 500, it’s going to go up to 3000 and 3000 or 5,000 or 10,000.

When it gets serious, you don’t want to be chasing down whether it has a trademark, you don’t want to be chasing down how many extensions is it registered in? You know, you want to kind of already thought that out and you just want to be focusing on, is this where I want to commit capital, you know, 1, 2, 5, 10,000.

And is this the time that I want to commit capital to this name? So I really think doing the work early. It’s going to make sense. And then secondly, you may see a [00:26:00] name that gets a thousand dollar bid and then 1400 and then 1,820 220 803,007,000 and, and starts running up. And you’re like, oh, I got to get it on that name, but, but I would encourage you to have to go back to your notes and say, you know, did I already do the work?

And, and it could be a fake-out name. You know, it could be a name that looks good, but, uh, there’s a phrase for cars under the hood. You know, when you look at a deeply, it doesn’t have the attributes where you wouldn’t get in a bidding war. But I think what I hear from most domain investors over time, especially some of the most sophisticated is they think back to times when they made.

I had applied too tough of a attitude toward a name, or they said, I don’t want to get crazy on this name. And then thinking back on it, the uniqueness aspects of some names had them always, you know, remembering the ones that got away. And I think it [00:27:00] takes a little bit of time to really focus on just how unique and special a domain is.

And th this is information that’s hopefully helpful for anyone out there. Who’s thinking about buying a domain name for, for their business or for resale is sometimes you need to slow down and look at the name straight on, and then look at the name from a side. Look at the name from underneath. Look at the name from above.

Really ask yourself. People would normally buy names based upon rarity and desire. And this is something I talk about a lot in my coaching and especially in my NFT, coaching is sometimes names have rarity have have value based upon their rarity. Only so many people can [00:28:00] own names of this type. There’s a lot of people that want them.

And so there’s a rarity value that says the domain owner has a singularly unique name. They only need to sell it to one person, but I don’t think you can underestimate other names that even though they may not be rare, there may be a lot of names just like. Do they, do they have a desire aspect? Do they get the heart pumping?

Are you proud of, to want it, to tell the world that you own that name? And I think you want to, you want to think about maybe the rarity and desire of names before going into the auction? Most of the names will probably not even show a bid, um, up until the day of the auction. So you can’t use what other people are doing to influence what you’re doing.

So anyway, suggestions for the right of the.auction, the same thing applies to the say auction and, uh, and hopefully that’s helpful. Anyone has any [00:29:00] questions about, uh, auctions like this, which I call timely auctions. They’re based upon the calendar. They’re not the, the everyday expired auctions. Uh, they’re not just, um, uh, You know, the daily drop names and the auctions that come from people placing back orders.

Uh, let me know. I’ll try to share it. You can either ask your question live and you will be on the recording, or you can ask it through the back tail. And, um,

and I, thanks for the one message. Um, so anyway, I’ll just kind of wait a second. After we talked about today, what’s going on this week, we have two options, um, that are timely and, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s fun. It’s, it’s something we don’t always have. We don’t always have a ride of adoption right. Of the dot right of adoption.

Oh, that’s funny. We don’t always have a ride to the.auction. Uh, and we don’t always have, uh, a say to auction. [00:30:00] So one of the reasons let’s see actually, you know what, let’s do some news of the week. So we had some interesting news, two big news items last week. Uh, Two big news items last week. I’m switching my, uh,

well, I’m trying to find my list of news items last week. Come on.

All right. We’ve talked about, let’s say to all right. So last week Namecheap, which is one of the largest. Registrars and one of the fastest growing, and I think one of the most engaged registrars, you know, they’re looking to add new business, they’re connecting with, with, I think they’re doing a better job of connecting and marketing with the technology industry and the web three industry, um, than any other registrar.

And they bought name [00:31:00] base last week. And name base is a w what I used to call an alternate route extension. It’s a web domaining system, and it’s, uh, it’s been out for about two years. We talked about it quite a bit on the domain, social Jonathan, I think introduced it to everybody. And he was able to explain how you went through this bidding system.

I know a lot of the biggest domain name investors in this space were in early. Um, it was probably the first example of. This is before NFTs. This is back in 2020, kind of a new part of the industry with a new vocabulary. Um, you had to use a new currency called H and S and shake. So name base, you can use it.

I kind of interchangeably with handshake hand. Shank is the dome handshake is the, what you might call the domain name system that wants to be the alternate route [00:32:00] and name base. I always felt was the closely integrated commercial company seeking to benefit from it. So when you think of handshake, you might think of.

De-centralized a nonprofit run, a utopian. We’re going to be all the problems that you see with ICANN we’re going to solve. But then in name base, you have the company running these auctions, selling the names, uh, letting people monetize them. And so you have a commercial company and that’s what Namecheap bought.

So you have a mixing of the old school domain industry with this new web three and handshake, handshake name base. I’ll call it hand base or name shake or something. Um, we’ll call it handshake. They’re one of three main. Um, decentralized web three domaining [00:33:00] systems that have started, um, ENS or they, some people don’t better by dot E T H was probably the first one on board.

You could actually buy names. I think as far back as 2018, 2017, it’s funny. When they first started selling names, you didn’t even have to buy them. You just locked up. Somebody theories them. Because they didn’t want to look like they were a money grab. So you just, you pledge some Ethereum like one a Sirium when a Syrian was like $200 and, and if no one else pledged more than you did that gave you control of the dot ETH name and, you know, hypothetically you could give the name back and then get your theory and back.

So I think one of the really interesting things is I was going back through my notes thinking, man, I hope I locked up somebody’s theory of to buy an ENS name. And now it’s, you know, it was trading at $3,000 a little while ago. It’s it’s in the twos now, [00:34:00] but anyway, they were the first ones out. And the whole premise here is there’s some things wrong with the ICANN system.

Wouldn’t it be great if we had a new system, but I really have to say my overall thought on it and I’m invested in name base, and I have HNS strings. Is that. It’s really easy to say that your new utopian decentralized system is going to solve some of the problems of the existing system. But I don’t think any of the three have stood up to any of the scrutiny that would be applied if you actually wanted to run your business on them.

And if they actually had to solve the problems of ownership and transferability and who is and legal and trademark and, and just operability, you know what I mean, where they’re talking about maybe reaching under 1% of the global internet right now, but just wait, just wait. That’s going to be [00:35:00] more. And then the second thing that I think all three of these systems have in common is that they’ve, they’ve put the profit motive of allocating the scarce domain names in front of.

Whether the domain names are accepted or not. And because, you know, existing, I can, domain names are so valuable and worth millions of dollars. I think what I hate to see is that the public, because they may not know about the original domain name system, they may not understand conceptually the distance in value between a real domain name that works on almost every internet device, unless you’re, you have to worry about filters in China and Iran and Russia maybe, but, and someone says, well, these new [00:36:00] ones are going to be maybe just as good in the future.

It’s hard to conceptualize that difference of how close are they to what we have now. And I think because of that, who per like, well, it could be just the same. So what you’re buying could be worth a million dollars. Therefore give me a thousand today or a hundred today or 10,000 today. And I hate the fact that there’s been so much trading in futures, bets on something that doesn’t exist.

They just plan for it to exist. And, and believe me, I know a lot of people are making money. I’ve made money on name, based names. I bought a, a two character name for like $300. I sold it for $4,000. You know, now it’s probably worth $40,000. Um, but I just want to encourage you that [00:37:00] it’s hard to conceptually understand just like it’s hard to conceptually understand the difference between maybe a.com domain name and a new GTL.

Because some people may say they’re not equal, but they might be Sunday. And when it comes to spending your money, how do you calculate, you know, what to spend? But I hate the fact that these all three of these new systems seem to have come out with a profit motive first, and then we hope to be universal later.

Now I started investing in the alternate routes, domain space in 2001. I actually, at that time I paid $10,000 in 2001. For the rights to.sports.mail.golf.lawyer.law. And even at that time, in 2001, there was a group of people that were trying to say, how can you know who says that I can, should [00:38:00] control everything.

We’re just going to build a simple plugin that someone can use our root system to operate internet devices. And in the same way, you know, it’ll use the it’ll, it’ll run the little browser thing. It’ll see all the ICANN TLDs, but it’ll see ours also. So even then I was open to the idea. Of investing in an alternate namespace because I thought it, it might happen.

Um, but I knew I was an extremely risky bet, but I had just been denied entry into the ICANN club, uh, when I applied for DACA kids. So yes, I was looking to still operate a doc kids. And if I can, wasn’t going to give it out. Then I was looking for alternative places to give it out because I think this is the most important thing, at least for me.

And I know that this is a deep discussion of what most people spend about 10 seconds on, which is Namecheap button name base. That means name basis going to be great by, by, by, you know, [00:39:00] but you know, for me, I was trying to build a use case for the alternate routes. By in my thing for DOD kids, I would bring all my customers who wanted a safe space.

I would bring all my website providers and I just needed a, you know, a root system operator. And so that’s the way I looked at it. I didn’t look at it that, you know, buying got kids was gonna, man, if I could buy it for 2000, it’s going to be worth a hundred thousand. You know, I was actually looking to operate on it and I just don’t see besides the baby, the wallet potential of that happening.

But anyway, it’s big news. If you’re in the name, Business Namecheap buying it, I think is great. It seems like it’s going to give them resources. Namecheap does hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. They’re looking to hire engineers in this thing. If you’ve got talent, I would suggest this would be a place to go and you’ll be rewarded.

You’ll be able to contribute to something valuable and we’ll see what comes of it. You know, [00:40:00] we’ll see if they can make it work. Um, we’ll see if they can get it on the different browsers. So name based by a Namecheap was. Was big news this week. Um, you know, at the, at the next I can meeting in the different constituencies, if they want to get up and say name base is nothing.

Handshake is nothing. There’s going to be an owner there of, of that space. Um, and I think that’s gonna, you know, change the discussion a little bit because the conflicts and things like that are gonna have to be worked out. Maybe you have someone in Namecheap that is already in the ICANN ecosystem. So I think it’s great news.

I congratulate both parties. Um, but I don’t know if it’s enough for me at least to say, oh my gosh, all bets are off by anything name based related, because you do pay a pretty good price for good strings. And they’ve sold a lot. They’ve sold hundreds of [00:41:00] thousands and the buy him, you have to use a currency called H and S and that currency itself can go up or down.

So you make, make a good decision buying your string, but then the value of H and S could go down. Secondarily, if you don’t want to buy any strings, you could just buy H and S coin. And if their future comes true, then it should have a lot of utility. And that could mean a lot of demand. It could also mean a lot of supply.

If you have a site ranked in the Alexa top, I think it’s the top a hundred thousand. You can actually claim your string, uh, in H and S and I think get some H and S for it. So it’s pretty complicated over. So inside the name based space, congratulations to both. If you’re thinking that this news. It’s safe to enter this and it’s not risky anymore.

I wouldn’t go that far, but anyway, a great news item. Second news item that happened. [00:42:00] And, uh, I’ll see if Sam has a question on something earlier. Hey, Sam, let’s see.

Well, I mean, the second thing that happened was on Wednesday night, I was watching one of the cable news stations and on the most successful cable news show out there, the most successful show on cable overall, you know, 3 million viewers a week. Um, they mentioned, uh, before they went to commercial, they said those of you out there on the internet, check out liar.

And this had been reported by Andrew Alaman earlier. If you went to liar.com, it actually forwarded to a Wikipedia page for a political finger, and I’m not going to weigh in on the political nature of the figure and this or that or the other. But here’s what I want to talk about [00:43:00] last week, we talked about Coinbase bang, you know, paying 5 million for a Superbowl commercial and then having a QR code.

And then we use the word bridge. That would be a great bridge for people to find out about their product. But when you hit the QR code, I told you where you were going, and then you had to use your browser and you had to use the domain name system to go to that website to actually get the content. And so, you know, I still feel like all these new things need the domain name system.

Even the new decentralized domain name systems need the current domain name system to be able to publicize and get customers and take money and do their business to become the future of the internet. Even an NFT needs an exchange operating on the current domain name system to have you buy [00:44:00] with your cryptocurrency, that it could be in cold storage.

I understand that, but most likely it’s on an exchange that’s operating in the current domain names. And you’re going to link to your NFT, which probably needs the current domain name system to be able to confirm images and resources and things like that. But I thought was interesting about this liar.com being forwarded was one, it looks like it was potentially purchased by a famous billionaire, uh, Elon Musk.

That’s not confirmed, but everyone seems to think so. Um, um, It was bought off afternoon for $500,000 on a buy it now. So we think by listing our names on the different platforms that, you know, Joe’s catering companies going to want a good domain for their business or Pepsi Cola is going to want to buy a good domain name.

And in this case, the system worked, somebody wanted to buy this domain name to use it as a [00:45:00] forward that the whole world could see, and they went to afternoon and they paid a half million dollars for this premium domain name without blinking. And if you think about how small our industry is, how few participants there are, how few companies there are, that we’ve still got hundreds of millions of people out there that have never bought a domain name, much less bought a premium domain name.

And, and I just think that it was a. It was a pretty good example. And on a half million dollar name of somebody wanting to connect with the whole world, uh, wanting to take a popular one word, liar.com and that they could then define what liar.com was going to be just by spending money. And half a million dollars is a lot of money.

But if you think about scale, there’s a lot of companies that could afford a lot more. And I think we [00:46:00] talked about the power of a domain name and the power of an aftermarket to sell that domain name. I think it was a really, you know, a Seminole event because it, uh, You know, it, it, it shows that we’ve got some of the things that we need to have a big marketplace for thousand dollar domains and 500,000 our names.

And maybe in 10 years, we’ll be talking about $5 million domains. But I just thought it was a really interesting example and a public example of someone using a domain name. As much as the QR codes were talked about after the Superbowl, someone using a real world domain name to accomplish, you know, a goal.

And, and you think about a BR you need a phone, you need to know what a QR code is. You need to trust that you can center your phone properly. You need to be comfortable that you use QR codes before, [00:47:00] but man, a bridge being a domain name, especially in easy to spell. Sure. Domain name. Now you’re talking about something that you can say on TV.

You can say in a podcast, you can say on an audio clip, you can say on a tweet, you can say on a Tik TOK and you don’t take talk to you. You just say liar.com or I could say paids.com, right? I can say Joe domains, Joe domains.com. And that’s my bridge for everybody in the world to be able to go and deal with me directly.

Or if you’re in a country code everyone in that country to go, and you’re dealing with them directly and you’re controlling your relationship with them, the data and everything. So I really thought that was kind of a. You know, a big deal, um, that we had the, you know, someone buying liar.com just for that specific non-commercial purpose, other than they wanted to make a point.

Um, [00:48:00] and, and they liked the price and, and they spent the money and they probably achieved their effect a little bit. And then here’s the other great thing about our domain name. When you spend $5 million on a Superbowl ad, it runs and they’re like, thank you, sir. Thank you. Ma’am we got through 5 million.

If you want to go again, that’s another 5 million and you think about a domain name where you’re talking about marketing benefits, but you’re talking about owning something where you could mention it in your publisher. A bunch of times and you own it. And even in this case, he could have used liar.com.

He or she, or we think we know who bought it and they used it and they achieved their purpose. And now they can sit here and use it again or sell it to someone else or use the publicity around when they used it to make it even worth more money. So I just thought that it was really interesting that in the same way that we [00:49:00] talk to people about using our thousand, our domain names, $5,000 domain names, $20,000 domain names, we had someone take a one-word domain name just to be a linked.

And you got to remember, again, this is a basic concept, but not everybody gets it. A domain name doesn’t have to be a website. Sometimes it can just be a link to content that’s already created. Content that you own somewhere content that you manage somewhere and that the domain name is simply an easier link to send to somebody.

Then if you had to spell out the whole address, like if you add an NFT, you might want to send them the open sleaze, open c.io/public/nft/anteaters or something to get to, to anteaters. But with [00:50:00] anteaters.com, I may do nothing more than linked to my open seat, you know, place. But boy, it’s a lot easier to say Anthony anders.com.

Anyway, those are the things I wanted to cover today. We’ve got two options this week say no, and, uh, right at the dot, uh, we got name based buy-in or got named seat by a name. We got liar.com being used as a forward, uh, in a really public way, bought off after Nick with the buy it now. And I think that that’s, you know, that’s a Seminole event.

We’ll all be talking about as we talk to different people about how you can use domain names. So that’s kind of my summary today. I see Sam and Todd have joined us. I always appreciate your guys’ input. Hey Sam, how’s it going across the pond?

All right. Sam may be listed. So I, when I’m doing good, you probably, uh, we’ve got a holiday here. I doubt you’ve [00:51:00] got the equivalent of a, of a president stay over there. It would have to be, I guess, prime minister’s day or the Queen’s day. Uh, my best to the queen there. I know she got COVID over the weekend, but how’s it gone?

So violin, I literally just got, got some fish and chips. So, uh, well, I will let you that we’ll let you have your fish and chips and, uh, Todd, how you doing welcome to Monday domains. You had a lot going on last week in your rooms, but what’d you think about either the name bay or name T by name base, the liar.com or will you be checking out the right of the.auction this week?

Well, I like clean for a day. I know. Anyway, I was thinking queen for a day. Okay. So page, yes, I really. The name, cheap buying of name base. Very important. I was going to come [00:52:00] up and say, it’s done. We’re in Namecheap. It’s going to be big. And it’s over with, and of course you want to sink all your money into these new names.

Well, okay. That’s silly. We know, of course not. But I think with what Richard, the CEO of Namecheap is doing, it is very interesting. I mean, it’s very important and I never expected these new blockchain domains to be, you know, I, I expected there’d be a small migration to, at first we get them to be defensive.

We know they may not work out, but we’re just looking at it. Like you looked at them 15, 20 years ago, the, these, these non ICANN names. And so we first get them to be defensive in case something sticks. And we don’t want to be, not have our brands. Then we realize, okay, when we do start setting up. Websites on these blockchain names.

We don’t plan on just abandoning our traditional names, where there’s going to be a really dual we’re going to just, like I said, there’s going to be a slow migration to blockchain. So I think this is important. The reason I like, uh, I was going [00:53:00] to call Namecheap and say, can I work for you? Cause I want to boss around Tyshawn and Johnny woo.

Now you guys own it. Just kidding. I just felt like a SANDAG. Um, I think, uh, what the, the big thing I like about handshake, just so folks know is yeah, that is actually owning the extension. The ENS. You don’t own the dot ETH, right? You’re just getting the name to the left of the dot with a dot ETH extension.

Same with unstoppable. You’re registering a dot crypto name or a dot NFT name and a dot X name. So I believe that I can is likely to issue. An extension like God NFT and an extension like dot crypto and of course dot crypto, there is a handshake dot crypto as well. So those, so when people talk about these potential collisions with multiple extent, you know, multiples the same extensions out there on different chains.

And then what through I can, [00:54:00] yeah. That’s POS. But I was going to mention, um, you know, handshake, right. They get into the whole thing, but they reserved all of the ICANN extensions and then even an additional, a hundred thousand to try to avoid collisions. So I think I don’t, I’m not worried about someone getting or one, I can’t issuing dot Todd in the future.

So I think handshake is onto something. Meaning there’s going to be a lot of extensions that are never going to be issued. I think should be accessible. So that said, I really want to dig deeper and try to get, you know, we see Richard on here. Uh, sometimes I haven’t seen him for a couple months, but yeah, that would be a great guest to get in now because of, you know, page, he was also buying some other names and really has, that seems like all sorts of different projects in the works.

So that I really am excited about that. I like that. He’s, that’s that’s this is going to be, you know, but it doesn’t mean it’s a big thing now, but it’s almost like, so he’s [00:55:00] staking some ground over here. He believes that there is something there. And I have to agree, um, with regards to remember when you mentioned Maggie the other day and it was for 75 grand.

M a G a and we know, okay. The history of what that were, but I was going to say there was another four letter that just sold. It was a word, not that great. I can’t think of it, but I brought it up yesterday for like 87,000 and I still think it was clam. I believe seal am clam. And we know, yeah, it was a GoDaddy option.

Name, someone let that expire and go, daddy is going to make $87,000 on that thing. I’m so glad for them because you know, they’ve been strung. Okay. So Paul mix, you know, got the, the he’s the president now of domains, right? Well, next Thursday with the right of the.auction, he’s actually. Uh, having a tenant, I think it’s 10, o’clock my time.

10 PST. He’s having a one hour question and answer, uh, through [00:56:00] ICA, a zoom call. So I would recommend I’m going to be part of that as I’m definitely gonna watch the ROTC auction, but yeah, cause we have some questions about some, some bull crap that still goes on at the auctions and you know, they always have answers and Paul’s cool and diplomatic, but there’s still some, you know, bullshit.

So, uh, I can’t wait to, you know, I love the Paul’s always around, but I was going to say that clam was 87,000 and, and it’s, it’s okay. You know, maggot, it’s easy to pronounce 75,000 and I know people, you know, I think that. The popularity of that term can be a benefit. Even if you do something that’s, you know, has nothing to do with politics and make America great.

Again, both, you know, with, with that whole thing. Meaning I just, I still liked the name for 75,000. I wanted to mention to you and now finish up by just asking you. So tell me a little bit about this and eaters NFT. I’m done well. [00:57:00] Uh, I almost had it done. It almost came out last year. It may come out this year, so I’ll just leave it.

That for me, it was a great way to create an NFC. Uh, around an animal that would be, uh, you know, just like the apes, you know, a, an indicator of membership in a group. And it would really be the power of the group that would, that would take on, you know, some neat, uh, some neat aspects. So for me, the reason I, you know, I thought about Annie there’s was, it was because I bought anteaters.com and I started researching just anteaters.

And they’re an amazing animal. Truly an amazing animal. And, and then when I thought about, you know, what, what I might do in NFTs, I had a couple other projects and then I thought, well, maybe I’ll do that. The anteaters, you know what I mean? And so my, uh, my tagline for anteaters and hopefully, no one’s going to use this and come out with a fake anteaters NFT.

Um, [00:58:00] Uh, because I just really never got my contract dialed in and the team that I had used to do it kind of failed me. Um, yeah. So my, my tagline was going to be, uh, uh, my NSP sucks. So that was going to be the, uh, the hook, uh, a, I wanted to mention page about the liar.com. Okay. So that was just a rich guy.

Admittedly, most Americans can’t spell wire. Anyway, L Y E R I dunno, L I E R O L I a R. So it’s not like easy to see why. Well, they don’t, they know how to spell liar. I’m going princess bride on you. Well, now it makes Michael Jackson not look so silly buying that machine that he was sleeping in. I mean, this would just Mo Musk if he bought, you know, just being thinking it’s funny.

And then you’re right. Well, I was gonna say. The about the $500,000 buy it now will, you know, domainers well, he left money [00:59:00] on the table. Shouldn’t have priced it now, what you do, price your names with buy it now and just assume that Musk is the buyer and just price them high. But I love, I love hearing that story.

And of course there’s no type in traffic. They have to get pressed because no, one’s just typing liar.com. So he has to not only spend half a million for the name, of course, then he gets that press for buying it. But now if he wants to continue to use it and think it’s funny, but yeah, can they resell, but that’s basically just a rich guy showing you.

I just it’s like a practical joke. It just did a little fun thing. And I guess, uh, if you got that, you know, he’s got that kind of dough. He can do it, but I don’t think it’s even affected. I think it’s like, those are like the old tricks I used to have, sorry, ass pointed to politicians, to, you know, my domain names.

And it is a funny thing, but that was just, uh, a rich guy, you know, I don’t know, doing things, doing something that he thought was funny and, um, you know, I’m not mad at him, but I’m glad for that. Yeah, but I think even when you’re talking about free publicity, if [01:00:00] a one-word domain name and what it’s pointed at is a story that you think about in today’s world.

You know, like when someone sponsors a Superbowl team, someone sponsors a Daytona race car, you know what I mean? They put their name on the race car for the number of people that are going to see it. You know what I mean? Um, and you think about social media, a story about a word.com, something happening to it is very repeatable and promotable.

You know what I mean? So I think that for buying the name. And doing something he didn’t have to, I don’t believe he was, he had to pay to promote that tweet that he bought that, you know what I mean? It was earned, it was free publicity around just the concept of saying that the definition of a word online, the.com was being pointed to [01:01:00] this.

And if you just think about the cumulative Mindshare, this is, what’s exciting about it in a world where every single company and business is competing for the attention of customers. You know what I mean? This got in there and got some of that attention. And I just think that if he did it for a Lark and a rich guy, just doing it, just think about companies that know.

What so many page views mean and so many looks and so many discussions and really penetrating people’s attention span. And what they talked about around the water cooler can mean for their business. That’s what I wanted to paint a picture of was, um, you know, a five bot success.com and I wanted to define with success was that there would be a certain amount of earned media, um, that would come from it.

So that was kind of my angle [01:02:00] well, in, in, right. But it’s like buying one ad the advertisers know it’s consistency, so you’re right. He did get that press and that immediate stuff. It’s that huge bump that in two weeks from now, there’s going to be no, no, one’s going to search back. What was that story about?

Why, unless it. There’s no way for it to keep coming around. So yeah, there was this one week of a big bump, but in a month from now, no, one’s going to know liar. They don’t have to keep saying, Hey, did you, you know, I mean, it just it’s, like I said, a cute little joke and they did get some, you know, that, that initial tweet and all that stuff gets some attention, but it just goes away fast.

So then, you know, it was an expensive, yeah, I think we probably just disagree on that. So. All right, Tom. Well, awesome. And, uh, wish you luck this week. Todd, remind me again, when your rooms are and clubhouses week, if anyone’s listening well, tomorrow’s, tomorrow’s a big day only because the domain name was through PMTC.

And 6:00 PM Eastern thanks page that, that the guys that I do with Jeff Newman and [01:03:00] David Michaels, a couple of lawyers, but they, uh, they really are. We’ve done a lot of preparing this week because one of the cases that we’re doing is one that Jeff Newman was a panelist on. And, um, he, he basically dissented.

So the other two panelists, this was the first time he was on a three member panel and he descended with his other two panels. The other two panelists, uh, ruled against the domain investor and said, transfer that domain away. And Jeff said, no, the domain investor should have kept. We’re going to cover a case that he did, which is always interesting.

Cause you know, we’ve been around for a long time to have a panelist, give their views and he’s really candid. It means a lot. So that’s the room tomorrow that, uh, I hope everybody shows up for. And then of course, on, on Thursday, uh, Jeff side kick on talking domains and that really is great for domainers, you know, from the very beginner to the one with a lot of experience.

So, um, those two rooms, you can see them on my profile, but thanks for asking page. Yeah. [01:04:00] I really think what you guys do on the Tuesday law room, you know, um, the idea of trademarks, the idea of Cybersquatting the idea of what do you do either as a domain owner or as a company, there is so much urban myths misinformation out there.

And if you are a domain owner, if you’re a trademark owner, if you’re a company owner and you’d like to elevate your knowledge to. Be in the world where real decisions take place, not the urban myths world, not the some guy trying to get a name by threatening this or threatening that, but you know, the real world, I think they do a really good job in that room.

And, you know, I think it may be another aspect of legal domains that they’re on. So I really do recommend that room. Uh, I’ll be doing outbounding club right before Todd’s room tomorrow at five Eastern, and then I’ll be doing [01:05:00] million dollar domains on Wednesday at one Eastern. And then I’ll, I’m starting to do more social rooms on Thursday and Friday.

So hopefully you followed domain club. Hopefully you follow me here on clubhouse and. Uh, if you’d like to do a room, either scheduled or just a pop-up room, and you’d like to do it in domain club, we are the largest domain club on clubhouse. We’re over 3,300 members, I think. And you will potentially be able to get a better audience by doing a room and domain club.

So if you’d like to do that, I can make you kind of a. Uh, super moderator. You can start a room on your own, either a pop-up room or you can set a time for it. And if you do set up a time and let me know, you know, we’ll retweet it and we’ll send it out and, and, you know, and mention it, maybe if we can, on some of the start-up club shows I do.

So anyway, I wanted to hold that out to folks, uh, for, for the rest of the year [01:06:00] that I know everyone wants to build their own club and do their own thing. But if you wanted to get some more, um, attraction and be amplified a little bit, then, um, then yes, we are opening up domain club for members to have rooms in them.

All right. Well, thanks everybody for joining us for Monday domains. If you came in late, you can hear the beginning either by listening to the replay. If you’re listening to it, follow us on domain club on clubhouse. You may be listening to this on the podcast off of clubhouse, but, uh, by, by joining clubhouse, you’ll get notifications and be connected to this growing community of domain investors and, uh, and just really nice people that we’ve been able to grow here on clubhouse.

So thanks everybody.