Domain Zombies Dissolving Fast

The world of domains is about to burst wide open, changing everything in the online world, or so the story goes. They say that anybody with a lot of money to blow paying a hundred thousand dollar fee and then paying to maintain the technical underpinnings of a domain could have one. A person could register a .charlie for all the Charlies of the world to use: Johnson.Charlie… Miller.Charlie… Brown.Charlie

Me, I’m not so impressed with this story. Yes, it will expand the range of domains available, but really, that range has already been expanded.

Beyond .com and .org, there’s .info, .us, .tv, .web, .net, .mobi, .biz, .name, .ws, and on and on. In the middle of July, a brand new domain is opening up. It’s called .me. Haven’t you heard the news about it? No? That’s because it’s a yawner.

Having a dreadful domain name can be a handicap, I suppose, but having an interesting, appropriate domain name doesn’t depend on grabbing a hot word before somebody else does. One of the reasons that we’re Irregular Times is that the domain name irregular.com was already taken. It’s not really being used very much. The guy who has registered irregular.com has a hodgepodge of articles there, and hasn’t updated it in ages, but he refuses to give it up because he’s convinced that a one-word domain is very valuable, and that he might be able to sell it for a lot of money some day.

Me, I think that IrregularTimes.com has a lot more panache than just Irregular.com. The number of two and three word combinations still available on the .com domain is staggering.

Also staggering are the number of domain name zombies – domain names that just didn’t work out fo the people who registered them, but have pathetic placeholder pages selling insurance, questionable pharmaceuticals, credit cards and the like. These domain names are usually up for sale by people and companies known as “cyber squatters”, just waiting for some sucker to come along and offer them a whole lot of money to take the domain name off their hands.

With the expansion of domain names, will that change? Yes, but I don’t think it’s in the way that cybersquatters would like. Michelle Kessler of USA Today writes, “Big winners are companies that sell domain names, such as Network Solutions and GoDaddy.com, Cook says. They could reap huge profits from new applications.”

I think Kessler’s got it exactly backwards. Think about this economically. With a possibly unending number of new domains opening up, the once-pricey territory of zombie .com and .org domains ought to bottom out. People won’t need to pay $6,500 for facebook-love.com – yes, that’s really the current asking price. If they’re really into Facebook love, they can go and register it on another domain.

With an even bigger new range of domains, people might finally wise up to the idea that a domain name isn’t valuable in itself. It’s what you do with it that matters.

Here are some more pathetic domain zombies currently on the auction block:

mrsaupdate.com – $4,999 (Isn’t it a shame when an epidemic doesn’t pan out?)
hvyw8.com – $50,000 (Why not just register hvywait.com for $10? It’s available.)
the3rdworldwar.com – $2,000 (Because Armageddon never came. My3rdWorldWar.com is available.)
anyonebuthillary.com – $25,000 (An oh-so relevant domain, because hillaryschmillary.com is already taken)

And then there’s offshore-sportsbook-bonus.com. With just over 2 hours to go in the auction of that domain, the bid remains at $10. Why would that be? Couldn’t just about anyone find a use for a domain like that?