Earlier this month, Rick shared a few thoughts about the industry and the main conclusion we should draw (in my opinion at least) is this: growth, just like everything else in this world, doesn’t last for ever. We as domainers are fortunate or even downright spoiled because even if making money in this industry isn’t easy, it’s far easier than in other fields (as mentioned a few days ago).
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Edited: Colin Campbell from Dot Club commented and made a clarification that we’re talking about the rate of inflation or 15% over *five years*, not per year, so a maximum of 3% yearly if the rate of inflation doesn’t exceed 3%.

After the Uniregistry price increase, various registries have released statements with the intention of reassuring domain holders but frankly, Dot Club is the only one that has a convincing approach for the simple reason that there’s more than just words behind it: they’ve signed a price protection clause with registrars which states that they’re allowed to bump prices by the rate of inflation or 15%. So unless the inflation rate will exceed 15% in the US (yikes!), at least .club domain holders know they won’t have to adapt to an increase greater than 15%.
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I’ve worked on lots and lots of different projects over the years: development services, hosting businesses, a small escrow service, a 457-page book, a YouTube channel and so on. I’m also a domainer and from time to time, can’t help but make comparisons.

Specifically comparisons about how much work is involved to make a buck in our industry compared to others.
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Earlier today, Shane made a point I consider valid: yes, we can criticize Frank for the Uniregistry decisions which are definitely not domainer-friendly (I’ve done it myself yesterday) but far too frequently in this industry, we forget to keep things civil! There’s a huge difference between criticizing and demonizing in my opinion.
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As much as I respect Frank, I think Uniregistry is shooting itself in the foot by increasing prices from 10-20 bucks all the way up to $300 per year for some of its extensions (Dot Hosting and Dot Juegos). With some of its other strings (Dot Audio, Dot BlackFriday, Dot Diet, Dot Flowers, Dot HipHop, Dot Guitars and Dot Property), the price is going up from 10-25 bucks to about $100 yearly, whereas for others, the increase will be less dramatic, with the minimum increase taking place with Dot Click and Dot Link ($1 – $2 extra per year).
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Two days ago, I’ve explained why you should always dig deeper rather than draw quick conclusions based on new gTLD stats. To a lesser degree, this is also true for dot coms.
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Edited: Dumb.com is pending sale.

Someone will be getting a genuinely awesome deal, this is an exclusive listing (I’m Dumb.com’s only broker) and not your average domain/site that gets shopped around ad nauseam. Not only is Dumb.com a blockbuster domain that would be the star of any auction event, it’s also a developed website that currently receives about 1,000,000 monthly pageviews (with ~80% being US traffic, ~11% UK traffic and ~3% Canadian traffic) and generates $1,000+ in monthly revenue.

The owner spends less than 30 minutes per month on it, so there’s *plenty* of room for growth if you want to increase the traffic or improve the website’s monetization. The only cost is the 50 bucks per month the seller is paying for hosting.
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I was going through statistics over at nTLDStats.com and noticed that Dot Theatre only had 149 registrations. My first instinct was “wow, it has over 18 times less regs than Dot Horse!” (I’d say that in the world of new gTLDs, you know you’ve hit rock bottom if you have less registrations than Dot Horse) but I then went to 101Domain to see how much a .theatre domain costs and noticed it’s $699.99.

All of a sudden the TLD no longer seems like such a financial failure.
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Edited: as Rick mentioned on twitter, he didn’t max out his cc, simply spent $1.8k on 18 names that he made back via domain revenue. My bad, sorry guys 🙂

The idea of borrowing money to buy domains has been around since pretty much the beginning of domaining.

Most of you have probably read stories about legendary domainers such as Rick Schwartz (edited: Rick wasn’t the best example, see above) who maxed out their credit cards to invest in then-unproven assets, people who ultimately became millionaires. So… should you do the same?
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… then you should keep a close eye on NameJet for the remainder of the week. Lots of LLL dot nets are being sold, with a batch of auctions ending within 24 hours, another batch in a day and 17 hours, another in 2 days and 17 hours and another in 3 days and 17 hours.
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