In the eyes of most domainers, a blogger needs to be someone willing to work for peanuts (or preferably $0), who doesn’t care if he’s respected or not and on the contrary, shows gratitude for the privilege of being publicly ridiculed by his peers whenever he screws up. In other words, the ideal domain blogger is a masochist.
But, shocking: as discovered by Rick last week, it turns out there aren’t that many masochists left.
As Shane mentioned earlier today, Rick himself stopped blogging for an extended period of time, then tweeted for a while but eventually stopped doing that as well. I don’t want to put words in Rick’s mouth, so I’ll just say this: I’m convinced the complete lack of gratitude exhibited by a lot of domainers toward him was a decisive factor. I mean look: here’s a guy who did a LOT for the industry, by generating buzz around his top dollar sales (which he could have easily kept to himself), by organizing a conference (TRAFFIC) for a cottage industry, by launching several projects (not all of which were successful, but the man tried!) and so on. Yet time and time again, people took up every opportunity that came around to attack him.
If TRAFFIC didn’t do that well, bam: hahaha, what a failure of a conference!
Whenever he mentioned his sales or track record, bam: hahaha, he just got lucky in the nineties, he’d be TOAST if he had to start today!
If he promoted one of his project in order to, dare I say it, make some money: hahaha, what a sellout!
… the list could go on and on.
Another good example is Francois, just look at Rick’s post and at how many people are attacking Francois.
Quick questions:
1) Have any of the existing bloggers EVER complained about their partnership with Domaining.com? I know I haven’t. $1,000 or whatever, sure, it’s not pocket change, but you get traffic for friggin ever in exchange for that money. Try spending that $1k on Facebook or, dare I say it, AdWords… good luck with that
2) He launched several reasonably successful services that domainers enjoyed, like for example his ECOP escrow platform… doesn’t that count?
3) If you had a short domain he liked, he was always a trustworthy partner who offered a fair price for it… doesn’t that count either?
I mean sure, everyone has flaws, including Francois and Rick.
But throwing stones at people publicly whenever an opportunity arises… seriously? Come on guys, ffs!
So… yeah.
People adapt to this as they see fit.
Some quit blogging altogether.
Some publish less time-intensive types of content, like what DomainingTips does these days with the NamePros summaries. I’m sorry if you prefer other types of content, that’s the best DomainingTips can offer at this point. It’s not like there are a gazillion blog posts out there nowadays and DT is stealing visibility. Please just ignore those posts and accept my sincere apologies if they’re not up to scruff. Should a favorable context present itself, I’ll post different types of content again. If not, I won’t. Again, it’s the best I can do.
Oh and on a final note, I want to explain that domaining isn’t and will probably never be dead.
Hence the * I’ve used.
There will probably always be people who make money in this space in one way or another. Right now, this much is certain: domaining is no longer hot. At all. Nada.
Primarily because:
1) New g’s have been an epic fail for investors, as I’ve been warning people who cared to listen since… forever, despite being ridiculed at times and “overlooked” by advertisers. I’ve maybe received 3-4 “thank you” messages, for what it’s worth
2) Crypto being multiple orders of magnitude hotter, that’s just the way it is
3) The low hanging fruit of domaining being gone (as with every maturing industry), which means more consolidation among big players and much less “quick buck” potential
… maybe this will change. Maybe domaining will become hot again for one reason or another.
But for now, it isn’t.
It’s a small industry, alive but out of the spotlight and today, I did my best to explain that by not sticking together and supporting one another, we’re doing our cottage industry and ultimately ourselves a huge disservice.
May 21st, 2018 at 8:33 am
I said about a year ago on one of the blogs, which asked the question about whether domaining was dying, that the entire space had become far too boring – especially when compared to crypto. Whether you chalk that up to the secondary market itself, the dearth of blogs, or whatever, it is what it is.
There is absolutely NO NEED for readers to be grateful to bloggers: And that’s because they are not doing this altruistically, whether or not they are directly profiting in monetary form. They write (whether consistently, or not) because they’re building their own credibility, celebrity, or CV, depending on their ‘day job.’ This is no different that many of the rest of us who’ve writing tons of published articles to enhance our own brands. And there’s nothing wrong with that in either case.
But please stop the martyr complex. No one is going to feel sorry for a domain blogger who feels ‘unappreciated’ – especially because the readers are doing the blogger more of a favor than vice-versa. And if you thinks that that’s untrue, feel free to point out all of the awesome tips [you’ve] given to people that have made them tons of money.
May 21st, 2018 at 8:44 am
@Gene: how’s about this one:
http://domainingtips.com/the-post-i-never-wanted-to-write-new-gtld-conclusions.html
Written back in 2015, one year after the new gTLD madness started, based on data gathered through publicly documented case studies of my own among other things. I hope it helped people save a bunch of money and can pretty much guarantee it cost me at least high 4 figs in lost advertising revenue.
Or the fact that I was pretty much the only blogger who told people that launching minisites is not a viable business model back when minisites were all the rage and domainers considered them the universal panacea that was going to turn their portfolio into a revenue-producing pink unicorn.
… etc.
Could I have done better? Yes.
Could I have done much worse? Oh yeah!
Either way, I always did my best and if anyone wants a refund for the free content they’ve received over the years, they can contact the CEO of Bitcoin with a formal demand letter 😛
May 21st, 2018 at 8:48 am
Oh and one more clarification: you’re 100% correct that people aren’t blogging because they’re martyrs. That’s precisely the point of this entire post… explaining that right now, the investment vs. reward ratio associated with blogging is so unattractive that people have left en masse.
On the one hand, readers roll their eyes whenever the idea of supporting content producers pops up. And then the same readers are appalled that the signal to noise ratio is going down the drain and a lot of the “opinion formers” that still stick around are thick-skinned scammers.
Kind of like the idea of hating politicians. We’ve grown accustomed to considering all politicians guilty until proven innocent, yet end up surprised that competent people are staying away and only opportunistic weasels become interested in this career. C’est la vie.
May 21st, 2018 at 12:45 pm
“”Some publish less time-intensive types of content, like what DomainingTips does these days with the NamePros summaries. I’m sorry if you prefer other types of content, that’s the best DomainingTips can offer at this point.””
Seriously Andrei?? Justifying copying and pasting others content as ‘less time-intensive’ and being ‘the best DomaingTips can offer’?!? Yeah, you shouldn’t have to work/write to be considered having a worthwhile blog. Que sera, justify it as you will/want, seems to just be what it is – the easiest way you can keep your blog a going! Nothing personal, I just don’t agree.
May 21st, 2018 at 1:08 pm
I don’t want to be a hypocrite Kevin, you’re right: it’s the least time-intensive way to keep the blog going until I can dedicate more time to posting. I’m sorry but this really is the best DT can do at this point 🙁
May 21st, 2018 at 1:10 pm
PS: for what it’s worth, this is being done at NamePros’s initiative, not mine. And the posts are not randomly chosen and copy/pasted.