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A
new article
about
the domain name aftermarket titled
"Internet
Domain Name Market in the Doldrums"
was published by the San Francisco
Chronicle today. I was quoted
extensively in the article by author Carrie
Kirby who called for an interview in
the course of researching the subject.
Domain sales piqued Carrie's interest
because the ultimate geodomain
representing the Chronicle's
state, California.com, has just
been put on the market with DomainHoldings.com
representing the seller.
More
often than not, mainstream business
press articles about domains get a lot
of the facts |
For
sale sign on California.com
piques the San
Francisco Chronicle's interest
in the domain market.
Image
from Bigstock |
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wrong
and end up with a portrayal of of the
topic that is far removed from reality.
When I saw the headline on the Chronicle
piece, my first thought was "here
we go again." However, I
also knew that headlines - meant to grab
attention - are usually written by an
editor, not the author of the piece, so
I wasn't ready to write it off for that
reason alone. |
That
was particularly true in this case because I
knew Ms. Kirby had been very thorough in asking
questions and follow-ups to make sure she
understood the complicated topic as well as
anyone could in the course of a half-hour
interview. I told her that with the Great
Recession high end sales have fallen off in
recent years - but the ultra high end is
not the market. Mid-range sales have been
booming and in fact we saw a
double-digit increase in median sale
prices in the latest quarter compared to a
year ago (a fact I reported at T.R.A.F.F.I.C.
2012 and will be detailing in our
latest monthly newsletter that will be out later
this week). Ms. Kirby accurately reported both
of those points in her article but the headline
writer missed it.
I
didn't see any factual errors or misquotes of
anything I said in Ms. Kirby's piece, a pleasant
surprise that is unfortunately a rarity in most
mainstream reporting on domains. It is not an
easy subject to understand and a lot of
reporters, under deadline pressure, won't make
the effort required to get a handle on it before
they write an article. I appreciate that she
took the time to get it right.
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Image
from Bigstock |
Aside
from the headline, the only other thing
from the article that really jumped out
at me was the wildly comical
quote from a Forrester Research analyst
named Jeff Ernst. Commenting on
the impending arrival of hundreds of new
TLDs Ernst was quoted as saying,
"initially only large
companies will take advantage of the new
top-level domains, but eventually even
midsize companies will all have their
own domain endings, leaving .com to
smaller and less Internet-savvy firms."
All I can
say to that is Really?! How
could any company be less internet
savvy than to abandon .com - the
extension that is synonymous with the
Internet? That status was reached after
hundreds of thousands of businesses
spent billions of dollars in
advertising making it so - a scenario
that no new TLD will ever duplicate. If
this silly comment is indicative of the
"research" work done at
Forrester, something is seriously wrong
there.
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