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DN Journal marks
its 10th Anniversary on January 1,
2013. I've always thought it was more
productive to look forward than back,
so I've never stopped to celebrate previous
anniversary dates for our publication, but
hitting double digits, especially for
an online media outlet, made even me think
it was time to pause and reflect on
how we made it to this
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point in time - especially since I never planned
on DN Journal becoming a business in
the first place! Life is funny that way. You never really
know where the next step is going to take
you. The passing of a full decade leaves too
much ground to cover in a single article so
I've taken a two-pronged approach to
observing this special occasion. First, in our
daily Lowdown section over
the past couple of weeks I posted
articles featuring chronological
photos and highlights focusing on
industry people and events that we have
covered over our first ten years. The links
to each of those articles are posted
below.
DN
Journal's First Decade - 2009: Recession
Arrives But Domain Investors Hold Their Own
DN
Journal's First Decade - 2010: Conference
Wars Continue, Cover Stories Feature Key
Players from Multiple Arenas
DN
Journal's First Decade - 2011: Predictions
We Would Run Out of Things to Write About
Prove to Be Unfounded
DN
Journal's First Decade - 2012: The 10th Year
of the Ride of Our Lives
While those posts touch on a few of the many great people and
events we have been privileged to cover over
the past decade, this story will focus on
the history of the publication itself - why
I started it and how DN Journal took
on a life of its own that carried me
along on the unexpected but delightful
decade long ride I'm writing about now.
The story begins shortly after I arrived
in the domain business in the spring of
2002. I was starting my third career
after spending over 20 years in broadcasting
(primarily as a TV reporter in Florida),
followed by 12 years as an independent
entrepreneur, running my own brick and
mortar music retail stores (Details on those
previous occupations are in a 2004
autobiographical Cover Story I wrote about My
Second Year in the Domain Business,
the follow up to a piece I had written the
year before called My
First Year In The Domain Business: A
Rookie's Diary.
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Image
from Bigstock |
The Internet (coupled with the arrival of
CD burners) had wiped out most of the
nation's independent music retail stores
(including mine) by the time the
new millennium arrived in 2000, or soon
after. I decided if
you can't beat them join them and
started looking for a new way to make a
living - determined that whatever I settled
on would be based on the Internet
because it was upending one traditional
industry after another, leaving almost no
place offline as a safe refuge -
certainly not brick and mortar retail which
I had been doing successfully until the web
came along and siphoned off our
customers.
One day in the spring of 2002 my monthly
copy of PC World magazine
arrived in the mail and it had a full page
ad placed by Neustar, the operator or
the .US registry, in it. They were
letting people know that the .US extension,
that had previously been reserved for government
use, had been opened to all American
citizens. I recalled how hard it had
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| been to
find a relevant .com name for our
record stores before settling on MusicParadise.com
in 1997. At the time I didn't know it was
possible to buy a name from someone else, I
only knew that most of the ones I looked up
were already taken, so I assumed there was
no way to get them, so I kept searching
until I found an unregistered name. |
My
stores were called Rock Island, but
RockIsland.com was taken. Since our print
advertising, as well as the Rock Island
T-Shirts, mugs and other souvenirs we sold
included a slogan that said "A
Music Collector's Paradise" I wound
up registering MusicParadise.com for
our website in 1997.
So, even though I had not yet decided
exactly what I was going to do on the
Internet after leaving music retail, I thought it might be a good idea
to get some names in this newly opened .US
extension that could be used for websites
devoted to areas I had some experience in
(like music, sports, media, etc.), because I
knew from past experience that the exact
words I wanted weren't likely to be
available in .com. At the time I didn't
really understand how dominant .com
was in Internet mind share, the value of
type in traffic, how much traffic
might be leaked from a new extension,
etc. - all of the things that go into
determining domain value on the
aftermarket.
A couple of months after registering my
first few domain names in May 2002,
in the course of doing some further research, I
stumbled upon a link to DNForum.com
- the pioneering domain forum where a lot of
today's veteran domain investors cut their
teeth. I joined in July of that year and the
forum was a complete revelation. I
had always thought the only reason to have a
domain name was to build a website on
it - and I never imagined there were
people out there paying significant money
for names that were already
registered rather than settling for whatever
was still open, as I had done.
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As a former journalist, the very idea
that you could actually own the
rights to a word on the internet and
buy and sell those rights left me slack
jawed with amazement. I jumped in with both
feet and, making the common newbie mistake,
started registering everything in site -
none of which had any value! By the fall of
2002 I was getting discouraged because no
one was buying any of the "gems" I had
accumulated. Hungry for some advice that
would set me on the right path I started
paying more attention to what people were
saying on the forums (rather than blindly
running full steam ahead with no idea where
I should be going).
I also started looked for the kind of
industry trade magazine I had relied on
in my previous businesses to keep abreast of
what was going on, what was selling and who
the key players were. In broadcasting we had
Broadcasting Magazine. In
music retail we had Billboard
Magazine. In the domain business I
was surprised to find no
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Image
from Bigstock |
| such animal
existed. The field, though it had already
spawned more than a few millionaires, was
just too new to have attracted the attention
of any professional journalists. |
By that point in time I had been out of
journalism myself for 13 years and never had
any plans to go back into it. However, after hearing
so many amazing rags to riches
stories about people who had made it big in
domains, I thought someone should be
telling those stories and if I didn't who
would? Over the next few months I gave the
idea of an online magazine some more
thought, but I never saw it as a business
opportunity, reasoning that no one would pay
to read it (everything on the Internet was
free!) and I never even thought about anyone
paying to advertise on it, after all - it
would be a new no name publication in a niche
business.
However, I did see a different kind of
reward that I felt would make it worth
my time to put a part time hobby publication
together. My domain investing activity was
going nowhere fast so I figured if I could
get the people who had proven that they did
know what they were doing to grant in
depth interviews for my publication, I
could learn what I needed to know from them
to turn things around in my own investing endeavors.
So, I started putting the usual elements
of a magazine together with the centerpieces
to be the Cover Story profiles of the
most successful investors and companies and
an "industry buzz" section called The
Lowdown that would be updated more often
with shorter bits of news and information.
The weekly domain sales reports
we are
so well known for now would not arrive until
near the end of that first year (more on
that in a few moments).
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Image
from Bigstock |
Now all I needed was
a name. Since the only way I could see to
send traffic to the site was to publicize it
on DNForum, in late 2002 I asked the other
forum members to help me choose a name. I
had narrowed it down to two. One was DotBeat
- a nod to the old school journalism term of
covering a "beat" - a specific
area of interest. The second was Domain
Name Journal to be abbreviated as DN
Journal, a nod to DN Forum, the site
that helped me birth the publication by
providing advice, an audience and a range of
contacts who became subjects of our stories
or led me to others we featured. Forum
members overwhelmingly favored Domain Name
Journal and the URL DNJournal.com and
I took their advice. |
In December 2002 - in preparation for a
January 1, 2003 launch of the site, I put
our first Cover Story in the can and also
got two forum friends to contribute feature
stories to help fill out the opening day
line up. Tariq Ghafoor wrote about .com
fighting off a challenge from new extensions
(.info and .biz) - a classic
example of the more things change the more
they stay the same as today we are still
talking about new extensions
challenging .com with ICANN's plans
to start rolling out an unlimited number of
new TLDs in 2013). Also, Dan McCullough
wrote about the prospects for the .US
extension that had been opened the previous
spring (the event that pulled me into the
domain business in the first place). On
New Year's Day 2003 I was ready to
flip the switch.
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A
screenshot of DNJournal.com's Home Page the day the
site launched on January 1, 2003.
There is a funny story behind that first
Cover Story. I wanted it to be a profile
of Thunayan K. Al-Ghanim, better
known on the forums as Elequa, an
extremely personable and popular young
investor/developer who had put together a tremendous
domain portfolio for his company - Future
Media Architects. Though we knew each
other from the forums, Elequa was a little gun
shy about being my Cover Story guinea pig.
He valued his privacy and who knew what kind
of angle I might take? So, while he was
reluctant Elequa was a guy who always tried
to help, so he referred me to a friend of
his, industry pioneer Igal Lichtman,
who had just opened a new domain
monetization company at DomainSpa.com
- one of the first PPC companies to
automatically display images relevant to the
domain's keyword on parking pages.
Elequa did me a favor - Igal was the real
deal. He had already founded and sold a
software company (Magic Solutions)
that he sold to Network Associates
(formerly McAfee Associates)
for $110 million. I contacted Igal
and put the piece together. Within minutes of the
article going live, I
got a call from Elequa on my cell phone. He
loved the story and (his doubts apparently
having been quelled), he said he would be happy to
be my second Cover Story subject (and
he
was).
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| Having heavyweights
Like Igal (who was featured again in a February
2012 Cover Story) and Elequa sit for our first major
interviews gave us an immediate boost and
from that point on it seemed that everyone's door
was open to us. Still, even though they were labeled
Cover Stories, those early profiles were actually
not much more than simple sketches. At that time there had been no
major domain conferences so I had no photos of my
subjects nor had I had a chance to met any of them
face to face. Over the next three years, as DN
Journal grew and domain conferences arrived, the
Cover Stories evolved into the much more detailed
and richly illustrated articles that we are now
known for.
By the fall of that first
year a couple of things happened that set DN Journal
on a course that would end up changing my life and completely
re-ordering how I would spend my time in the domain
business. First, I was contacted out of the blue by
a major domain company who inquired about
advertising and what it would cost. I had never even
thought about it (I know - I'm a moron!), so I said
I'm a little busy today but I'll get our rate card
over to you tomorrow. |
Igal
Lichtman (who was featured in
DN Journal's 1st Cover Story in
January
2003 as well as another in February 2012). |
That night I wrestled
with how much do you charge for an ad on the
Internet - I had no idea! I didn't want to scare the
company off so I came up with some numbers that
would turn out to be absurdly low. After I emailed
my new "rate card" to the company
executive the next day he quickly replied -
"Are you sure these numbers are
right!?" Afraid that, despite my caution, I
had had aimed too high, I immediately responded,
"Now, if the prices are too high I can work
with you." Incredulous at my naiveté, he said,
"Don't tell anyone I told you this, but they are
way too low!" Though it was against his own
company's interests to tell me that (which is why I am
not mentioning his name),
he was kind and honest enough to give me a ballpark
idea of reasonable rates and signed up to
advertise.
| Other companies soon
followed making it possible for me to devote
increasingly more of my time to the site. Instead of
25% of it spent on a hobby publication, I could
spend half my time on DN Journal, a year later 75%
and in another year, basically all of it.
Helping to fuel that growth was |
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Former
Sedo CEO Matt Bentley |
a new feature that
we added in the fall of 2003 - our weekly domain
sales reports. Sedo's then CEO Matt
Bentley suggested the idea to me and offered to
provide Sedo's weekly sales data to help get it off
the ground. Matt felt that the best way to spur
growth in the industry was to show people examples
of exactly how much was being paid for specific
domain names. Other companies, as well as many
private sellers, quickly got on board and we became publishing the reports
near the
end of 2003.
The domain sales
reports remain one of the most popular features on
our site, read by virtually everyone in the industry
and frequently quoted by the major
mainstream business publications. DN Journal has
been featured multiple times in The Wall
Street Journal, New York Times, USA
Today, ABC News, BBC News, CNN/Money, Forbes
and many other publications.
As the site continued
to grow, allowing me to devote more time to it, the
Lowdown section also grew from a page with sporadic
posts into one with the daily entries people
are now accustomed to seeing. DN Journal is not a
blog |
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started. The Lowdown was modeled after Rolling
Stone magazine's Random Notes section.
Originally it was snippets of news and information
with the proper names in bold face type so you could
easily spot names of the people you were interested
in reading about. The snippets grew into more
fleshed out full articles as time went on. |
From the beginning, my
plan was a feature based magazine, not a
publication that chased the 24-hour news cycle. From
my 20 years in newsrooms I knew how labor intensive
trying to cover breaking news was - only to have the
product become stale as soon as the next day
began. Detailed features have much longer
"legs" - they are history that
people will refer back to for years to come (many of
the Cover Stories we wrote years ago still
receive hundreds of monthly visitors and almost all
of them rank on the first page of Google for
the name of the person profiled. They are the
gift
that keeps on giving.
We do of course,
include some news items in the Lowdown and by virtue
of my contacts in the industry we are able to break
some stories, but that is not our primary mission.
There are a lot of blogs that do that today and do
it very well. I am a fan of those sites and, knowing
how hard it is to do what they do, I have a great
deal of respect for those reporters.
| I came into this
industry planning to spend all of my time buying,
selling and monetizing domains and I still do all of
that today, but within three years of DN Journal's launch
I had little time left to research new purchases, so
I now stick to managing a portfolio of domains that remains
capped between 3,500-4,000 names.
The tipping point
at which DN Journal pushed just about everything
else to the side came at the start of 2006
when the T.R.A.F.F.I.C.
conference took the domain story
to Silicon Valley with a major conference
there. The headline on our show review article said
it all - Domain
Business Moves Into the |
A
scene from the landmark T.R.A.F.F.I.C.
Silicon Valley conference in January 2006 |
| Fast Lane After
T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Stop in Silicon Valley.
So many new advertisers asked to come onboard at
that show (and in the immediate aftermath of it)
that devoting my full attention to the publication
became a no brainer. |
Being able
to devote all of my time to the publication allowed me
to take our marquee Cover Stories to a new level that
year as well. Pieces like our June
2006 Cover Story on famed domain attorney Ari
Goldberger (who was also one our earliest supporters),
that detailed his family's terrifying experience
during the Holocaust, set the standard for human
interest, rich detail and supporting photos that I
have tried to follow ever since.
With all of
the key elements on our site, the Cover Stories, the
weekly domain sales reports and The Lowdown, fully
realized in 2006, I have been able to spend the time
since then building on that foundation with constant
new content that has told the story of our industry.
I've chronicled the countless changes we've seen
over the past decade with people and companies coming
and going, rising and falling and new trends
continually emerging. Details on many of those are in
the 10th anniversary Lowdown posts linked to at the
top of this article, so I won't recount them here. One
thing hasn't changed though - the inherent
value of good domain names. They are the
foundation that every successful enterprise on the
Internet is built upon - they all start with a
domain name.
| In closing I want to thank every
one of our valued readers and everyone
who contributed content that helped make
the publication better (one of those being Richard
Meyer whose painstaking research helped add
valuable data to our weekly sales reports).
A special Thank You also goes out to everyone
who advertises on DN Journal, or ever has advertised
on it. I could never
have spent the time it takes to produce this publication
for you - and do it the way I felt it needed to
be done - without our advertiser's support. I am especially
appreciative of that support because I have never
asked anyone to advertise on this site. There is
no sales department here. Everyone who is here or
has been here asked to be here. I have to
operate that way because I have to keep the lines
between editorial and advertising
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Image
from Bigstock |
| separate. A lot of
media outlets, including household names in traditional
media, no longer respect those lines, but that's not
the way I was trained and not a path I will be going
down. Our advertisers understand and respect that
and that has allowed me to produce a publication
that treats everyone as equally as is humanly
possible. |
I'm getting a little
closer to "blowing your own horn"
territory than I like here, but I also have to
thank
those who have recognized our work with numerous
awards through the years - T.R.A.F.F.I.C. for their
2005 "Public Awareness of Domains Award",
the introduction of their Domain Hall of Fame in
2006 when Rick Schwartz and I were the first two
inductees voted in and for their first Domain News/Blog of the
Year Award in 2009. To Name Intelligence
(the original producers
of the Domain Roundtable conference) for three
straight Outstanding Industry Coverage Awards, to
Donna Mahony for organizing voting for the Domainer's Choice Awards
that were handed out at the DOMAINfest Global
conference in 2008 when DN Journal was honored with
the Best Domain Publication award and to the Domaining
Europe conference for their first International
Communications in the Domain Industry Award in 2012,
one I was delighted to have the opportunity to pick up
in person at their conference in Valencia, Spain last
spring.
While I
certainly appreciate that recognition from my
peers, what I value the most is their friendship.
The number of lifelong friends I have made in
this business has been an even more pleasant surprise
than seeing DN Journal unexpectedly develop into a
full time enterprise. Very few people in the
world practice our profession on a full time basis so
there is a closeness and camaraderie among
those of us who do that is unlike anything I've seen
anywhere else. It really is a special
fraternity/sorority filled with the brightest, most
creative people I've ever had the pleasure of being
around. For both myself, and my wife Diana,
whom many of you know as she has been at my side at
almost all of the conferences through the years, thank
you for making the past 10 years the best
decade of our lives. God willing - I know the next
10 years spent with you will be even better!
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