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Focus on Acquisitions

I know, a lot of people are saying "it's all about survival". Even more people are saying, "it only takes one name and focus". I'm not trying to tell you what to do, I'm just making it clear what my intentions are: The more people say that now is the time to drop your portfolios and focus on development, the longer and harder I'll focus on acquisitions.

You see, there are a lot of ways to succeed. You can put all your eggs in one or two baskets. You can bet the farm on a single $100k Geo domain name. You can spend your time writing domain news blog posts. You can also spend your time searching through drop lists, auction lists, domain forums and whois records looking for under utilized, undervalued domain names and picking them up while everyone else is just "surviving". I choose the later.

You can look at the drop in parking revenue the last couple years as the sign of things to come or as a sign of a buying opportunity. You can grab names from domainers who are focused on "what can I make from the type in traffic at $0.15 a click". You can be focused on buying names that end users will want, that you can see yourself developing, that have the potential to be truly great brands. You think a lot of people were typing in syfy.com before it became a television channel? Flip through your channel guide and look at how many ChannelName.TV channels there are now - there are several that I've found that don't even own the .TV domain name! Yet.

You can point to domain companies that have stopped acquiring, that have started selling names they wouldn't have let go of two years ago, that are folding up shop completely. You can point to the facebooks and the twitters and say "it only takes one good domain". I got into this business because I love the creative side of domaining, the branding and promotion of new and fresh ideas, the planning for what you could do with a domain name that was like a blank sheet of paper. Looking around at the quality of content that domainers and mom and pop shops were putting on their websites, I knew I could do better. I also saw where there was a huge potential of untapped end users who didn't know the proper way to brand and didn't yet understand the value of domains. That opportunity still exists.

I've not been perfect in my investments, but I'm not going to give up on finding new, undiscovered and undeveloped value just because everyone else has stopped buying or cut their acquisition budgets to a tiny fraction of what they were a year or two ago. I'm also not going to give up on development of my domain names either. Far from it. But right now, I'm focused. Focused on acquisitions. Focused on finding value. Focused on finding a way forward that works and that scales. Best of luck to us all.

1 comment:

  1. I agree! I am on the hunt for good domains on a daily basis.

    Mike - HeadlineDomains.com

    ReplyDelete