Month: May 2006

No, the title is not a typo. And no – I don’t like domain parking pages[1]. I actually hate them. Unless you make $$’s from parked domains, you probably hate them too. I especially hate how they’re taking over more and more of the natural search engine results, and reducing their quality to absolute rubbish.

So how in the world can the despicable domain parking business be of any value to the web?!

Here’s how –
Domain parkers make $$’s in two ways: 1) They catch web traffic (usually from search engines or typing of mispelled URL’s) to their domains and monetize the hell out of it using Google AdSense or Yahoo’s YPN, and 2) they buy and sell these domains.

It’s #1 that I hate, and #2 that I think is such a critical service to the web community. A lot of companies buy domains these days, but very few sell them. Once a corporate decision is made to buy a bunch of domains for future use, those domains are usually gone from the market forever even if the owner never does actually use them. That’s just the nature of stuff like this in big/medium companies – no one really cares about unused domains, and just the thought of getting consensus and sign-off on selling a domain is daunting.

Domain parkers, on the other hand, keep the domain inventory liquid. That’s what enables many new web companies to establish brands and actually own a decent domain name. Without domain parkers, a majority of the domains would be snatched by faceless corporations “just to be safe” and never ever see the light of real use ever again.

I wish we could get #2 (liquidity in the market) without #1 (spamming of search engines), but I guess that’s the price we all have to pay for this service. I just hope that Matt Cutts & Co at the search engines will find ways to push these shitty pages far down the result list…

[1] No link love in this post… if you don’t know what domain parking is, Washington Post recently had a good article on this subject.

[update: just noticed that Forbes had an article on the subject of parked domains a couple of days ago. via Dan Grossman]

Here’s another episode in my “this-is-probably-going-to-make-me-look-stupid” series of predictions. I should really stop this habit… Anyhow:

I went to the Yankees-Mets game last night. It was sold out with an attendance of 56,205. However, we were able to get four tickets just a few hours before the game started, thanks to StubHub which is a marketplace for buying and selling tickets between people.

The StubHub service is really great – they have a solid feature set, the site is good, information on the events and venues is very good, the ‘Buyer’s Guarantee’ makes you comfortable buying there, etc, etc, etc.

So would eBay acquire StubHub for all the great features and expertise they have developed around person-to-person ticket buying and selling? I bet you eBay doesn’t give a shit about any of that.

What does matter in the world of online person-to-person marketplaces is becoming the de-facto marketplace of choice for buyers and sellers. Once you become that, it’s a very defensible position that’s almost impossible for other marketplaces to win because of a simple law – buyers won’t come to a marketplace that doesn’t have much inventory, and sellers won’t list their inventory in a marketplace that doesn’t have many buyers. This catch-22 is what makes de-facto marketplaces so defensible… even the best feature set in the world from the best known brands can hardly dent this law (ask Amazon and Yahoo, both of which tried launching eBay-clones in the past).

It seems that growingly StubHub, not eBay, is perceived as THE go-to place for buying and selling tickets to events. Once that perception is established, even mighty eBay will find it almost impossible to win back the leadership position in this category (and again – in the marketplace business if you’re not the leader, you’re almost by definition not a player).

eBay cannot afford to cede such a core category to another player, and will not be able to win this battle through R&D, and therefore I predict that once this is realized, eBay will acquire StubHub.

[UPDATE:] 2 for 2…