The Next Best Thing: Alternate Domains for When You Can’t Afford the Most Expensive Ones

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By: OpenSRS Team on July 6th, 2007
Posted in: Industry News
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Valuable Domain Names

The Forbes article titled The World's Most Expensive Online Addresses starts out with a description of the TRAFFIC conference (which we covered in this post where I interview Domain Product Manager Adam Eisner about the conference) and then goes into a slideshow of the most expensive domains, listed below:

What Makes These Domain Names Valuable?

Back in the late '90's and very early 2000s, when search engines weren't as refiend as they are today, knowing the domain name of the site you wanted was considerably more important. Most people found out about websites through knowledgeable authorities, such as heavy web users, “A-list” sites and traditional media such as TV and print (Remember the number of magazines and books devoted to covering the newest sites? I think I still have a few of them sitting in a storage locker).

As a result, what made a domain name valuable was brand recognition. Hence you wanted a domain name that was short and memorable, which explains the numerous sites and start-ups with silly-sounding names.

Now that we live in a world where even supermodels use the world “Google” as an everyday verb and where typing any old thing in your browser's address bar will at least get you to a search results page, domain name brand recognition isn't so important.

What matters now are keywords. Simply put, a domain name that contains a specified word is more likely to be ranked higher on a search than a domain without that word. (I am, of course, simplifying by ignoring the content of the associated site.)

The Forbes article points out another factor that changed the domain name market: online advertising:

With online ad spending increasing at a rate of 30% a year, owning domain names has become a business in itself. Entrepreneurs can flip them, like Miami condominiums, or they can sit on them and collect rent.

Say you buy Papercups.com. You may have no intention of selling paper cups, but because the name is so descriptive, chances are it will soar to the top of a Google search stack.

In theory, your Web site could simply list a bunch of URLs leading to other sites that do sell paper cups; every time someone clicks one of those links, you collect a royalty–just as Google does with its AdWords service. Social networks like News Corp.'s MySpace and Facebook operate on this same ad-based principle.

“Today people are buying a lot of domain names as an advertising tool, rather than as a brand name for their Web site,” says Bentley [Matt Bentley, chief strategy officer for Sedo.com].

But Those Domains are Already Taken? What Can I Get?

It's true that unless you've got millions to spend, domains like beer.com, business.com and sex.com aren't likely to end up in your hands. However, there are still a number of domain names with the keywords “beer”, “business” and “sex” to be had, and we can help you find them.

The magic is in the fairly new name_suggest call in Tucows' XCP API. It's a pretty powerful API call; given a domain name or even just one or more keywords, it will do the following:

• Run a check on the availability of the given domain name or words for .com, .net and .org
• Provide a list of any premium domain names related to or containing the given domain name or words
• Provide a list of suggested domain names related to or containing the given domain name or words

The Duke of URL is a simple application built on top of the name_suggest API call. I wrote it to demonstrate name_suggest's capabilities, and what better way to do so than by feeding it the keywords for the world's most expensive domain names?

I'm going to keep this blog entry reasonably family-friendly and show the Duke of URL's results for just diamond.com, business.com and beer.com. Of course, you're free to use the Duke to run searches on sex.com and porn.com.

Diamond.com

Providing the Duke with the keyword diamond shows that the .com, .net and .org domains are taken, but there are a number of premium domains based on “diamond”:

The Duke also has a number of domain name suggestions based on “diamond”; click here to see them.

Business.com

Let's try the keyword business. As you might expect, the .com, .net and .org domains are taken, but the Duke has some pretty good premium domains built around the word “business”:

The Duke also has a number of domain name suggestions based on “business”; click here to see them.

Beer.com

And now, my favourite: beer. Once again, the .com, .net and .org domains are taken. However, that doesn't mean that there aren't some good domain name based on “beer” — the Duke has a few premium domains:

The Duke also has a number of domain name suggestions based on “beer”; click here to see them.

Try the Duke on Taken Names You Want

Naturally, you can apply the Duke to other domain names and keywords that are taken to find new domain names you can use. Visit the Duke and start entering some keywords!