Domaining.com and anti-competitiveness
Jun 12th, 2009 by Richard
My pal Sahar posted about the anti-competitive madness going on with Domaining.com on his blog today.
Domaining.com is a RSS feed aggregator just like alltop, yahoo, google etc. They’re building traffic and selling ads on the backs of other people’s content. Plain and simple.
To try and tell your content providers what they can post (domain sales in your posts) or whom you can work with (other RSS aggregators like namebee or dngator or dnheadlines) is PURE MADNESS.
What do you guys think?
I believe Francois & Domaining.com have done much to further the domain industry. With that said, I cannot longer align myself with such a venue, and such beliefs. I believe the best should win, not because of blocking competitors, but because of best service.
I agree with Sahar 100%.
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The thing is Francois is too f’ing bias! He clearly runs that domaining site giving preference to a certain set of blogges. No wonder he is failing so miserably in his effort to make 2 cents from the site.
I am deeply disappointed!!!
@Phil
I agree about the bias.
Some say there is a bit of a language issue or lost in translation issue with Francois some time. But I’ve had extensive email exchanges over the past year with Francois and I think he’s more than capable of reading and writing english.
He always appears to be making rules or telling people what to do, when these are the same people providing him free content!!
I’ve suggested to him in private and on twitter that he should *listen* to his audience more.
- Richard
Just curious, if Francois is being unreasonable why to people allow to themselves to be published on his site ?
@Anthony
Well it is possible to block certain IP’s or domains from accessing your RSS feed, but generally people don’t do it because of the hassle and how easy it is to get around the block.
No one wants the hassle, why not just drop all the rules and get along and promote the industry?
I agree.
People will copy your ideas, and it happens all the time!
They key is too constantly stay at the top by innovative ideas.
Not sure what they were thinking, maybe they think they are too important… they’re not!
I launched http://www.techfeed.com two months ago, we are still improving it. Techfeed not only shows domaining posts, but tech related posts. It gives you a much broader sense of what’s happening.
Thanks for sharing, that’s a nice, clean looking site.
Thank you Richard! I just added your blog to the feed.
Francois is a pompous ass for sure. He tried doing business with me at one time and he comes across as a bad used car salesman with zero honesty. Keep that in mind if he ever approaches you.
Monopolies hurt the economy, stifle progress and create entities that can do as they please. That’s why mergers are bad, that’s why we need Bing and Yahoo and not just Google. People need choices. I just wrote a post just for that at my blog, at http://acro.net/blog/
And I am sure a lot of people are using http://DNGator.com as their 24/7 domain blog aggregator.
domaining.com and all those emails from the francios guy just leaves a bad taste in your mouth… i have to agree
I think BIDO should do an aggregator page. People check in there any way. And domaining has just become a sales outlet for HIS domains so he censors or hides promotion of other.
Domaining.com has done A Lot for many domain bloggers and the domain industry itself. If I am thinking correctly, Domaining.com was the first of it’s kind for the domain industry and holds the prime domain. Likely the reason the logo is on sites like Escrow.com, Sedo.com, Afternic.com, Pool.com and many more.
Domaining.com is owned by Francois which also allows him to run the site how he wants and what goes on it. Are the choices made always “right” for everybody? No. It’s hard to please all and will never happen.
With that being said, I also do not agree about the anti-competitive approach. It’s something that makes us all work harder and smarter.
Now if Sahar was making Porn posts all the time, posting things bad about the domain industry while not backing it up with facts or simply spamming all the time… it would be a little more understanding to remove his feed.
It is an aggregator…….teach him a lesson and switch your RSS feed to send Domaining.com 100s of Viagra spam posts!
Not a very wise decision at all, without the hard work that ALL the bloggers are putting in (for free) there’s very little/if any point in visiting. Choice is a good thing to have and stimulates people to outsmart their competition with new ideas.
( I often visit both Domaining.com & NameBee.com )
Considering the amount and quality of posts Sahar contributes (for free) to the domain community I’d give Francois decision a 9/10 on the BAD IDEA scale.
I received the notice about Namebee as well on my blog — I don’t mind and have to agree with Elliot about Domaining.com being owned by Francois and Francois can set whatever rules he wants on it. I’m very surprised by some of the comments here — you may not agree with the decision and that’s fine, you’re entitled to your opinion as well, however do you really need to bad mouth someone who has done so much for the domain industry?
@Reece
I’d like to bring a very specific point to light here.
Now yahoo, google, alltop can afford to do whatever they want, they have millions of RSS feed sources. But Francois has what, 100 feed sources for DOMAINING? And what, 10 of them generate the majority of interest/traffic in the DOMAINING space? And Francois is in what business? DOMAINING, right?
So he could stand to lose 10, or 20% of his audience in a heartbeat to competitors just my making silly rules. That’s 10 or 20% less people to sell ads to, sell his domains to, earn affiliate commission from, you get the idea.
I don’t think that’s a wise business strategy if he wishes to continue to work in the DOMAINING industry. I think his competitors understand this and that is exactly the reason why he has many more competitors now than he did 12 months ago.
- Richard
More from @Reece can be found here:
http://llll.com/domains/domainingcom/
Francois is a french guy with a few bucks end of story. He pays $1,000 for a slogan but can’t pay a 10 year old $20 to fix all the awful grammar on his site. What has he sold? What has he brokered? What is premium on his site? The extensions he labels as Premium labels himself as a rookie. How many times has he gone back and forth with new rules etc… cause he threw a bunch a cash out to make PremiumDomains.com happen and now realizes that any dipshit with a few bucks is not the correct formula. Good riddance, can’t see why any of you guys put this rookies “Domaining Recommends This Site” banner on your sites to begin with.
So now Francois calls the competition “copycats”. While I think that he is a nice guy and that there are some cultural and language barriers in this mess, it’s important for him to understand the difference between providing an alternative source of services e.g. aggregation of 100-150 domain blog feeds and “copycats”.
As a blogger, I often write about social issues unrelated to domains. Domaining.com does not like that and removes them from its feed. When I launched DNGator.com I announced it at my blog and those posts were filtered out from Domaining.com as well.
Somehow, Francois appears to have the rather naive perception that he is the authoritative source of all things related to domains, that the rest of us are “copycats” and that there should be no-one else covering the industry we’re a part of. That’s exactly the kind of monopolistic behavior displayed by Microsoft towards *nix and mac OS and by Intel towards AMD.
As someone else mentioned, it’s a small market and a tight community and there opportunities for everyone to contribute. When egos clash, friendly fire will be more destructive than any kind of incoming attacks.
So, Francois, thanks for leading the way - now please learn about the American way of offering competitive alternatives; that’s what a healthy market is about!
Some good arguments mentioned above. Domaining.com is Francois’ site, and he can do with it whatever he wants. But so can the readers and the bloggers. If you don’t like what Francois is doing, why don’t you stop using the service? Domaining.com isn’t anything special, it’s an aggregator fetching content from external sources.
When Francois announced he was going to make Domaining.com available to paying members only, I quickly had my blog removed from his site out of protest. He later decided not to follow through and Domaining.com remained free for all, which was the right decision, in my opinion. So when Francois recently asked me whether I wanted my blog to be included again, I happily said yes. (I’m only writing very few posts these days, so I think the addition of my blog to Domaining.com hasn’t been of much value to Francois or me, but it has been a nice token gesture.)
However, I think Francois’ latest rule not to allow certain banners on the blogs his service is directly dependent on has once again been a very unlucky decision. Personally, I respect Francois for everything he has achieved in this industry, but I also think he tends to overestimate the importance of Domaining.com. It is really no service the domain industry desperately needs. It may be useful, but it’s no must-have.
Also, if you call, for example, NameBee.com or DNHeadlines.com a copycat, you must also call Domaining.com a copycat for having copied the idea of Alltop.com (which, by the way, also has a domaining category).
After all, competition is good because it fuels innovation. Trying to create a monopoly may look like the right thing to do for the company or service that wants to get into that leading position, but it’s nothing you should support or strive for as a customer.
I like and use Domaining.com just about every day, customized with the blogs of my choice. I also use Namebee frequently. Francois asked me to add a button a while back, and I did since I get a considerable amount of free traffic from his site. He uses a bit of my content and the content of my peers as the primary selling point of his site, but I am okay with it now because it’s bringing me traffic in return. It’s a win/win for both of our websites.
Regardless of any legal, language, or even ethical issues, Domaining.com brings more traffic than other referrers, so I don’t mind giving my support with a banner. Nobody else even comes close, so if Namebee would say the same thing Francois has said to people, it wouldn’t be such a big loss in traffic right now if they pulled my feed.
Ironically, Francois asked me for better placement of his banner a few months ago, which I didn’t agree to because I generate revenue from paid advertisements, and I will not place his button above the advertisers who support my site financially.
It’s a straight up business decision for me, while other sites who don’t have advertisers don’t necessarily need to make a business decision with regards to this issue.
Just to give an idea of how much traffic my site gets from Domaining.com and my top referrers (over 10,000 total referring site unique visitors in the last 30 days - not including search engine or direct navigation):
domaining.com 3,397
namebee.com 677
twitter.com 535
sevenmile.com 258
ricksblog.com 257
facebook.com 151
domain-name.alltop.com 90
dngator.com 95
@Elliot
Thanks for sharing your stats and comments!
Just for laughs, put up a namebee banner on your site and let’s see what happens.
I think after all the discussion on this site and others, Francois would be best to reconsider this latest “policy”.
That would be stirring the pot
@Elliot
Right! Where’s ChefPatrick anyways?
I received the following from Francois, and as I am not really in the mood to spillover the “argument” at my blog, which is a personal notepad of opinions and professional experiences, I’m pasting it below. It shows, in my opinion, that Francois suffers from Napoleon complex in the domaining sense.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I guess this post is targeted to Domaining.com, so as things come to mind:
Does IBM.com advertise DELL.com?
Does SnapNames.com advertise NameJet.com?
…
No!
So why do you want we promote a competing service?
And more when:
- It’s for free.
- It’s a “copycat” of our own service.
- Copied by an old member.
Something is fair competition and another is “copycat”.
Something is have an open mind, and another is be an idiot.
…
Another blogger today was waitting I comment his post about the issue I had with Sahar.
I was decided until I saw his missleading and inacurate blog post title.
In his post he said we are selling ads on the backs of other people’s content.
It’s a point of view, now this is another one:
We already spend $200k+ to promote our industry and continue each month $3-$6k from our own pocket.
So look all the money we are making from people content! You want the same?
I don’t think anyone else in the industry is spending so much money to try to promote it.
What we are doing in fact is simply spend each month a lot of money so few bloggers can get a larger audience and few thousands people a better way to read them.
And the gratitude are the comments you can read today around, not a lot.
Some motivated volunteers to replace us?
Most serious, sure we would like one day we stop generating expenses and start making benefices.
This why we will continue to try to monetize domaining.com
We have not stollen any content and we are not abusing of anyone!
Bloggers accepted we show their headlines in exchange of traffic and possible recognition.
A win/win situation!
Otherwise tell me what will be our advantage if we could not try to monetize our site?
Bloggers are selling themselves advertising in their site with our traffic.
And it’s normal, it will never come to my mind that Elliot, Andrew, Michael, Ron, … are abusing of domaining.com because they are selling ads in their pages, it’s absurd!
At the inverse, I am happy, they deserve it for the great work and their dedication, at the inverse I would like all have the same chance.
You know without sponsoring at a moment even the most motivated blogger finish abandoning, and a lot already did the step unfortunately.
Sure, many will say that today domaining.com is only a part of their traffic.
But I can tell you (and I have traffic numbers) from the less popular to the most popular one, all got a great share of their subscribers because they were listed in domaining.com
The problem is bloggers cannot quantify the volume because subscribers after use their own RSS reader for a huge percentage or mainly visit them from our newsletter (where they cannot track referral and identify it’s from domaining.com).
Domaining.com is not having any monopolistic share, trust me.
I think less than 30% of the full domaining industry use a vertical news aggregator to check domaining news, the rest is taken by RSS readers like Google, …
…
I read another false comment on this blog:
We NEVER listed any domaining feed at domaining.com without previously get the authorization of the owner, and this should NOT change.
Better, since September for avoid possible missunderstanding we ask a setup fee which is the proof the blogger accepted the few rules each blogger we list must follow.
So what I read of people suggesting to some bloggers they ban our IP to avoid we show their headlines have no clue of how does it works.
…
Regarding Sahar.
To be true I have been very surprised.
He started this morning by a missleading Tweet suggesting I dropped his feed because he was advertising a competitor.
When in fact we decided to not advertise in our NEWSLETTER the ones promoting competing services, NOT in our pages.
So I immediately sent him an email to clarify if it was due to a possible missunderstanding (english is not my mother language).
I did not got other response that a post in his blog (one cannot comment) and the attempt to activate his relationships to try to create an anti domaining.com buzz.
When I think that I tried to help him just one week ago recommending to all my Twitter followers to follow our “friend Sahar” … Oops!
I don’t know the “real” reason that motivated Sahar.
Recently he told me business was a bit harder, so maybe it was simply a bad day, bu what bad day!
…
We will continue improving Domaining.com as better it’s possible and launching new services that may help domainers.
For those that support Domaining.com THANKS and for the others simply visit another site, you have all your freedom.
Francois
“Does IBM.com advertise DELL.com?
Does SnapNames.com advertise NameJet.com?
…
No!
So why do you want we promote a competing service?”
lol. Nobody is expecting Domaining.com to advertise dnGator and Namebee on DOMAINING.COM. We just don’t want to be told who to link to on OUR blog. Domaining.com needs us way more than we need him.
“Domaining.com needs us way more than we need him.”
Completely disagree. You could be right if everyone really cared and told him to piss off, which won’t happen. Francois promotes his site much more than others, which drives plenty of traffic to the listed bloggers, and will be even more if others de-list or are de-listed.
Regardless of the above, from the email Acro posted, it doesn’t look like Francois de-listed Sahar - rather that he wouldn’t include him in the newsletter. I don’t know if I am misunderstanding what Francois is saying, but that’s what it looks like.
@Elliot
That’s not what the email snipped says that Sahar posted on his web site.
It says “we’ll no longer will include headlines of bloggers promoting other RSS feed agregators in their pages.” Others have commented, tweeted and emailed me confirmed they received the same email.
It would be good to hear Francois’ side of this though. Maybe domaining.com should set up a blog so that he can post there?
I can offer advice for the wordpress install, I’ve got lots of tips, as you know!
I’ve been following this debacle via Twitter and various blogs today.
If I understand what happened correctly a number of people received an email saying they were being culled from a blog aggregator since they also linked / promoted other blog aggregators?
So that would be like Technorati delisting blogs that linked to mybloglog or another one of the myriad of blog / rss services …
Maybe I’m naive, but the owner of domaining.com seems to have thrown the proverbial baby out with the bath water
Michele
@Michele
“Maybe I’m naive, but the owner of domaining.com seems to have thrown the proverbial baby out with the bath water”
Yes I think so!
“He started this morning by a missleading Tweet suggesting I dropped his feed because he was advertising a competitor.
When in fact we decided to not advertise in our NEWSLETTER the ones promoting competing services, NOT in our pages.”
So Francois didn’t pull Sahar’s feed but just wouldn’t include his posts in the daily newsletter? Is that what Francois is saying here? If so, I think that’s different than Francois pulling Sahar’s feed simply because he had a Namebee banner, which seems to be the issue for most people.
I think it’s pretty clear from the email “we’ll no longer will include headlines of bloggers promoting other RSS feed agregators in their pages” that he is talking about all of Domaining.com. Only dropping people from the newsletter is a pretty big detail to accidentally leave out.
More likely this is him reversing his decision once he realized bloggers will not bend over for him, and him trying to save face by acting like he never meant he would really drop them.
As I mentioned in my other post it was only a matter of time before he either reversed his decision or became less valuable by not covering 100% of the industry.
The title of my mail was exactly “Newsletter feed blocked”.
I think it was clear no?
And if it was not clear this is why I immediately contacted Sahar to clarify and you have the exact copy.
I have no reason to lie and it’s not in my usal practices.
I do not have a domaining blog, but being someone who has developed/marketed many successful sites both in and outside the domaining industry, here is my take on this.
I don’t know Francois personally, but from following the developments of domaining.com the past several months I have realized he is either a very poor business/marketing person, or he does not understand what he has with domaining.com
As RSS aggregator that displays other peoples domaining posts is ridiculously trivial to duplicate. There is nothing unique or difficult about what his site does. What he does have going for him are an excellent domain name (probably the best possible for domain RSS aggregation) and the fact he was the first site out there and thus the most popular and established.
A few months ago when he decided to charge for access to his site and people got upset, I stated that it was a horrible decision and that he really didn’t get what his site was. I said he would either end up reversing his decision or people would leave to a free alternative. Of course he eventually realized this and made it free.
To me this decision to not include prominent bloggers who link to a competitor is just as poor of a business decision. He still doesn’t get what his site truly is. By not including popular bloggers, his site becomes less valuable than his competitors. Why visit a site that shows you 75% of the news when you could go to any competitor that will show you 100% of whats going on in the industry?
Unless he reverses this decision (which I predict will eventually happen) he will slowly start losing market share as people discover alternatives with more of the headlines. It won’t happen quickly but if he continues to block prominent sites with good stories eventually it will happen.
I agree !
if we had a few more Sahar and Tia I think we could do much better.
Unfortunately, too many bloggers prefer the Traffic and nothing else. next time Francois will ask a fee for listing them and later he will ask a precentage of their sales…
one thing is for sure: NameBee and DNgator are very happy with this poor decision making by Domaining.com. They should thank Francois for his business decision making in the last few months.
Wow, looks like he already has partially reversed his decision: http://twitter.com/DomainingCom/status/2130749352 (what a surprise).
I did not dropped Sahar.
I sent an email to Sahar, and few other bloggers where the title was “Newsletter feed blocked”.
Show Sahar headlines in domaining.com page no problem.
But benefit of my newsletter to drive my subscriber to a page where a big competing button was sticked just below my own award button: NO!
I am kind, but there are limits, as I said, after is be an idiot.
…
To come back to the story, I did not drop the feed of anyone, I just send the email explaining we will not list them in the newsletter if they were showing competing site stuff.
And this is why I was so surprised thois morning, I was expecting a mail response from Sahar like I got from others. But what I got was this first tweet missleading people.
I know I am not a champion at english, so I immediately sent a second mail clarifying about the newsletter and here again I was expecting a mail from Sahar and what I got was his post again missleading people and no way to comment. This is when I asked if someone could let me explain his blog I have none. What followed was all this anti domaining.com buzz, orchestraded by Sahar or no I don’t know.
Something is sure he has not acted friendly there.
@Francois
Thank you for coming here to share your comments with us.
I’ve had private conversations with others who said they got an email from you asking that they stop linking to namebee from their blog or else you would have to remove their feed from your site.
It’s a free world and you certainly have every right to control your site, but I am not sure this request is in the ’spirit’ of our small domaining community. And that’s what has a lot of people buzzing about this issue.
The proof is in the actual note that Francois sent rather than the interpretation of those who received it. Have you seen actual copies? If Francois posted the actual email and it referenced the newsletter, no feeds were removed by him and it was only related to his promotions rather than the service.
Russell,
I did not reversed anything, since time zero it was the truth, Sahar missleaded people for an agenda I ignore. I sent him a second mail to clarify any missunderstanding immediately.
I posted this tweet 10 hours ago, in fact probably just an hour after the start of the story when I saw nobody was offering me his blog (it was soon in the morning) to can clarify what sahar is witting may misslead people.
The email you posted below is the FOLLOW UP email, AFTER you had realized he wouldn’t give in to your demands.
The original email, as posted in full on Sahar’s blog as well as posted be several other people mentioned “we’ll no longer will include headlines of bloggers promoting other RSS feed agregators in their pages”. Absolutely no mention of it being from the newsletter anywhere in the email.
I find it very hard to believe that’s what you meant all along. It’s very obvious once you realized he was glad to drop you that you changed your mind.
Here an exact and full copy (I will not remove the typos I see now nor my ugly english faults I am seeing, what a shame) I sent to Sahar a pair of minutes he received my first letter and posted his tweet, he responded by his blog post continuing missleading people and this is why I was so upset and more when I saw Richard also posting a blog post with a title I found innacurate:
=================================
I was surprised to see your tweet.
- In case you did not understood:, I was speaking your headlines will be blocked in our “newsletter”, not in the site (see mail subject).
- Surprised you don’t respond me but gone immediately complain through at Twitter, not very nice.
- If tommorrow I make a copycat of Bido (not in my TODO list :), will you appreciate it?
And will continue promoting domaining.com?
I don’t think.
- It’s not about be anti-competitive.
Even If I don’t appreciate a lot you advertise the site that one of my member created after copy my site for months I did not dropped your feed.
It’s your site and do what you want.
But there is some limits, you can not ask me I advertise your site to my thousnads members to offer free advertising to my unfair competitor.
And more when it’s a site I am spending several thousnads dollars of my own pocket to maintain it and kindly try a to help a little our community.
- Last thing, for many reasons I think it’s better to have a stronger domaining aggregator then many.
Francois
I will stop here my participation.
You are indirectly pushing me to display private mails I had with bloggers, and pushing me to be pesting again Sahar.
Even if I admit I was suprised and I did not appreciated what he did with me (I felt a huge ingratitude) it’s not in my nature to be mad and want a vengeance.
I wil simply ignore him from now, each one will follow his route.
Also despite what few persistant people want to draw of my personality, I am not a monster, at the inverse I have dedicated a lot of my time and resources this past years for your community for no profit.
Regards,
Francois
Nobody has called you a monster, and none of my posts have had any intent to attack you personally. I apologize if you took any offense.
I am only trying to point out that by blocking prominent bloggers from your site (or newsletter, it doesn’t really matter) you will only hurt your own site in the long run. Why would I visit domaining.com, knowing it blocks many good stories, when I could visit a competitor and see everything going on in the domain industry? By trying to “hurt” your competition you are actually helping them in the long term.
Honestly this is a no win topic. I believe all parties have valid opinions and I respect them all.
I received an email from Francois about a week ago advising the removal of my blog from his NEWSLETTER. Did I like receiving that email, not at all. Nowhere is it posted on his site that we are not allowed to showcase other aggregators. I agree we should have the choice to post whatever we’d like on our blogs. Looking at what Domaining.com offers and the other aggregator I elected to remove the other banner. Purely a business decision. As I have paid advertisers on my blog it is my job to earn as much traffic for them as possible.
Myself, I like Francois. We don’t always see eye to eye but that is life. We have a mutual beneficial business relationship. Not only has he spent a nice amount of money advertising with me but also delivers traffic to my blog. Domaining.com accounts for about 4% of my traffic or 900 ish visits per month. With great respect to NameBee.com they do not provide the results that Domaining.com does. I will say that NameBee.com has done a great job with, to my understanding, zero advertising.
I believe Francois has done a lot for domain bloggers in providing the first highly advertised news aggregator. Yes, today he only provides 4% of my monthly traffic but how many domain investors has he introduced to my blog. Those visitors now type in my blog url directly. I’ve seen where he advertises and how much he spends. All for a negative return. One thing I do not understand is how Francois can be spending so much on web hosting every month. You know what, it’s not my business. He can spend as he wishes.
In closing, if you disagree with any site owners choice, simply stop using their service and visiting. Francois, don’t worry about the competition and try to find a cheaper hosting solution. I’m sure you can find someone to trade off advertising for service.
Because this topic has received a lot of attention, instead of creating my own blog post I’ve decided to post this comment on all the blogs with related articles.
I am not on domaining.com but if the letter is as he posted seems that there was a misunderstanding and some people jumping on the bandwagon in droves to rant and rave . I wonder how many will pile back on to apologize? I can totally understand if he doesn’t want to advertise in his newsletter people who advertise his competitors which is indirectly advertising his competitors .
Nobody called Francois a monster, as far as I know. Francois, you need to calm down and regard today’s business decision to be merely a bad choice, given the fact that in domain blog aggregation there are existing alternatives out there. And that was precisely the purpose of today’s post at my blog, which never mentioned Domaining.com by the way: to help you understand that you cannot behave in a monopolistic way, or - in particular - demand that feed providers (bloggers) must remove links to “copy cats” in order to remain on the blogroll. To refresh your memory, the only reason Domaining.com has a PR6 is due to the link exchange that was part of the initial agreement. You’ve since then introduced terms and conditions that have altered the relationship. You can either keep your own terms as you like, it’s your business, but then don’t expect people to panic; as I said, there are alternative blog aggregators (one of which has started to email bloggers seeking to denounce Domaining.com!)
Hi All.
I am very new to the domaining industry.
I have spent my whole professional career in the CE (Consumer Electronics) space. Most specifically in a subset of the CE space, called the Custom Integration market place ($12B of the $144B CE space).
It is always interesting, as a newbie to an industry, to grasp the politics, understandable passion and egos attached to the movers and shakers, of any industry, in what are still relatively small verticals (in the big picture, such as the CI and Domaining spaces).
The domaining industry is very akin to what the CI space was just three or four years ago (before Best Buy’s Geek Squad and CC’s Fire Dog (RIP)), where it enjoyed explosive exponential growth and huge returns who entered it early. The domaining industry is clearly going through a similar maturation from infant, toddler, pre-teen, teen and adolescence. This is normal for any new industry. Each stage has been identified by people such famed personalities such as Rick Schwartz and others in their blogs. However, what strikes me most is that the domaining industry is eerily similar to my core industry (Custom Integration), with industry icons and heated debates as long standing personalities protect their turf, as the industry quickly matures from it’s teen to adult stage…
What does a post like this have on to do in a forum like this (most likely appropriate for a blog - on my todo list), well, it is the $$$’s that will soon be available to all of us! Madison Ave. and media giants are soon going to realize that domains and the services domainers offer are of HUGE value to them (i.e. candy.com). In essence, all our ships will rise with the tide. Competition is NOT other domainers, it is creating the intellectual “tipping point” for the general public (i.e. corporate america) to “get” that domains are THE IP they must have in order to affordably reach customers with their products and services (niche or not). All you have to do is look at what GoDaddy is doing, all the advertising they are doing on media, in ball parks and elsewhere to realize that someday domains will be like SSN’s and every person will get one at birth!!!
I love the brilliance of all of the participants in this debate, Elliott, Chef, Francois, Sahar etc. I look forward to meeting all of you someday!
Thanks for reading this and I welcome inside comments from you veterans!
Good luck to all…. Earl
I fell out with Francois early on.
I submitted names along with prices to his auction. I paid for these listings.
The next day Francois emailed me to claim that he could not list my names at those prices because they were higher than what Estibot claimed they were worth. He also reminded me that “professional domainers” is my audience.
I responded that I did not want to participate if he felt that “professional domianers” used estibot as valuations. I reminded him that while estibot was a “tool”, I certainly hoped that “professional domainers” did not use this as a serious guide.
I withdrew my names and he did refund my money.
I looked at many of the names on the list and just laughed at what was listed and how estibot valued them.
I do not use this tool. I have a medical specialty site that has seen over 380,000 users this year. Estibot places a value of $290.00
By the way…
Estibot relates that Domaining.com is worth $4,300.00
I’ll start by saying that Domaining.com has brought value to all in the industry. This includes those who are listed and those who frequent the site to get their news quickly. I want to acknowledge this first before moving on.
That being said, strictly from a business stand point, Francois is completely out of line here! I cannot side with domaining.com’s position.
New, better solutions pop up all the time. That’s what makes this system so great. If you want to succeed, then man up and create a better product/service.
There are many white label scripts that allow anyone of us to clone the functionality behind domaining.com. (notice i said functionality and nothing more). Lets not forget an important thing that makes all business different as well=customer service.
Namebee is doing their thing and if you find it better serves your needs than go there. You have that right. Much like you have the right to build relationships with any advertiser that fits and serves YOUR business objective.
Francois if you read this, please acknowledge that you’ve stepped over the line here. I would love to hear a response from you and will probably find it posted somewhere I’m sure. The unfortunate part is that many have now seen a side of Francois that is not very appealing.
“I would love to hear a response from you and will probably find it posted somewhere I’m sure”
Jorge,
You got your wish.
See Sahar’s blog post of today.
http://snurl.com/Retraction
Looks like Francois has had a changed his mind
http://www.conceptualist.com/2009/06/13/a-public-note-to-francois-domainingcom/
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