Make money with domains and linkets
A domainer (also known as a domain broker or domain name broker.) often scans lists of newly abandoned domains to glean any unrecognised diamonds amidst the rough. They dream of finding one to buy from a Registrar at their default price ($US12) and later reselling it for $10,000 or more. Maybe much more.
Many domainers never knew a world without the Web, which was born in 1989. Domains are older than the Web but it was the rise and rise of the Web that drove the demand for good domains. The Web and domains grew in tandem, each helping the other.
Domainers know how to use escrow accounts, how to negotiate, etc. But they don’t need to know much about the underlying technology. Herein lies peril. There is a technology bubbling up that can dramatically expand the business of domains. I’m not talking about TLDs. There are now hundreds of new TLDs. Their success is mixed and the very surplus of these undercuts the value of any given domain using a new TLD. Cynically it might be said that ICANN which oversees domains allowed too many TLDs. But they get fees from the owners of TLDs, so when they approve a new one, ICANN gets more revenue with no risk to them.
The new technology is linkets. My firm, Linket, makes them. We are like a comination of a Registrar and DNS. Examples of linkets are:
[ 3TEN Capital ], [ Analyst 刘明 ], [ CEO आडवाणी ].
(English, Chinese, Hindi)
Linkets are enclosed in brackets and can have whitespace. They are in any language. Currently there are 21,000 owners of linkets, in 70 languages.
A domain is used in an URL, in a webpage to point to another webpage. Once you own a domain, you can connect it to an Internet address and make a website. Most domains are hosted in data centers, while a few are hosted on desktops. In contrast, a linket goes from a mobile webpage to the linket owner who is using a mobile phone app. A linket is hosted on a mobile device. Domains and linkets are hosted in different places. They do not directly compete with each other.
If you want a website, you get an address for its domain. The address should be fixed to that domain for at least 24 hours. In practice, the address is fixed for weeks or months. DNS wants all its root servers to have the same information about your domain and its address, to be globally consistent. This takes a day.
A linket is different. When you use a phone to access the Internet, your carrier or hotspot assigns you a temporary address. When you stop using the Internet, the address is taken away and reassigned to someone else. Because of the realtime aspect of using a phone, you rarely use the address for more than an hour or so. Figure 1 shows this. DNS sits above the 24 hour line. Linkets are below the 2 hour line. Example linkets are in Hindi, English, Chinese and Russian. Those cellphones in Figure 1 are hosting the linkets. Whereas the computers on the desks in the top of Figure 1 are hosting domains.
What’s to stop a domain Registrar making its own linket Registry to compete with us? The US legal system. We have 12 US patents. This page lists them. Each patent links to its US PTO page. You can verify this. Plus we will get 1more patent by December 2020. For a mashup of linkets with a theme park and an Augmented Reality game (eg Pokemon go) and with esports (remote watching of people playing the game). We are very excited about the upcoming patent.
Figure 2 shows various DNS domain Registrars above the 24 hour line and Linket by itself as a Registrar below the 2 hour line.
Domaining will change. Linkets will be an alternative, hosted on mobile phones, where domains have little presence. Plus in the developing world, the phone is the only personal computer many have ever known. And linket brands in local languages (Tamil, Gujurati, Mandarin, Italian, …) are far easier for locals to read than English.
There is more. Linkets can also be used to point to a website, instead of the website needing a domain.
How can you respond?
One. Do nothing new. Most domainers will do this. (Drones.)
Two. Make money from linkets.
Here is a list of top domains at top1000domains.com. (Domainers easily know such lists.) Just as an example, it says MeetPeople.com sold for $100,000. No kidding!
The corresponding linket is [Meet People]. You can buy it from Linket for $US20 for 2 years ($10/year).
This is much cheaper on 2 levels. If you buy a generic domain from a Registrar, it will cost about $12, and then $12/year to renew it. If you sell it for anything approaching the price of the domain, that’s your big score. That linket is just 1 example. You get the idea.
Many domainers own domains that they speculate in. You can treat linkets as a hedge against the future.
Imagine you went back in time to 1993 when anyone could buy domains. The domain space was so empty in that early year. With a modest outlay you could have swept the board when the dot com came around a few years later. Time travel is just for movies, but you can do the equivalent in the new space of linkets.
Here is one way to see it. A domainer who wants to buy from someone is used to asking “What domains do you have?”. Maybe she has 10 or even 100 and the domainer chooses from her list. This is the wrong question to ask Linket. It is a Registrar. The linkets it sells are linkets that others have not bought. This list is infinite.
You have the creative freedom to pick a linket that might be valuable one day. You ask Linket if it is for sale. It probably is.
Three. Get non-English linkets. Step out of the English bubble that many domainers live in. Look at that top 1000 list. See all the English words? There is a market opportunity for you. Many domainers are from India, China, Africa, Europe. If English is a second language to you, use your first language to find linkets. In the language of economics, using another language leads you to an inefficient market, which is to your advantage if you are early.
If you specialise in, say, Hindi linkets, this blocks off many of your current competitors, who are looking only at English domains. Of course, the English domains are currently the highest value brands. And they play to a large international audience. There is a tradeoff here. Hindi is widely spoken by its own huge audience so there may well be enough money in it for you. Yes, India is a developing country. But that also means that long term economic growth can be greater than in developed countries. Just surfing on this trend, you might be better off in the long run than restricting yourself to English domains.
Continuing with Hindi as the example language, an outsider might use Google Translate to make Hindi words and then try to get these as linkets. But if she does not speak Hindi, it still leaves her lacking of an expert judgment of what Hindi linkets to get. Especially in words that might be slang or just new made up words. If you can speak Hindi, a home field advantage accrues to you.
Four. If you still want to invest in domains, try to ignore the silly domains that are 2 or 3 words. Domains like nortela.com (north Los Angeles?), DesignGrapes.com, migratethings.com, outfirms.com, elitecorporate.com, coreprogramming.in, infrafimls.com (??). I’m not making these up, though I suspect the current owners did exactly that.
Look on Facebook at various domainer groups: Domain Names Selling/Buying, Domain Name Marketplace, Website Domain Hosting Buy, Cupid Name — Buy and Sell Domain Names etc. Members often list domains for sale. See the domains (and sometimes the asking prices) for yourself.
Domainers are now scraping the bottom of the barrel. They smoosh together 2 or even 3 words (often in English), to get a unique combination they can now buy for $12 from a Registrar because no one else had wanted that obscure combination before. They try to resell these claiming purported high values. A little sad is the chasing of breadcrumbs. They are reduced to this because domaining is now mature. The big scores have largely happened, and these were usually with single English words.
This is worsened by the proliferation of TLDs in the last 10 years. A popular domain might be cloned onto a different TLD by a competitor.
Email me if you’re interested in linkets.
Dr Wes Boudville, Founder Linket Corp
wes@linket.info
