Need a website? It’s flamin’ unfair
For every budding entrepreneur, the flutter of excitement that wells up and compels you to impulse purchase a domain name in preparation for your next venture is almost incomparable.
The question of its availability is always a gamble, but most of the time even if your desires aren’t completely met, you are satisfied with a minor variation.
For about 12 bucks you can own a small piece of digital real estate, holding the name of your dreams well within reach.
Much to my surprise, GoDaddy has now destroyed the gamble, they’ve established a monopoly on a great deal of desirable domain names — charging in some cases $5,000+ for what they call ‘premium domains’. You can watch their video explanation below.
No longer can I have a spark of brilliance and reach out to touch greatness. I’ll more likely be selling my car in exchange for an obscenely priced URL address or be outbid by established businesses that have the capital to pay big dollars.
It’s no wonder the GoDaddy team were able to recently justify a costly advertising campaign. Entrepreneurs might be selling their belongings for a piece of the pie, but the financially healthy are already eating it.
GoDaddy Auctions® may decentralise wealth and purport to give business owners the opportunity to buy unavailable domains, but however you spin it, I am sure the commission is handsome to both domain owner and facilitating entity.
I couldn’t help but question the ethics of this power move made by the digital giant. Although I don’t know the ins and outs of their privacy policy, there would be thousands of searches made on the site daily and with even the most basic tracking or user recording plugins, the company would have access to most searched domains.
Now, don’t get me wrong — I understand this sort of buying and reselling has been available and the price of domains has been steadily on the rise. However, in the past it’s been a little less calculated and a little more digestible. GoDaddy might in fact just be the first entity to provide the service in the most efficient way and beat others in a similar pursuit to the punch.
Suffice to say, maybe it was inevitable — maybe it was always going to happen.
That doesn’t stop a little piece of me dying on the inside. It doesn’t hold out hope for the future of aspiring entrepreneurs with 48 dollars in their bank account and a big hairy audacious goal.
It’s an ethical dilemma, a commercially intelligent decision and a big kick in the nuts, but I suppose good branding must prevail as a solution. (Even though I don’t really like the idea of writing jingles for domains that are too long or too obscure to remember. Just joking…I love jingles.)
Regardless, a proper a marketing strategy, an intelligent brand aesthetic and keyword-based content creation is really what you should be investing in to boost your business’ visibility — not just (now) overpriced addresses.
URLs are still accessible via a couple of keystrokes, maybe they’ll just require a couple more in the future as less and less people can afford to begin with premium services.
R.I.P. decent, affordable domain names. I shall miss you dearly, but I’ll hold close the value of good branding and great content implementation.
Warm regards,
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