I had a chance to sit down with Josh Metnick who owns Chicago.com and started selling subdomains & email addresses ending in Chicago.com.
In the first year, sales of subdomains and vanity email addresses using Chicago.com generated some $125,000 in revenue with virtually no marketing.
Josh shared the numbers with TheDomains.com exclusively:
“”Chicago.com is going well — our first year sales were approximately $125,000, but it’s recurring high-margin revenue. ”
“First batch of yearly renewals came up — and the renewal rate was actually higher than 100%, which is interesting. ”
“What that means — is that during the renewal process, our existing customers not only renewed, but they placed additional orders– significantly more than we lost. ”
“I believe we lost five customers total in 14 months or so. ”
“We are targeting around $250,000+ next year, maybe more if we do a deal with a local media partner.”
“Our marketing budget for the first year was around $5,000, so we will be putting more into it and also doing a large drive for Cyber-Monday, as roughly 50% of our sales are given as gifts, we didn’t see that.”
“Another thing we did not see was Spanish language names.”
“Chicago is roughly 30% Hispanic.”
“We sold lawyer@chicago.com, and then the same firm, which has attorneys who specialize in Spanish-speaking clients, bought abogado@chicago.com — so this again is taking us in another, unexpected direction.”
“We sold Parking.Chicago.com and Parking@Chicago.com to one of the largest VC-based “Hotels.com” for parking companies– Spot Hero, to help create a portal for Chicago parking. Lawyer.Chicago.com will be launching soon.”
“A domainer bought limos.chicago.com and limos@chicago.com (we bundle the subdomain and the email) for investment purposes, we have had some of those.”
Josh confirmed that the system he developed has spread to other Geo domains including:
Neworleans.com; they just went live about two weeks ago, but cannot reveal sales numbers there, they are ramping up.
Nashville.com; they are live but it is not being promoted, so we are in the process of re-doing all of the direct marketing efforts.
Telaviv.com; This went live a little while ago, we have something like 50+ Israeli city.com’s on the system, these names have been selling, as well Jerusalem.net, we have been selling emails. Pricing is more simplified on this system, we are testing different price points.
“”We’ve sold several thousand dollars worth but officially just launched that site today actually.”
Even smaller US cities are signing up and seeing results.
“We recently launched Brookline.com for Brookline MA and Cambridge.com is next.”
“For identity-centric domains, the domainer sets their own pricing, so while we charge several thousand dollars for lawyer@chicago.com and ongoing $750/year for that name , I think if you had a small or medium sized city name, or other name like Golf.com, etc. you could make good incremental revenue by putting the system up at email.domain.com or identity.domain.com and if you sell 1,000 emails at $99/year, etc.”
“It’s an extra $50k a year (we do 50/50 rev split and handle all backend stuff, customer service, etc. cut checks on 7th of each month for previous 30 days collected) in recurring, high margin revenue — it’s a good addition to whatever revenue streams you may have.”
“I think it could be yet another way to monetize gTLD’s that are identity-centric, have strong emotional properties people identify with.”
“We see this spreading to other generic .com’s like “Power.com which is also live but by invitation only and with elite pricing. I can say that they do have customer traction, there is a market for what they are doing and they are refining their branding.”
It seems Josh has really come up wit a a no-brainier money maker for the owners of Geo domains even generic domains.
Selling subdomains and vanity email addresses while keeping the domain for the domain holders use.
It also seems to me to prove out that there will be a market for new gTLD’s certainly if people are willing to pony up for subdomains and vanity email addresses of existing .com’s there would seem to be a demand for the Geo new gTLD’s such as .NYC, .Boston., .Miami, .Paris, .Vegas and .Brussels to name a few.
As for Chicago.com it should be noted that no one applied for the new gTLD of .Chicago meaning that Josh has many years of selling subdomains and vanity email addresses with no competition.
Congrats to Josh and his team for developing a winning formula.
Great idea.
Seems like a directory would be a perfect fit.
Upsell them into a directory listing?
Amazing revenue from subs and emails! Great job Josh and team.
Great development work! This offers a real step forward in monetization strategies. The news will reach out to many non-domainers, and it’s especially good if Josh & co begin to seriously expand and attract other sites to their platform / system (must build marketing).
Kudos also to The Domains for a fine interview – others can profit from the tidbit of how revenue from gifts, and Hispanic participation, were surprising.
One step forward, one step back, however. Last week’s Ireland.com acquisition by Tourism Ireland
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2012/1015/breaking44.html
was the step back, where 15,000 @ireland.com email users will be disconnected in coming weeks and barred from the site by 7 December. Couldn’t someone in this nascent industry help them?
Alex
Right you make a good point that is from the users perspective there email rights are contract rights not ownership right which is again where they will exist I think Geo new gTLD’s have a huge marketing advantage as you will own the domain.
However as I mentioned no .Chicago was applied for in the 1st round and the 2nd round opening maybe years away
I was thinking of that, in addition you better have a “bullet proof” contract and disclaimer in case someone missuses the email address or subdomain …
A few months back they mentioned (dnjournal) the program would be available to others by year’s end, any news on that? I am game…
I am surprised nobody else related to the Domain Industry has jumped on it.
“on it” as the Concept.
Domo
This is one of the advantages of attending ICANN so you can chat with a lot of the big boys in person
ha ha
You never going to give me a break on that.
I agree 100% , just not my style even if I am missing on deals but… “Never say Never”.
On the other hand …Eagles fly solo while Ducks flock 🙂
@Alex et al: this is exactly we have been doing with NamelyPRO and domain names like Irish.Me or is.me… while our numbers are currently lower that of chicago.com – they pay the bills.
I am wondering if the email and subdomain concept can be carried over to other type of domains for example:
USTube dot com
DetroitTube dot com
ClevelandBlog dot com
Will this make sense?
** Get Your Own Email Address and Blog @BullShitWebsites.com
already bringing in $$$$$ to me
@RK – you can try for free with Namely.PRO. All you need is to change the name servers. The platform will handle the rest, including DNS, billing…
This is fascinating news, but is it feasible? Was Chicago.com making less than $125,000 per year as a major city hub?
I am not being negative here, but don’t they have like 3-4 employees that work for them? With paying a couple of employees then paying for advertising costs that doesn’t leave much left over at $125,000 for a year. Is this the only way they are making money or is this in addition to their regular Chicago.com revenue? I only ask because it appears to me that Chicago.com is no longer a directory site, but just an email seller. I can’t view any page on their site that is not trying to sell me a sub domain or an email so if this is 100% of their profit then perhaps its not a business that will have the luxury of having 3-4 employees in time.
Owner operator?
Troy
Thallewell
I don’t know how Josh operates his chicago.com business but some of the other sites like Nashville.com is a site and the ireland.com example shows you can operate your site as is and just sell subdomains and vanity email addresses as an extra revenue source.
I believe ireland.com just sold…
Discontinuation of ireland.com email service
right so those email users are screwed under the term of the agreement
bad for email accounts
good for domain holder
Right, imagine having one of those “leased” emails addresses serving as your already established “main business contact address” ….
Now what?
In 2000 I registered the url CondoMains.com (or ConDomains.com) – envisioning a similar model. I cam to realizes that, similar to the real estate market, you could SELL someone a subdomain, or email address. IF you could grant them ownership. A deeded right.
That way, they can/could sell that email or subdomain name for a profit, or at least make back what they may have purchased theior “condo” for.
I then regisitered CondoNames.com to complement that modle, so that, using the example on the website site, Boston,com could sell Boston.com/RealEstate to C21.. since The Boston Globe (owner of Boston.com) doesn’t need it.
Being the broker of these models is where I see much of this going. If you have all the inventory, you ARE the MLS of domain names.
As I explained on the site when I tossed it together, Imagine the value of a top level City geo domain if it is joinly owned (Condo ownership) By the local Bank, the local Hotel chain, the local Restauramnt, Realtor, dry cleaner, taxi company, etc, etc… Each benefitting the other because they don’t compete with each other yet are each advertiseing the root url everywhere..
http://www.Condomains.com
Excellent Geos. Yes, I believe IrelandTourism recently acquired Ireland.com
“email rights are contract rights not ownership right which is again where they will exist I think Geo new gTLD’s have a huge marketing advantage as you will own the domain.”
Domain regitartion is the same thing, it is a service contract. Many domainers think they should have “ownership” rights in their domain without realizing that it would mean their domain could be taken away to satify a debt or court judgement.
It is a model that has been tried time & time again without anything but mediocre success for at least the last 15 years.
This one looks exactly the same as all the ones that came before it, paid email and subdomains. Usually it is tried with near unmonetizable domains for small webmasters/domainers like surnames, firstnames & non tourism geos.
I was kind of wondering when I read the story,
“If this really worked well why would this guy be doing interviews, instead he’d be trying to buy up every geo he can”
Quickly though we see the real purpose of the interview, which is to try and sell the platform to others. It reads to me like we were getting half the story, the rosy half with supposed 100% renewal rates and 6 figures income. A few replies and the cracks appear (eg having a staff to generate that income – the real expenses are obviously not 5k).
Lets assume Chicago.com really doing have 125k revenue, if a domineer has a similar names they’d get half of that, say 60k, then they’d have advertising expenses of at least 5k by the sounds of it, and potentially a need for staff. At the end of the day it is going to be a terrible return in my view given the value of the name. I can see why these guys need to scale up with other people using the platform.
At the end of the day people going to chicago.com aren’t looking for eamil, subdomains, or or probably anything else clear, so it is going to be an uphill battle trying to sell them that. We are back into the very hard to monetize world of non tourism geos.
Chicago it is a Touristic city …
What is also baffling to see is the Hotel ads’ page ….
“email rights are contract rights not ownership right which is again where they will exist I think Geo new gTLD’s have a huge marketing advantage as you will own the domain.”
by help.org
Has anybody looked at the way the New gTlDs’ emails addresses will look like ?
eg:
Skip@hosting.cloud
JohnDoe@newyork.hotel
confusing… or not?
@MHB, Thanx for nice article about Josh Metnick’s resounding success with Chicago.com! 🙂
Josh seems to have beat down any potential of a rival in .chicago as gtld, because there is a service mark flying for both the @ sign used to call out usernames in Tweets:
@chicago
and the subdomain
.chicago
Does the service mark – SM – on the dot chicago make use of a .chicago gtld sticky? In that case, it is a masterfull protection of a meaningful dot com to prohibit the use of dot chicago gtld – what is your [legal] opinion?
“Chicago it is a Touristic city …”
/////////////////////
What location on earth doesn’t have some element of tourism?
The issue is for a name like this the tourism element is very small, not enough to really build a viable business on. For a domineer or small webmaster trying to develop something they’d be way better off owning chicagohotels.com, not for resale, but for actually building a business on, the traffic volume is 1/10 but the commerciality of the term is probably 100 times better. There is something to latch onto, something that can be built on. For the actual city government or tourist bureau they could brand a name like this, but in terms of the actual search term and type in traffic, it has little to do with tourism.
For those who think chicago.com would make a good tourism site ask why these people have put vanity email on it and are crowing about 100k revenue. It used to be a tourist site, it was in associated cities and all that mumbo jumbo, I’m sure they had plenty of advice. So think what sort of profit it must have been making then….I know the answer…..jack all.
Hello,
i want to know exactly what did Chicago.com do to make such huge money and if we have to start this business what we have to do and how does it work
Similar identity branding is happening with Canadian.me (cnd.me) for national affinity.
Are they offering the the platform to any other extensions like .me ? For emails I would think it might make sense Mb@Chicago.me ect…
That is totally amazing, generating $125k in fees selling subdomains etc. I wonder, could someone do that with a non geo domain if it is good enough? I was just thinking, i wonder if i could do the same thing with my domain name: CloudComputing.co? For example what if some cloud companies had a subdomain and they could use it to advertise their company. But would they even want to? Maybe some of the smaller companies might? For example say: ibm. cloudcomputing.co or microsoft or some other companies? Would this be more profitable than the current site i have built on this domain? Or perhaps could i could do it with another one of my domains: NatGas.co or CleanEnergy.co? This SEEMS like it could be a new avenue of revenue generation – selling subdomains on non geo TLDs. Has it been done before?
Eric
Hi,
(I had a post pending mod yesterday, it didn’t make it through for some reason).
I owned a geo real estate url – and back in 96+, we ended up with dozens of leading local Realtors were using my capecodrealestat*.com/C21 or /DavisRealtors, etc as their prime web address – most were realtor friends in the business. (I always felt that giving them MY address to use in ALL their print was simply free advetising for me)…
They also used C21@CapeCodRealEstat*.com and the like. What I didn’t plan for and neither did they, was the inevitable Divorce. That can be a complex wind-down when you’ve got entire businesses hyaving branded that url and email on what could be six figures worth or marketing materials, business cards for 100+ agents, signs, etc..
But in this point in time No business is going to build off their valuable brand by borrowing a url that they can lose. You;d be crazy. So, being in real estate a little myself, I came to the conclusion that THE best model for “monitizing” this valuable real estate in this context of a geo such as Chicago.com, is t0 sell as a Unit, as Condominiums.
The Buyer needs to be a buyer… he needs to own what he buys.
He ends to be able to resell his unit – likely at a profit, having gotten ALL that exposure for FREE.. right up until you want to sell it. A geo like this should use THAT as a selling opoint to the advertisers.
I just want to be the broker who has all the inventory, the Registry Of Deeds if you will.
As I suggest in some detail on this 2002 domain on a page I made years ago..
http://www.ConDomains.com
Thanks for the discussion, interesting topic.
A white label service would be nice. Namely.pro is way too techy-intimidating to the potential customer. I have been wondering who is behind the service of Seattle.me and so many other geo .me’s
“Josh seems to have beat down any potential of a rival”
Josh seems to have figured out how to use the superscript feature to display the term “SM” alongside a bunch of stuff.
Well done Josh. Nice Interview MHB.
Peter Niederman
Denver.com
Thanks everybody for the thoughtful feedback. As well, Michael, thanks for sharing this information with the domainer community– hopefully it is helpful insight into new ways of monetizing domains. So much of our online identities are tied to our email addresses, that we feel the product works best for domains that have identity-centric properties, Geo.com’s probably being the strongest.
I had a fascinating conversation with Thies Lindenthal from Sedo while @ ICANN45 — he has done some very interesting research as it relates to the occurrence of city name strings in registered .COM’s relative to a city’s population size. His research is one method of quantifying the degree or strength of “Place-Identity” as it relates to certain cities. There are some cities, by intuition, many of us have feel for how passionate its residents are relative to the City’s brand. Cities that may come to mind are Chicago, Boston, NYC, etc. Being a 5th generation Chicagoan — I have strong biases, so Thies’ research is the first I have seen in the domain name space that indicates some of our intuitions on this “force” are correct. Another manifestation of this place-identity force one can see in the intensity of how local populations relate and support their own sports teams.
“Where we are from,” is a powerful force within all of us. It often the first question we ask somebody new when we meet them. There is a deep-rooted psychological reason why that is. But this identification force is not unique to large cities or even cities at all. The common sayings like “home town pride,” John Cougar Mellencamp’s lyrics: “I was born in a small town…”– one could make an argument that smaller towns may have stronger place-identity than larger cities. And I think it can be said that some people are probably more passionate about their avocations (e.g., Golf, Auto Racing, Gardening, etc) From a domainer perspective, what this means is that we think the platform, or the idea — doesn’t need to be on our platform, has revenue potential inherit in this emotional pull individuals feel towards things they strongly identify with.
We started with $0 in sales with the product about a year ago. We hope to do about double what we did last year over the next year. I think to go from $0 to $125k recurring, high margin revenue, with a mostly happy customer base in about a year is decent. It’s not Groupon type growth– but it’s not a Groupon-type customer or product. We don’t have a huge marketing budget, and our product is inherently limited to the Chicago area market, roughly 10 million people. As most Chicagoans know — whether you are from the suburbs or Chicago proper — most people say they are from “Chicago.”
So, we need to stay humble with the success we have had over the past year. It’s a good indication of market demand for our product, but it’s not like we jumped to $5M our first year or something. There is still much refinement and expansion of the marketing messaging we need to do to reach the maximum potential audience for the product.
For the time being, we have given up on our tourism related revenue as (a) it had flatlined (b) we were always lowest on the chain (i.e, an affiliate at 5-11% margins) (c) increased and increasing competition from .. almost everybody including Google getting in the direct tourism business and (d) it’s just a more intellectually interesting product to work on — we have a number of innovations and ideas in the pipeline we plan on adding. One of the posts here mentioned adding a directory to the product, which we have thought of as well– I think it’s a brilliant possible way to take the product, particularly for the category names like “lawyer@chicago.com/lawyer.chicago.com” — if you buy that, you get the top listing under our local business directory search, etc.
It’s true that other products have been out there that function similarly to our product. Some of these products are quite old in Internet years — Mail.com, etc. But a lot has changed in those years as well. Most, if not all, invented product words have a sort of brand affinity depreciation over time. Luxury brands perhaps excluded– at least, they work hard to maintain those brands, it’s the main asset they have. We call it the “nightclub” effect — seeing a hotmail.com address on a resume in 1996 was cool. Now it can be a red-flag. The same thing is happening to Yahoo.com email addresses– for lack of a better word, they are just turning lame. The brand is arguably a negative. Gmail.com is still generally perceived as a positive brand, but odds are, over time, it will fade as well. City brands and words with stable identity properties — like Golf.com, etc. will, barring some cataclysmic event, hold value effectively forever.
One layer we do not play in is the inbox or maintaining any email for our users, it is a pure identity layer, an “alias” in literal UNIX terms. That said — when people are paying good money for an email address, deliverability and customer service expectations increase substantially, and we have very real costs associated in maintaining our systems and making sure we have staff on hand that knows how to configure all sorts of email systems to function properly with an alias. Most customers want their inbound and outbound email identities to be seamless, even if they have joe.lastname@gmail.com underneath. Gmail and Yahoo! Mail have the best systems for integrating our product. Configuring for a desktop-based MS Outlook client is more tedious, but we still need to be able to make sure we can get people up and running on that, or Android, or their iPad & Mac.com email, etc.
As far as Ireland.com goes — I think it’s not so smart for them to terminate their users. The @Chicago.com email product started from a similar origin: Last July, we made a decision to phase out the 15 or so free email accounts we had given to users.. we were paying for our own servers at a datacenter, the costs didn’t seem to justify it. The same day or next day (I forget, it was one of the two, I’ve told conflicting stories) we got a random call from a user wanting “tony@chicago.com”, which was already allocated to another individual. They went back and forth until the owner of the email address declined $2,000 for his tony@chicago.com. So it got us thinking. Instead of canceling the 15 users, we decided to charge a premium price — $200/year per address. We expected a backlash– we were doing a bit of an experiment. What we discovered was the opposite of what we thought (hate mail, ‘how could you do this to me’, etc.). 12 out of the 15 converted at $200/year, and the emails we got were .. actually happy emails– these users were thrilled to keep their accounts. Not just because they were able to keep an account they had been using, but now they have a formal contractual relationship with us to maintain their email, they have a perpetual (and transferable– they are liquid digital assets now) renewable right to their online identity. And it’s an online identity that may outlast the brand image of even Google/Gmail. It’s the one thing we can compete against the big guys that they can never, ever beat us at — our name. We are selling atomic level pieces of the master brand, that’s the product. And no matter how big Google or Yahoo or Facebook or whoever gets — as Sean Miller, CEO of NYC.com (who has an invite-only product up at mail.nyc.com as well) said: Nobody’s passport says “Place of Birth: Facebook.” It’s not the biggest business model in the world, but it’s something we can effectively offer that nobody else can.
I have been receiving a lot of email 🙂 regarding the product, and these comments here are great. You can reach me at josh@chicago.com, I try to answer them the best I can but we are pretty overloaded with demand right now, as well working on the next generation of the product.
I had lunch with Ammar Kubba last October at the TRAFFIC conference in Florida– we have known each other for several years, and shared with him some of the initial data on the product, which we could barely believe was happening at the time. Ammar has significant experience in developing scalable domainer platforms, as well as tremendous industry connections, so we were fortunate to close on an initial round of funding from Ammar to help support the product scale to multiple domains.
Michael — thanks again for the article. And again, we are trying to stay humble with the initial success. What we have now is significantly less revenue than we were making with our previous tourism model for Chicago.com, but the growth rate, recurring revenue, and margins show higher potential than our old model.
And, it doesn’t preclude us from adding back the tourism model at some point in the future– but that model will be more powerful when we have 50,000, 100,000 @Chicago.com accounts. Right now, I like the singularity of focus and purpose with the product, instead of hodge-podge of random stuff that characterized our previous site.
Please excuse any grammar, typo, etc. mistakes in my missive here.. it was done in one take and via this 1994-era text input box!
Regards,
Josh
Domo
Lets use Josh’s example of lawyer.Chicago.com
So if I buy it my email address would be mike@lawyer.Chicago.com
If i bought the same new gTLD for say new york it would be mike@lawyer.nyc
Snoopy:
Here are some “gross” numbers:
40 Million annual visitors to the windy city
30 Million domestic
10 Million Business travelers but only
1 Million International Travelers.
Perhaps I should have said “travelers” in general…
My point is that there is potentially over xx Million annual visitors potentially needing accommodation, surely 100% of the business travelers …
however I get your message on the difficulties to develop “profitable” Geo portals and perhaps the proof is that chicago.com is choosing to lease/sell rights to email and subdomains rather than taking Denver.com’s approach …
Mike:
add one more (*or 2) to the mix:
mike@nyc.lawyer
+
mike@lawyer.Chicago.com
mike@lawyer.NYC
* additionally I am not sure where the Dotless domains will fit if when approved?
mike@lawyer ?
Josh, thanks for sharing such a valuable information.
Thanks Josh. I appreciate hearing your viewpoint. I think you have got some great ideas.
I agree with Snoopy. It sounds like a promo to get other domainers to buy into their platform while trying to claim some sort of rights in “.chicago.”
These domainer blogs are not credible.
I have to say this is one of the most impressive articles I’ve read in the entire domain industry for quite a while!
Josh! you should be given enormous credit for achieving the level of sales you have attained, going against the grain. This shows 2 things, you can make money simply by being very creative and daring…. only in America!
Unfortunately so many people have no idea what it takes to develop any domain or startup and make it obscenely successful, takes very deep pockets nowadays. The fact that you may have a premium domain name is actually irrelevant. Facebook raised close to one billion USD and look at their paltry stock now, down in the dumps! Same goes for Znga, Groupon and lots of others out there. It’s really not that easy. Of course there are several successes, but that’s besides the point. Josh really deserves a serious thumbs up because he may have well started what could become a huge “domain” trend that demonstrates why and how this could work for several other geo or important domains…
In the UK for instance, are you guys aware if you buy an apartment with a 99 year lease, all you own is the lease and not really the apartment. Once your lease goes to say 55yrs or 75yrs, you pretty much have to re-extend the lease for several thousands of pounds!! If you don’t do this your property value plummets. All this inspite of paying your leverages mortgage. So in the domain world, Josh is basically demonstrating the same concept can possible work, depending on what domain you have. So for instance, I’d be interested in asking Josh or anyone here, could it work for SupremeCourt.com for instance?? A domain i happen to own. So Law firm sub-domains and email addresses all leased out to US law firms and lawyers worldwide? Think about it very carefully…hmmm. Another example, Leicestersquare.com is a London Geo domain and Leicestersquare like Timesquare attracts over 250,000 visitors every single day! So how do I know all those establishments may not want to lease a sub-domain and email address with one of the most important geo tourist locations in the UK? See where all this can go? Josh in my opinion has just demonstrated almost anything can be sold if you try to think out of the box!
Well done Josh and don’t give up! Like you said, go get some more funding, partners etc and make this concept rock!
One final suggestion Josh… IMO do not turn the main domain Chicago.com into a directory, here is what you can do…. create a social sharing system with “heirarchy” for the sub-domains that attain the highest traffic on your leasing platform. Try to create a twitter or foursquare kinda solution around your sub-domains leased out. That’s more traffic and massive viral sharing, in a social media eco system to scale your new business model for Chicago.
Well done!
Robert
@Blackworld,
Totally agree……Like your idea of creating a social sharing system in sub-domain instead of developing directory platform.
Yes, Geo domain Leicestersquare can be the next big potential for leasing sub-domain and email address….smart thinking.
Yes, Geo domain Leicestersquare can be the next big potential for leasing sub-domain and email address….smart thinking.
///////////////
The muppet brigade is out today.
@ joshmetnick, Thanx for thoughtful reply. Is reserving the SM on .Chicago and @Chicago throwing meat at a wall to see what sticks, or is it really a master plan to fend off copycats from the new gTLD space?
@Mark Kolb
Mark, glad you made it. Canadian market is very big indeed. A propos, checked cnd.me, it resolves at some Chinese website.
@Phil Harris
This is what we do with Irish.Me, Indian.Me, etc. Shame Chicagoan.Me is taken already. But if you have good .Me name, feel free to monetise similar way.
@Michael
Brands-and-Jingles study shows that hardly any brand longer than 12 characters make it high. You are so right on new jingly and short tlds.
@brands: oops, it’s cdn.me and also cndn.me
@Snoopy
I sense cynicism in your dialogue on this thread… fair play!
Constructive criticism is always helpful to scale. I actually think the sub-domain concept could work for geo domains and other premium vertical domains if marketed the right way. So lets take Manhattan.com for instance… i’d prefer to see an “ECLECTIC” sub-domained manhattan.com rather than a predictable directory guide structure. So through sub-domaining, Manhattan.com actually begins to emulate the real manhattan because of the creative variety in terms of sub-domain design, content, applications and social media all driven through different vendor owner leases.
Makes a lot of sense. The only problem is, the domain community itself has not been very creative in startup parlance and perhaps this sub-domaining concept could provide impetus.
“Makes a lot of sense. The only problem is, the domain community itself has not been very creative in startup parlance and perhaps this sub-domaining concept could provide impetus.”
/////////////////////////
Not sure what you mean, this “creative concept” has been tried time & time again for names lacking in the clear business model stakes, it was one of the first business models domainers thought up.
@Snoopy
Indeed you’re right it has been tried before, however times are changing. For instance, the mobile web went from WAP that never worked to what now appears to be working 10 years later. Today there are so many tools that could make sub-domaining work a lot beter than previously. Vendors are being squashed through Adsense premium advertising and new marketing platforms are evolving through social media to help vendors reach target markets more cost effectively.
I’m suggesting sub-domaining could work if the system itself is structured to help vendors gain more traction in a social media and applications marketplace. So Manhattan.com shouldn’t just lease sub-domains, it should in fact provide social web tools, within the geo domain utility that will help the vendors scale their sub-domains. So lets suppose foursquare just as an example was manhattan.com, you begin to see how every sub-domain on that type of social commerce solution, can gain lots of traction through location checkins, commerce, sharing, advertising and so on. Bearing in mind this is now a lot more possible today than previously was 10 years ago.
.TEL domains like http://www.NYC.tel and HOMES.tel are perfectly suited to @identity email leasing and subdomain landing pages. Out of the box, you get 3,000 subdomains and unlimited email forwarding.
Sounds like a good idea for all goe sites. I have started this quite a while ago with my PurGeo.com’s but with less success.
I recently purchased “Main.me” and have started the “Email” and “SubDomain” marketing for this domain as well. I feel the “.me” will have double meaning here since the official State of Maine abbreviation is ME
Great read + we here @thehamptons.com are inspired : )
This is great news for GEO .com domain owners!
However, successfully selling sub-domains in .com, e.g.
mybusiness.chicago.com, bodes very well indeed for some
of the up-coming GEO-based gTLDs…
These sub domains, in .com, are ‘a dot too far’ in my opinion
and gTLD names such as mybusiness.chicago will be seen as
being much more intuitive and valuable.
@ri.sk: the problem with gTLDs is it that you don’t get email something@chicago. Although, they should.
While with chicago.com, an email something@chicago.com is quite attractive.
At Namely.PRO we discovered that some customers are so into it.
@brands-jingles
Really?!
So if, next year, I decide to register bullshit.blackfriday I can’t
have an email address like fresh@bullshit.blackfriday??
That can’t be right!
Caution is advised, as Mr Metnick appears, at least on occasion, to offer for sale web domains to which he has no claim. Example: http://ebizvaluations.com/archive/report/19770
This is an eye opener I never, ever believe someone can buy a sub domain nor the email of a particular domain name and with such a good price for the seller
There is real sense behind this innovation.
Thanks and cheers