All my nerdy friends should find this article interesting about domain names. ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), determines who gets what domain names now that the Internet has expanded beyond the usual .com, .org, .edu., ca, etc.
Seems there is now going to be a .amazon and guess who doesn't get that to be their Domain? Not Amazon.com who was heartily bidding for it, but an area of South America where you will find: the Amazon! Surprise.
I found the article interesting and the give and pull -- what domain does the Catholic Church get? should it be .religion, .Vatican, .catholic? And what about .jp for Japan?
Asleep yet? Here's the link: http://www.lankabusinessonline.com/news/powerful-body-that-runs-internet-backbone-mulls-future/2120664996
Replies
I agree, Greg. You can still get domain names for $1.99, if you are willing to get something with many words and underscores. When we started callsforartists.com (about 3 years ago) callforartists.com cost $1200, so we settled for the plural variation. Do you own greglittle.com? We own lots of domain names, but nothing as fancy as .amazon ... but we've been doing this for over 10 years and really this niche is so small that it is more about getting the google juice that brings people to my sites:
artfaircalendar.com
artfairinsiders.com
artshowreviews.com
callsforartists.com
artfairradio.com
bestartfairs.com -- and no one tries to buy them from me. Yet, they work for us.
It seems only fair because the Amazon in South America has been in existence way longer than the online Amazon website. I remember back around 1995 it cost about $100 to register a domain name and you could get pretty much any domain name with a .com that you wanted. I recall companies paying outrageous amounts of money to purchase domain names that someone else had registered. If I remember hearing IBM paid around $7,500,000 for the domain business.com