As a newbie at buying and selling domain names through my business, DomainsPromote.com, I was interested to read this new book.  The book was written by David Kesmodel, a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal.


The Domain Game

After looking for it in all of the local stores and not finding it, I ordered it online.  I really enjoyed reading it!  For the most part it gives the history of investing and selling domain names (Internet addresses).  From the back of the book it summarizes:

“Almost everyone has heard a tale of someone getting rich by selling an Internet domain name for a staggering price.  But few understand the secretive world of domain investing, a game that a growing number of people are playing around the globe.  The Domain Game chronicles the exploits of leading domain investors and explains how this mysterious market works.

 Learn how an Oklahoma watermelon farmer (Scott Day) wound up owning some of the world’s most valuable Web addresses, from recipes.com to chairs.com, and how a college dropout (Frank Schilling) became a multimillionaire by scooping up domains that others abandoned amid the dot-com bust.

Find out how the rise of Google and Yahoo! has helped boost the fortunes of domain investors.  And explore the shenigans of investors who snag names associated with corporate trademarks.  Finally, read how you can jump into this exciting market with a relatively small initial investment.  It’s a market with high risk, but huge potential reward.”

Chapters include:

  • Speculators
  • From Dirt Bikes to Domains
  • Name Dropping
  • Click, Click, Click
  • Better Late Than Never
  • Big Money
  • The Domain Craze
  • Shenanigans in Cyberspace
  • The Future

There are two appendix:

  • Big Deals: The Twenty-Five Largest Domain Sales (actually 30 different domains as some are tied for the same position)
  • Resources for Investors including lists of:
    • Registrars (where you can register domains)
    • Aftermarket Sites (where domains can be listed for sale)
    • Drop Catching Services (where you can bid on names whose owners have let them expire)
    • Parking Services (where you can ‘park’ a domain or make a mini website in order to list advertisements)
    • News Sites and Blogs about the domain market
    • Forums (where you can discuss, buy and sell names)
    • Research Sites (where you can find out who registered a name, sales prices, and whether a name has been trademarked.)
    • and finally, Dispute Resolution Sites

The book was quite interesting.  There was a lot of history that I wasn’t familiar with but made sense as I think about the Internet and its evolution.   I would have liked to seen more “how-to” information.  The second appendix list was of value in regard to this.