Domain names, LOL
 

Starting in 1995, I bought hundreds of domain names. I paid Network Solutions $35 per year for domain renewal on each of them. They were going to be my 'retirement'. I think I let the last one expire a few months ago. I never sold one of them. That little experiment probably cost me $100,000. Oh well.

Easy come, easier go :)

My former corp used to occasionally pay some serious bucks for one they wanted, but talk about a crap shoot....

Care to share any of the names you bet on? I wager some are a hoot :)

When you "retire" from travelling the globe, I'll sell ya "Slo-motion.com" :)

I'm glad you can laugh about it.

LOL. They were pretty tame. A few off the top of my head that I desperately hung on to:

flomp.com
sdnow.com
onetogo.com
buymycars.com
tripbot.com - I paid $5k for that one. Let it expire.

I'll have to dig around to find a better list.

I had bikinicontest.com a long ways back... verrrrrry interesting backstory on that one.

I bought shopbot.com one Thankgsiving morning in the 90's for $35. Excite had mistakenly let it expire. That domain name has made me tens of thousands. A guy offered me $1 million for it the next day. I stupidly declined. I had it sold at one point for $4.5 million, but the buyer couldn't raise funds so the sale never happened.

I also have animotion.com. The band emails me every once in a while :) It was also in a Simpsons episode.

Have a domain that I use for hosting and personal stuff, ZIPBANG.COM. Had it since 1991. Was offered a whole $200 for it once. Told them it would cost me more than that to change everything.

When international domains like .mx, .cn, .ca, .ru were first available our company registered their name as a domain in a lot of them to keep spoofers from trying to look like our presence in those countries. After about 5 or 6 years of owning the domains we figured we had done due diligence and let them expire. We had to keep .ru because companies would not deal with our representatives without a local presence. Our China distributors kept the .cn domain so they could maintain a web site in Mandarin.

It really went crazy right after they stopped requiring domain requests on company letterhead and tax id's to register a .com domain and similar proof to get a .net or .org.

Some international domains required a physical company address to be able to register as well.

Doing all the international stuff did get me a wholesale domain registry account that lets me register and maintain my Domains cheaper than Godaddy and Namecheap's regular pricing. But can't beat Godaddy introductory deals, sometimes less than $2 a year for a two year commitment.

I got solicited to sell the very 1st one I ever bought.

Did not sell it.

Have a bunch of others as well.

One of my fav's is pooflingingspacemonkeys.com

monkeysinamethlab.com is another good one.

A random bag of crap for whoever can figure out tidgafa.com

Today I Don't Give A F*** Azzhole.com

But I don't need any more crap :)

Totally I Don't Give a F**k A**hole.

That is my guess.

Oh, I was close!

Great minds....something, something....

I forgot....:)

I bought location names thinking real estate firms or local advertising places would want to buy them off me. Umm, I haven't sold any either and have let them expire.

Things I Don't Give A F*** About

Kind of counter intuitive though. If they really are TIDGAFA then why would I bother to put them on a web site?

What burnt me was people that register domains then set them up as search engine landing page click thrus to make click money. Then if you want to purchase the domain for real money for some business they won't respond at all. And I represented companies that were willing to pay a LOT for that particular domain for a real company not just time wasting pseudo search result click pages.

I have bought a dozen or so over the past. I sold one for 1500 so it paid for my experiment. I just looked it up, the domain I sold is not being used...

The dotcom bubble didn't last long and a LOT of companies were spawned, sucked up investors bucks, then went bankrupt, and died.

Oh yeah, I have to look through my portfolio. :-D

I'm the domain registrar for the family, so I have a small collection.

Friends and I were sitting around drunk, talking about cheap little mall kiosk type stores that sell the crap you get from ABC Trading, Oriental Trading Co, etc. in quantity. We'd call it "its just crap" or something...

Which is how I ended up owning itsjustcrap.com

All I use it for is email hosting, some image hosting, and the front landing page.

http://itsjustcrap.com/itsjustcrap.com.png