DOMAINfest Opening Remarks by Oversee President Jeff Kupietzky About the Opportunities in a Down Domain Name Market
Are you wondering what Oversee's President Jeff Kupietzky's thinks the opportunities are in this down domain name market? Here is a audio clip of his opening remarks live from DOMAINfest in Hollywood, California.
(Note: Transcript May Not Be Completely Accurate)
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JEFF KUPIETZKY: . . . I actually am very optimistic about three critical trends that give us hope to be optimistic for the future and help us better explain where we are wrong on the domain industry.
No. 1: The core of our business lies in providing high quality traffic that converts for advertisers. Today’s advertisers are a little gun shy because of the current economic conditions. However, I certainly believe that these high quality converted direct navigation traffic will be as …scarce resource today and in the future. There is still $16 Billion spent in advertising on TV, radio and print that cannot be measured and is in front of declining audiences. We will continue to see that shift and those dollars moving online. This is the time to educate advertisers and brand managers about the value of domaining and the resources of high quality converted traffic.
No. 2: There’s another aspect . . . that I would like to discuss in our industry. It is the resale value of a generic name. Now, more than ever . . . for people to have an identify on the web. This identity is best captured in the .com. In a bad economy, conventional wisdom says that no one . . . I think it might just be the opposite. With a lot of people out of work, we know just from talking with friends and colleagues the traditional job market might be shrinking, but people are looking out to start their own businesses. They are going to be out there buying their domain name to start their own business. What better way to do that than with presence on the web? Now, with changes like that it makes me…. my view is that this will make the current global rank of .coms even more valuable. Who’s going to remember pepsi.drink, or pepsi.soda, pepsi.in, pepsi.cn . . . It’s pepsi.com. That’s their . . . In the long-term, the value of these generic names will only continue to rise.
Finally, No. 3, the holy grail for all of us continues to be how to develop a domain name into its best and most popular use. This modified ...warns of stench in the park. This is, in my view, the creation of brands and businesses for each name . . . that these models get to be more mature and the tools of technology become more widespread, we will see a dramatic reduction in the barriers to creating successful . . . This is going to be a big business and part of that kind of transformation that we witness. Let me give you an example. Someone you all know very well recently bought the domain name bassguitar.com for only $17,000. He then invested less than $20,000 on development and attracted a national…audience. Now, just by itself, it is running by itself with very little ongoing expenses, and believe me he doesn’t want to run a business . . . It is actually very . . . There is no need for him to set up any inventory and that’s because there’s plenty of companies on the web who have been set up to provide their products, database, catalog ,and even…
. . .believe in these three long-term strategies for putting millions of dollars to work to …You might have read the announcement we had a couple weeks ago in which we reorganized the company to focus primarily on domain services which include monetization, after market…businesses . . .and then invest and merge the businesses…travel…regeneration vertical for our effort in the domain…area….Now I’ve already mentioned it wasn’t that long ago, in between 2000 and 2001, that we were in the …for most or part of the time, was the worst .com ….there was…from anybody that we knew who knew anything about the web. They would tell us that there was no job prospects, investments in…have dried out, the …window was closed. The Wall Street Journal, and this is the actual a fact, had a story they did on November 27, 2000, with the headline Dot-com era is dead. The story talked about the dot-com meltdown and that how there was a company every day, shutting its doors. With…in that line... that people like Fred…and frankly many of you, recognize the opportunity with which we all are benefiting from today. Who’s to say that we are now in the exact same situation where five years from now, people are going to look back and say, you know what, those were the bargain years. I wish I had been smart enough to buy…like the investments I could had in 2009.
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