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They're worth a lot of money, so my thinking was if he didn't have any money he'd sell them, although I guess maybe they're a super long term investment if he did just register them.



My original point though, is that they're only worth money to people who think they're worth money - domain speculators and 'cherished name' buyers.

To anyone else, if you think about it with a clear head, they're fairly worthless.

What is god.com? It doesn't get any traffic, have any users or product. If you bought it, you'd still have to find a way to get people to go there.

Yes, you could build a brand/product/service around it, but then you could just choose some other name for your brand/product/service.

The web is literally full of domains like this.

  insure.com  $16m  Alexa 39,000
  sex.com     $12m  Alexa 24,000
  fund.com    $10m  Alexa 602,000
  beer.com    $7m   Alexa 374,000
  diamond.com $7.5m Alexa 103,000
So none of these get any real traffic, some are just holding pages asking for other silly people to buy them for millions.


So you wouldn't rather have irc.com than mibbit.com when you were starting out?


Certainly not. Despite the fact that irc.com would be blocking yourself into a specific protocol and not building a brand, I doubt anyone here has ever thought to go to irc.com.

I think building it around irc.com would have actually worked against me. People see <familiar word>.com as mostly holding pages/made for adsense sites, as well as being "web 1.0".

I did buy a domain - ircatwork.com. I bought it because it had users and traffic - things that are worth money.


While generic word .com domains attract lots of traffic which is good for banner farms, it hasn't seemed to have much of an effect on which businesses are on top of certain markets. I mean, who the heck is 'search.com'? And would anyone have thought 'google' would be a far more important term meaning search than 'search'?


god.com used to be owned by a company called Guaranteed Overnight Delivery. Read up on that CEO sometime. :)



The article is from 1989, any further information on how the changes Riley made worked out?





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