Bam! Take that, every other company that's below mine. And, well played, every other company that's above mine. You all totally suck, or are totally awesome, respectively.
How often people check stats in rescuetime online is probably a good measure. Installs on computers is certainly a better measure, though harder to find.
RescueTime could easily track how many computers have RescueTime running offline, but there is a bit of a selection bias there.
You can always use Google Trends for websites...but also see 'Hot Social': (an idea only) for comparing the number of bookmarks that any set of pages or websites has received from across a set of social bookmarking sites.
The fix is easy. Charge more, per year, for domain names. You'll never "cure" misspelled domains at this point, but the domain names at the fringe would be too expensive to hold on to as they wouldn't recoup their costs, which would force speculators to release more of them and improve overall availability.
Completely agree. Or at least hold an auction for each domain name instead of giving them away for $10.
As long as domain names are given out essentially free, they will be owned mainly by squatters trying to extort money for them.
The price they are sold for initially should be the going market price for that name.
How do you hold auctions for domain names? You can't force people to renew via auction, or Google will just steal the domain name from any site that catches on. You can't really start out with an auction price either, because any domain name not already taken clearly has 0 bidders, so the first one would win for $10.
Auctions only make sense for domains that were already registered and whose owners want to sell them, and that's already done.
Raise the price of domain names too high (say $1,000) and you stifle innovation. Keep it sufficiently low and squatters will still have any name worth keeping. It's a no-win situation. Though the current state of domain names sucks, it's kinda like democracy. It's the least bad option.
I'm talking about the initial registration of a domain name. Not the renewal fee.
Stifle innovation??? How would you stifle innovation?
The current situation gives away names to anyone who wants them, when their market price is way above that. It's a land grab with no limits on how much land you can grab, which I don't think is a fair way to be doing things. Many of the good domain names are just held by a few people who happened to be around at the right time.
I'd say $1k was a good start on making domain names fair.
Or, wait until enough people are interested in a domain name, and auction it.
eg I see that foobar.com is unregistered, register my interest, that goes public, other parties have say 30 days to register interest, then after those 30 days it goes up for auction, at which time the market decides a price for it. Profits to go to the eff or something :/
That auction system won't work well because in your example, somehow foobar.com is available after 10 years of $10 domains. If nobody picked it up yet, it's unlikely any sort of bidding war is going to occur. Also, the problem is already so well-entrenched, with so many domains currently being squatted on that it does nothing to solve it.
$1k domains would stifle innovation because there are a lot of people who can program (or learn to program) a cool website but might not have $1k to spare. Craigslist, plentyoffish, whatever that MySpace site made by a trailer-dwelling teen in Detroit that was a media sensasation, every blog known to man, etc. might not exist if the founders had to plunk down a grand.
Any name worth keeping? My domain name is certainly worth keeping and it only costs me $15/year. The problem isn't the low cost of domain names or squatting. The problem is a lack of imagination in coming up with names.
No, it's squatting combined with the known fact that short domains that can easily be sounded out are best.
When we were looking for a domain name, we built a script to merge a bunch of keywords into short domains and check for availability. There were almost none left with the word "sports" in it. sportshit.com was available and that was about it.
I don't see any sites from the session that just finished. Not trying to be nitpicky or anything...you know the first thing we're all going to do is search for our company name.
