Ask HN: Economics of domain hoarders
I'm in the process of building a Twitter app. Taking a break from coding (hey ... it's new years day), I go over to godaddy and try to register a decent sounding domain name. As you can guess, a large fraction of domain names that include "twit" or "tweet" are taken. I expected this ... there are supposedly 300K twitter apps out there. Normally, I'd move from name-to-name quickly ... and just keep searching until I found a decent name. Today, however, I decided to check out what "lives" at these domain names. Again, no surprise ... crap, crap and more crap. So HN: what are the economics for people who hoard domain names with no intention of setting up meaningful websites?
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However, these is a huge issue if you're buying 100 or 500 or 1,000.
Moving domains to $25 a year would probably reduce the amount of hoarding, as it would narrow people's focus.
For Weblogs Inc. I bought 3,000 domains when we started, and for Mahalo I've bought 2,000 or so. It's a trivial cost to buy all the possible options you might need. If the economics were 2, 3, or 4x i would have narrowed the focus down considerably.
Do they all point to the same site? Is the reason simply to catch people who may mistype your real URL ie ycominator, ycombinator, ycombinates etc?
I find this fascinating, as even with these thoughts in mind I could only get up to about 10-20 domains for my current project! Thanks for any insight.
Another thought I had was hoarders attempting to grab usable names in order to extort real companies to pony up. I believe this happened a lot in the late 90s. Wonder how common it is today?
If I have an idea for a site, the first thing I do is try to find a good domain for it. Depending on how serious I am about the site idea, I will pick up any serious contender for a name. That means for any particular idea, I might register 1-20 domains depending on various factors like how serious of an idea it is and how quickly I find "the" domain name. I'll even buy from set-price brokers up to 4 figures for a domain I think I will eventually use.
My portfolio is about 350 domains at the moment, which costs me ~$3150 a year to maintain. That is a footnote expense in almost any profitable small business.
This said, it's still a disgusting waste of internet real estate.