Many domain owners have busy lives, and most of us have day jobs. There are a select few people who receive all of the income from their domain names. Many of these people are becoming “online businesspersons” with developed ecommerce sites and income beyond the traditional income streams of PPC income and domain sales income.
How can the rest of us keep up with this fast-changing industry? If you are strapped for time, I recommend two sources that all domainers should keep up with – DNJournal and DomainNameWire.
DNJournal
DNJournal is Ron Jackson’s “electronic trade magazine” for the domain industry. I remember stumbling upon this resource in 2004 when Ron wrote an article on Pool.com. The earliest article that I can find online is A March 2003 article about DomainSpa. It’s hard to fine these older issues on the site – which is not the best organized site out there. (I finally found a “Cover Story Archive” here.) Jackson does a great job of promoting new businesses in the domain space and making everyone aware of what is going on in the industry. His background as a journalist shows in his clear writing style, and he is an all-around nice guy. There’s no mud-slinging at DNJournal.
The best weekly recap of publicly-available domain sales is also at DNJournal. This is a great resouce for domain sellers. Send interested buyers to Ron’s Domain Sales section to give them an idea of just how much some people will pay for a good domain name. Most of your domains won’t sell for these prices, of course, but it can be an eye-opener for a potential buyer who doesn’t understand why they can’t just pay you $50 for your domain.
DomainNameWire
Andrew Allemann started DomainNameWire in 2005. Andrew’s style was more critical than Ron’s from the beginning. Ron Jackson’s DNJournal was a friendly publication promoting the domain industry, while Andrew’s was more of an industry watchdog. He has been a vocal critic of some of GoDaddy’s policies, for example, and covered the Moniker-Monte Cahn legal dispute in great detail. Allemann doesn’t even shy away from writing critical words about self-proclcimed “Domain King” Rick Schwartz.
Allemann conducts an annual survey of the industry every year, and dribbles the results out over the course of several weeks. I understand that he wants people to return to his site – but if the results are in, then just tell us the results already.
I highly recommend reading DomainNameWire at least weekly (also available at the cool 3-letter domain dnw.com) and reading DNJournal at least monthly. If you keep up with these two publications you will be up-to-date on the domain industry.
[Disclosure – In the early days of DomainNameWire I wrote some guest articles for them, and my name still appears as a guest writer. I do not and have never received any compensation from them.]
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