A great discussion about if is late to join the game of domains:
It seems to me that all the good names have already been taken, and all the good aftermarket names are taken by established players.
So is it totally worthless coming into domaining now?
I don’t hope to make huge bucks. I just hope to do this thing on the side, not like the big players (dn forum has a lot of those). Heck, I’d be happy with just 500 bucks a month (being a college student, even that much is great).
But it seems that I’m already too late in the game. I’ve spent a decent amount on domains already (which I don’t think are that bad), but don’t seem to be recouping any of it.
Is it hopeless?
Every point is an answer from other domainers:
If you have a lot of money to spend, no. If you don’t unless you get lucky and just happen to hand reg something decent, yes. You have to think about if the time you put into it is worth what you are getting out of it. Chances are no matter what you won’t make money right away but if you are doing a ton of work for $500/month, your time might be better spent elsewhere.
You have to work hard and find a niche that is not heavily exploited. For some that may be cctlds or idns and for others it might be typo domains. Either way, you will have to spend some money and spend even more time.
I’m in university too – I sacrifice sleep. If you are prepared to sacrifice and work hard and smart, there is avenues to make money here.
Good luck.
You might put a small part of your domain investment into IDNs, Internationalized Domain Names in foreign languages which will come into mainstream use over the next year and beyond when IE7 browser (which is IDN compatable) gains major market share in Asia, Russia and elsewhere. There are still some decent .coms if you spend some time searching, and still a lot of good .nets and .jps. Also some good deals on the secondary market that could potentially give you extraordinary returns over the next 12-36 months. Check out some of the IDN sales reports at DNJournal or idntools.net sites to get a feel for some of the x,xxx and xx,xxx sales that are have been happening over the past year.
If you have limited capital, your only hope of doing well is either through website creation (better be crazy good) or from fresh regging IDN domains (.com/.net or ccTLD only) or perhaps do both (gulp).
Don’t let anybody talk you into non .com or .net extensions, it’s far too hard for you to make money in those niches.
Even if you don’t speak another language fluently, it just means you need to try a little harder but at least in IDNs unlike everything else there is still hope of doing well because it is very early days. Also the majority of domainers don’t fully understand the opportunity yet so the field is still relatively undisturbed for those who do. I make far more than $500 per month on traffic from IDN domains so your stated goal is not far fetched.
People always think they have missed the boat in real estate, but you can always jump in and make money. Same here. Just do your research.
It’s never too late.
You see many people here responded actually joined 1 or 2 yrs earlier than you (even though not necessarily). If they can do well then you can too.
I did pretty well with new TLDs, .us/.mobi all make me a confident player now. When your fund grows, you have more options and strategies to invest in.
