Slay me, or Occupy my mind

I am buying quite a few domain names at TBR drops/auctions, and recently a friend of mine asked about one of them. He was wondering why I bought domain name Slay.ca, he was kind of surprised. It’s true though, who in the right mind would register and own a domain name which meaning is “to kill violently”.

Vast majority of domainers understand the value of short, one word generic domain names, but still Slay.ca is far from being a premium domain name, and definitely doesn’t have any traffic. I explained to my friend that all the domain names have “you never know” factor, and one word dictionary names, even unpopular words, have more of it than anything else.

Sometimes, if the price is right, you simply have to buy a name. Even if you are not going to use it, you still buying it and taking a risk, because you never know – someday this word or phrase might become popular. That was a case with Slay.ca, MyID.ca helped me to acquire it through TBR, and I was lucky enough to pay only $22 for it.

I gave one example to my friend about this “never know” factor, and even though it is a good example, it was a lesson to me too.

On September 23, 2005 I hand registered a list of .ca domain names including Occupy.ca. Why would I register that name? It was insane at the time to even think that somebody would want to develop that name in the future.  My reasons for registering the name though simple: it was a dictionary word, relatively short,  a verb calling for action, and cheap price of $10 for hand registration. When I left on vacation on September 23, 2011, exactly 6 years after my registration of Occupy.ca, I didn’t know anything about Occupy Wall Street movement.  I read an article about mass protests organized by this movement only in the middle of October when I sat on the plane back to Canada. On my way back I was wondering if I still own Occupy.ca.

It turns out that I sold Occupy.ca to another domainer in 2006. I don’t regret selling it, even thought I let it go for cheap. This story a good lesson to me, it reminded me about that great ability of absolutely any generic phrase or one word domain name to become more valuable at any moment.