Wills.ca – Do you have a will?

As many of you know, domain name WILLS.ca is for sale at Pool.com auction. Less than 24 hours left until the end of the auction, and last time I checked there are no bids placed. The main reason why any of the bids weren’t placed is a hefty price tag. The reserve price of the auction is at $20,000, and the buyer will be expected to pay at least $22,400 including tax. Is it a good deal? There is no obvious answer to this question.

Wills.ca is a premium, generic domain name. It clearly describes the product, and anybody who visits the site knows ahead of time what they expect to find. I went to few of the local lawyer’s offices in Vancouver with the purpose of finding out how much it will cost to “create a will”.  The prices ranged from $350 to $450 dollars for simple cases. You should note though, that if you own a business it might cost significantly more to prepare a will, and even more if your business is not easily understandable by most of the people. For instance if you are a domainer with a large portfolio of names, it will take more time for a lawyer to draw all necessary documents to describe your business and how the will should be enforced in case something happens to you.

In conclusion I must say, that in most cases there is only once a chance to acquire for businesses that one domain name that it so generic and premium for them. Once cars.com, loans.com, homes.com get sold and developed, there is no way to buy these names anymore, because they turn from domain names to an operating businesses. In contrast, Canadian namespace is so immature, and so poorly developed that all the .com names that I mentioned above, are not even developed in .ca, they are simply parked. It might be a good chance for one of the law firms to buy WILLS.ca domain name, but seeing so many premium .ca domains left undeveloped, I think we are at the stage where Canadian companies still don’t understand the value of premium generic domains. I won’t be surprised to see WILLS.ca unsold.

Did You Know?

I really like this video that recently went viral and has more than 13 million views on YouTube

It ends with the open question: “so what does it all mean?”, which I want to rephrase into “what does it all mean for domainers?”

Old Domains: Moist no more 1992-2011

I want to start to post every week about old domain names that happen to drop during the TBR runs.  This is my first post in the section.

Do you remember Moist? It is a Canadian band that was popular in the 1990s.  The band was formed in Vancouver BC in 1992 and lasted until year 2000, and it was considered to be an alternative music band.  Domain name Moist.ca was used by a band to update the followers.

Moist.ca is on the list for today’s TBR run. There is a Wikipedia article written about the band and the article links to the official band website – Moist.ca. The band was pretty popular in Canada, and there are numerous links online that lead to Moist.ca. The new owner might have a decent traffic.

Moist Facebook page:   http://www.facebook.com/pages/Moist-Band/29886299013?v=info

Archive.org is filled with pages ranging from 1999 to 2008. It is interesting to observe how popular the band became during the years. The first screenshot in 1998 shows the number of visitors being at 78,000, and the last screenshot for year 2008 shows more than 273,000 visitors.

Part II – TBR TimeSaver – for February 23,2011

Here is the second part of the sorted domain names for the next TBR run:

http://pile.ca/TBR/tbr-report-february-23-2011-part2.html