I heard a pretty funny story today. Back in the days of tasting one company was tasting about 200k domains a day. But once they forgot to delete them in the grace period, so they ended up with 200k rubbish domains. This error cost them a petty $1.4 mil 
.
Obviously tasting has been long gone today since the grace period has been cancelled by ICANN. It is now only possible to delete 10% of new registrations in the 5 day period.
Jun 10
My apologies for not posting lately, have been quite busy and that coupled with my laziness simply equals no posts for a long time. So anyway, what have I been up to lately…
When it comes to domaining I have to say I’m getting a little bit bored of it. It’s just become a completely routine job for me, going through my daily lists, picking domains etc. I’m actually thinking about putting my domaining operation on “autopilot” since I’ve tought all my guys how to handle everything. Recently I hit 1 million uniques a day as I’ve planned. That was a always my goal and since it’s already reached I just don’t have that much motivation to be honest. To keep myself motivated I just need to keep on coming up with new projects etc that keep me entertained for a year or two.
Two weeks ago we had the iGaming Supershow in Prague, which is basically a huge gettogether for people who are in the online gambling business. I have to say that this industry shares a lot with domaining in the sense that it is a pretty tightly knit circle, pretty secretive etc. One thing is certaing though – it is significantly larger than domaining. I’ve been looking into a gaming project of my own, which I plan to launch maybe in 6 months. My idea is basically to teach people to play various casual skill games against each other for money and charge a rake for connecting players together in the same way poker sites operate. So the idea is that people could play chess, checkers, scrabble etc against each other for a dollar or something like that. I think it will make the games more fun to play as well.
Another of my new projects is a wood processing plant that we will start building in Eastern Slovakia soon. We will basically be processing waste wood and manufacturing wooden pellets out it that will be used by powerplants in Austria and Italy. It’s quite a complex project with a lot of inputs etc, but it’s something new to keep me entertained.
Our online insurance broker ePojisteni.cz has been running strong. We will be moving into a bigger office next month to house our growing army of brokers in the callcenter, currently we have 40 there fulltime. We are also planning a large TV campaign for the autumn on national TV since the pools of available traffic online are just getting slimmer and slimmer and we simply need to keep growing.
Our liposuction clinic Slim & GO has been a big hit, we are currently running on full capacity with 5 machines operating 12 hours a day – we are doing 40 clients a day now. We’re just signing a lease for a new location where we plan to open our secong clinic, which should be even bigger than our first one. It might be a stretch to fill it up with clients, but challenge accepted .
Our facebook developer Viral Maniacs is hopefully going to launch its new game in the US in about 2 weeks. It’s something similar to the Sims. The first version of the game which we only launched in the Czech Rep has been quite a success, he already have about 80k users and 3k join everyday. Viral Maniacs should hopefully break even in July, which would be nice.
I’m also helping out with our new CPA department, I’ll probably joing them for LeadsCon in July in New York.
And that’s pretty much it now…
I keep on reading about the guy who sold camroullete.com for $1400 to Adam Strong, who flipped it a few weeks later for $150k at his Domain Madness auction. Congrats to Adam of course.
Everybody has a sale that he or she regrets, it’s just part of the domainer life. I recall about 2 years ago I sold ringtones.org for $20k to Scott Richter. The domain got about 7-10 uniques a day and made $2-3 a day. So it was about 25 years revenue, which I saw as very reasonable. A few months later Scott flipped it over via auction for about $140k. I was obviously upset as well as I tought of myself as the biggest sucker on the planet. But I overcame this and made that amount many times over later on other domain deals. Learning can sometimes be painful!
I am generally cautious with new monetization platforms. So I’m generally not the first to jump on the bandwagon for tests. I prefer other friends to test out first and if I get a decent recomendation I start thinking about it. That was the case with WhyPark. I heard a lot of positives about it during DomainFest in January.
I’ve known Craig for some time, so I finally decided to run a test. Two weeks ago I pushed over a couple thousand domains onto their system that were making zero – we tested them on pretty much every parking company, so these were domains relegated to being dropped. From day one they started making about $20/day on WhyPark and about 7k uniques/day. Today it’s two weeks later and they are getting 11k uniques/day, so search engines are starting to pick them up. The amount of searches and clicks are going up as well, as the WhyPark team optimizes the domains. Yesterday they made $80, which is a great result if you look at it that previously they were making zero and were ready to be dropped. Seems like the earnings still have potential to go higher.
The test has been successful, so I’ve decided to put much more domains on WhyPark very soon. Well done WhyPark boys, looking forward to doing more business! Your platform has proved itself to me.
I really enjoy reading the feature stories on DNJournal, they bring a lot of inspiration. What usually most of the profiled people share in common is a pretty comfortable middle to upper class upbringing (I’m no different) which to a large extent helped them to be successful in their future business careers.
Today I want to tell you part of the life story of a huge domainer (easily over $200k in revenue per month), because it is one of the most breathtaking and fascinating stories I have ever heard and really differs from all of us. This person comes from Eastern Europe just like me and I have got to know him pretty well in the last two years, although we have met in person only a few times. This guy is completely under the radar, so obviously I will keep his name private. Let’s just call him Igor for the purpose of this story.
Igor spent most of his teenager years still behind the iron curtain, growing up under the communist regime of the time. The times were tough then, shops were undersupplied, there was a lack of freedom, you couldn’t travel etc. Igor dropped out of school early, never finishing high school. His first major encounter with life was when his father committed suicide when he was a teenager, to be found by Igor’s brother. Igor would later attempt to committ suicide himself through a rohypnol overdose, which he fortunately survived (he woke up 48 hours later). With the revolution in 1989, Igor discovered he had an entrepreneural spirit and decided to go into business, opening a newsstand at a train station. Unfortunately he ended bancrupt with no money, he had to find a new way how to provide himself with a living quickly. During his time working at the newsstand he got acquainted with some of the homosexual prostitutes residing there, which would tell him about their “business” and the potential of making decent money from it. Because of the situation he was in, he opted for this option and moved to Germany, where he would prostitute himself for over a year (although being straight himself). He also had a stint in Switzerland, only to be banned from the country for 10 years. As his financial situation improved, he came back and went back into business, starting a book wholesale operation. This career was brought to a halt though as he got involved in a serious car accident for which he was sentenced to two years in prison. After being released from prison he again started a new business, this time in import-export, where he finally found some success. The internet was becoming integral to this business and Igor stumbled upon the relatively new Google Adsense programme, which he implemented on his export related websites. After making 50 cents in the first day, he saw potential in this and was looking at ways to scale this and was quickly drawn to domains, which he would acquire through drops. Even though he had a demon called alcohol haunting him (he would go through two bottles of vodka a night working), he would put immense amounts of work into his new passion of domains and would observe his portfolio and parking revenue grow every month, mainly through re-investing all his income back into domains. Today, his portfolio numbers tens of thousands of domains and is still growing every day.I really admire this guy because he is one of the smartest people in the business, has a huge drive to move forward and has an unbelievable sense of humour. This guy is the biggest charater in the biz and is 100% pure. I hope a movie is made out of his life one day.
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