Squatters suck!

[misteroriginal]

I'm working on a video for a guy who wants, naturally, a companion website to help sell the videos. As much as I like to cuss, I don't have the vocabulary to express the frustration trying to find a domain name. It's like all these people are sitting on the toilets with there pants up demanding money. What's up with that????

Yes, I know America is built on the concept that greed is a good thing, but squatters will be the first against the wall when the next revolution comes.

[bargainbloodhound]

What's up with that?

Huge amounts of money are what's up with it. http://community.tuliptools.com/index.ph...127.0.html

Google's greed also deserves a huge share of the blame. It has refused to crack down on abuse by cybersquatters because squatters generate huge amounts of revenue for it through its AdSense for Domains program.  Typos are fetching huge amounts even though their buyers know they will likely only have use of a name for a limited time before they are forced to give it up.  Typo domain Myspac.com recently sold for $35K even though the odds are Myspace.com will come after them for trademark infringement.  The revenues they'll make from Google AdSense for Domains will more than cover the cost of the domain name and their legal bills.

http://community.tuliptools.com/index.ph...881.0.html

[misteroriginal]

Yeah, so we all hate squatters. They're worse than ticket scalpers.

[bargainbloodhound]

Just to add to that last post.  Buying a domain name and sitting on it for 10 years doesn't make someone a squatter.  They are only cybersquatters if the name infringes on existing trademarks, domain names, etc and is bought with the sole purpose of capitalizing on that infringement.

There is nothing wrong with buying a domain name as an investment and sitting on it for 5 years waiting for it to rise in value as long as the name doesn't infringe on an existing trademark (ex. myspacebooks.com or myspace.info), or in the case of typos, wasn't registered with the intent of stealing traffic from another web site (ex. myspac.com or myspaces.com).  Owning a portfolio of legitimate, non-infringing domain names is like owning real estate.

The money you can make on domain auction sites like Sedo and Afternic is more than 99.5% of sellers will ever make on eBay. We made more in 2000 auctioning domain names on Afternic than we made in any year on eBay, but all of our names were legitimate non-infringing names (unlike several domain sellers I could name...like "snappyboy" ).  

[misteroriginal]

Sure it's a valid and legal business. Ticket scalping is legal in Indiana too. Doesn't make it right.

[Bidera]

Squatters will continue to persist till domain fees go up and money generated by traffic goes down. Neither seems too likely to happen any time soon.

Finding a good short name these days ending with .com is pretty much a no way proposition.