What makes a name worth thousands of dollars and how does this market work?

[mandy]

So how have domain names become valuable? There are several ways. First, let's talk about this. They have proven their value with revenue production.

So you may have heard about some of these methods. There's PPC, the pay-per-click market, the ability to buy a name and park it with a provider and have advertising syndicated onto that site in a way that produces advertising revenue to the domain owner. A domain owner can sell advertising direct, they can put up a storefront to sell goods and services.

Revenue production has moved easily well outside of almost any border that you can think of, and businesses around the world now are using domain names for revenue production...

Another trend that's making domain names more and more valuable over time is the rising population of Internet users all over the world. And I know we all know about this in this room but nations like China, India, other developing nations are coming on rapidly and the Internet is the crux of a great deal of economic development activity in those countries.

So over time, we are going to see those domain names also become more important and more valuable...

full article: http://www.icann.org/meetings/lisbon/tra...5mar07.htm