I've just returned from Domainermeeting and it was indeed very good to meet up with old friends (one of whom actually got a little "older" today ;) and make new contacts. Roland Buck, especially, is a very insightful person -- and I can see that he is building a very impressive team of writers who are contributing to DomainNews.com (and I was honored to be asked to join that team -- so here I am! ;).
It is interesting to see how much has changed over the time since I have last been at a domain-related conference -- but it's also intriguing to note what has more / less remained the same....
One thing that has changed about my personal behavior / involvement at this meeting is that I was somewhat "aloof" from much of the discussions about ICANN, policy, etc. -- I was very focused on making new business contacts and I am happy to say that the DomainerMeeting conference was a very good venue for this purpose.
One thing that has stayed remarkably the same is the continued concentration on traffic statistics as a basis for the valuation of domain names. Over the past months, several studies have been published related to the measurement of online media that would give me pause to think twice about such "simple" traffic measurements (as, for example, page-loads or click-through rates) -- that is: they would give me pause, if it weren't for the fact that I already had pause several years ago (and not much has changed in my "humble" opinion).
I remain confident that in the near future, much of the recent discussions that I have noticed concerning "ad networks" will continue to expand. I hope (and even "expect") that such discussions will lead to new opportunities for advertising formats such as sponsored links an/or banner advertising for the various regions of the world, whether these are targeted at local or global audiences
One of the amazing (really: jaw-dropping) events was the domain name aution. I was quite flabbergasted at the nothing-short-of "completely" divergent valuations of .COM names versus other TLDs. This is, of course, nothing new -- but that is precisely the point: I feel there ought to be more reasonable valuations of the economic importance of many of the countries / regions outside of the United States, but I was shocked to find that the level of awareness for top single word keywords outside of .COM was extremely low. When I shook my head at this, I was repeatedly told by many of the people I talked to that "I only buy .COM names", ".COM is King"and similar story lines. At any rate: .COM quite obviously continues to command quite royal prices -- whether or not that is warranted is another issue altogether.
As a result, I feel this auction sold some very valuable domain names for more/less rock bottom prices -- simply because those domains were not .COM domains. I guess the fact that I advertised some "bargain" domain names at http://bargains.at/domainermeeting was therefore quite well-suited to the occasion (and I expect it will be relatively easy for the new owners of such bargain domain names to reach a "breaking even" point on their domain investments).
Source: Norbert Mayer-Wittman writing for Domainnews.com - june 20th, 2008