February 2008 – Craig | Ashley

This is an extract from the SMH Tech Section 26th Feb 2008

“Australia Post executive and auDA board member Joshua Rowe agrees with Mr Delzoppo.

“I don’t think a million dollars is realistic for an Australian domain name,” he says.

“I see it as a pure real estate. If you think of buying domain names as like buying land, then what you are buying is ‘traffic’ – or the number of people who are coming to visit that site. That might be because they’ve typed a guess at the domain name directly into their browser, or come via a search engine or even got there by clicking on links from other sites. But what you’re paying for is the value of the traffic. And compared to the US sites the sites using Australian domain names don’t attract anywhere near the same level of traffic.”

Bruce Tonkin at Melbourne IT has a rule of thumb for comparing the prices of US and Australian domain names: divide by 100. “We’ll probably be offering a new service to our customers where we can help them to try and sell their domain names, if they don’t want to renew them. And, generally speaking, Australian domain names are worth about 100th of the prices people are paying for dotcoms.”

Mr Tonkin also cautions that the prices reported for domain name sales out of the US are often prices that include the website built on that name.”
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Right then. I have to things to say here. Firstly, Joshua Rowe is an idiot and proves that any one working for Australia Post knows nothing about the internet. Domains names are not like property and do not bring traffic. Domain names are your electronic brand on the internet. If a website owner is good enough at web marketing and search engine optimisation then traffic will come. If this wasn’t the case we would all go to amazon.com to find out about the biggest river in South America!

Fool #2. MelbourneIT’s Mr Bruce Tonkin believes .com.au domains are worth just 1/100th the value of a .com name. Well if that’s true you fucking thieving bastard, why does MelboureIT charge $70/per year (pro rata, because you can only by in 2 year blocks) when a .com domain is US$9.95 from someone like godaddy.com? Worth 1/100th. Costs 7 times more.

Thieves and idiots. On the internet they can be found everywhere.