There are two tutorials /sessions this afternoon covering domain aftermarket.
The first session was given by Rob Hall from Momentous.ca.
The salient point from Rob's talk being that the secondary market has become the primary market - much as is the case in real estate. Some people may not agree or approve with that sentiment, but the reality and figures speak for themselves.
Further
details of his talk are here, while you can
download the slides from the ICANN site
The second session is being chaired by my good friend Jothan Frakes of
DomainSponsor and features Mason Cole (SnapNames), Tim Schumacher (Sedo), Tom Murphy (Name Media - owners of Afternic) and Emiliano Pasqualetti (DomainsBot).
You can
download the slides of their presentations on the ICANN site.
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Considering Momentous' involvement in the .eu fiasco, there is a strong argument that secondary marketers have polluted the primary market.
John
Pity you didn't send in a comment to them :)
It would only upset them Michele,
After all they still think that nobody has noticed what they did to .eu ccTLD. :)
They are fascinating presentations but I think that they have overlooked one critical factor: A new TLD needs time to mature.
By moving in on .eu to such an extent and so early in the market, I think that the speculators might well have destroyed the value of the ccTLD since they have effectively killed off natural growth. After all, .com has been around for over twenty years and it has had an organic growth cycle that allowed a secondary market to develop - just like in the real estate analogy that these guys are so fond of using. To take the analogy a bit further, they may well have created the roadside advertising but nobody is creating the roads. The natural growth - the cities, towns and villages are absent in .eu ccTLD. I did notice that Sedo has marked the value of .eu down. It should be interesting to see if .eu loses a million or more registrations in the next few weeks.