by Jackolantern » Wed Jan 24, 2018 8:56 pm
Honestly I think the domain squatter community is still struggling to catch-up to the way the world works now. I was actually just thinking about this earlier today.
Back in the day, maybe say from 1993 to about 2000, a majority of people getting on the Web had no idea how to get around or find anything. The archaic "search engines" back then did not help. This meant that if your mom got online and wanted to buy shoes, she was most likely to simply try typing in buyshoes.com or shoes.come and see where that took her. She didn't know any other way to find things. This made owning simple and common dictionary domain names very powerful. You could potentially get hundreds of thousands of interested visitors simple by owning shoes.com.
Of course this caused the explosion of domain squatters that really started taking off in the late 90's. Suddenly almost every combination of English words had been snapped up by someone. And fairly common word domains could go into the tens of thousands of dollars. If even one sold, it would pay for years of domain fees for hundreds of sites.
This as well as the creation of true search engines such as Google turned the business world away from simple, dictionary domain names to more unique, protectable and most importantly, unused names.
But these domain squatters still own the majority of domain names that are now extremely unlikely to ever sell for the rates that they are asking. But still they persist because, again, just one makes the whole past several years worth it. Kind of sad, really.
The indelible lord of tl;dr