Domain names dominate Internet real estate
BY EMILY PICKRELL | emily.pickrell@newsday.com
August 6, 2007 - NewsDay.com
It may surprise you to find out that the Brooklyn Bridge is indeed for sale, at least virtually.
A visit to brooklynbridge.org lists it as a domain address offered for sale in the virtual real estate market, available for an unspecified price.
Several Long Island addresses are also up for grabs.
Al Triolo of Commack owns LI.com and said he has received a $500,000 bid through broker Sedo.com, a domain name broker that lists li.com as its most desirable of the 8 million addresses in its portfolio.
What makes names valuable Although this may sound like a lot of cash for an online address, other two-letter domains have sold at six-digit price tags, including et.com for $225,000 and ol.com for $125,000, according to Domain Industry News Magazine.
“Two-letter domains are very, very valuable,” said Jeremiah Johnston, chief operating officer of Sedo.com, who explained that domain names that are short and easy to remember tend to draw the highest prices. “People who have the real key, generic terms essentially own a valuable piece of real estate.”
Desirable domain site names can translate into big business, and catchy geographic sites are high on the list of such addresses - such as huntington.com - because they easily attract new site visitors.
But don’t assume that address has anything to do with the Town of Huntington.
Instead, a Midwestern bank, Huntington Bank, owns it - and there’s little chance that will change.
“We are proud of our Web site,” said Jeri Grier-Ball, a spokeswoman for Huntington Bancshares, Inc., of Columbus, Ohio. “Pelatiah Huntington established this bank in 1866, and we were among the first banks to launch online banking and an online site in 1996.”
Geographic domains “are very popular in general,” said Sedo’s Johnston. “They’re a fantastic domain name, because they are not capable of being trademarked. They are completely up for grabs.”
Variations on a theme
Since the popularization of the Internet in the 1990s, individuals have been able to register domain addresses for a relatively small fee, typically about $8 a year, resulting in widespread investment in potentially desirable addresses, including community names and geographic locations.
In the 1990s, the state of New York recommended a standard for official town domain addresses, and although some towns adhered to the specifications, others registered shorter names. Huntington’s official Web site can be found at town.huntington.ny.us, for example, while Islip’s site is www.isliptown.org.
Huntington’s address comes up in the fourth position on a Google search for “Huntington” and first place on a search for “Huntington, New York.” Islip’s address comes up second on a search for “Islip,” right after a site dedicated to the Long Island MacArthur Airport in Islip.
“We used the standard state naming convention to register our domain name,” said Joan Cergol, a spokeswoman for Huntington Supervisor Frank Petrone. “We’ve never found a reason to change it because we’ve never had a problem with people accessing our site.”
Investors who bought up several names with the hopes of selling them at a profit “were very smart, because those are going to be very valuable,” said David Reid, owner of NYLI Web Technologies Inc., a Bohemia company that offers domain registration. “As the Internet gets even bigger, those people are going to be happier and happier that they have that Web site name.”
The domain of business
A number of related businesses, such as associatedcities .com, now promote this virtual real estate and assist domain site owners who have the rights to a particular city, such as newyorkcity.com, in promoting the value of the domain name through site construction and advertising.
Entrepreneurs still look for ways to build up value in new local real estate, such as a local businessman who is trying to promote the value of “.li” Web sites as a Long Island resource.
Some speculators hoped that local organizations might purchase location Web sites, said Moke McGowan, president of the Long Island Convention and Visitors Bureau.
“When Web sites first came out, there were individuals who bought up tons of URL names and held on to them in hopes of selling them to folks like ourselves,” said McGowan.
Instead, the Long Island Convention and Visitors Bureau has looked for less expensive domain names that could be part of a larger marketing strategy, while still being quickly identifiable via a Web search. One example: discover longisland.com, which the board purchased for $300.
“We’ve never tried to register town names; there’s no reason for us to do that,” McGowan said. “It’s not the domain name that’s going to be the major attraction. The whole search engine optimization and key words are associated with a Web site, and that tells the search engine where to go.”
As for Triolo, he says he’s thinking long and hard about the offer.
“I bought li.com with the idea of developing a portal, but I never had the opportunity to develop that,” said Triolo, who says he bought the domain about five years ago, but never developed a Web site with content, instead renting out space on the site to local advertisers.
“LI.com is the most wanted domain of the Sedo domain sites. I average about three to five offers a day for the site. If the offer comes that I’m happy with, I’m done.”
MONDAY FOCUS
Getting a handle online
Official municipality sites on the Internet have the option of using domain suffixes for their Web sites:
“.gov” - reserved exclusively for governments within the United States
“.us” - once limited to governmental entities, has been opened up to U.S. citizens, residents or organizations or foreign entities with a presence in the United States.
Municipalities can also choose to use “.org” and “.com”
