Voyage of the Eclipse

Having now returned from the Galapagos I realize I could have done the trip much more cheaply. It isn’t the kind of trip that needs business class seats and top accommodations. It was after all, an eco-tour.

Nevertheless, it was nice to start the journey in Quito at the Patio Andaluz. The former convent has been lovingly transformed into a first class hotel.

I won’t dwell much on my stay there as there is too much to cover about the islands and it’ll be hard enough to keep your attention. Two things about the city are worth mentioning. At an altitude of around 9000 feet or 3000 meters the city enjoys eternal fall weather. It was cool yet sunny during the day and chilly at night which is perfect for a guy like me that has too much insulation covering his bones.

The other item worth pointing out about Quito is the large collection of colonial Spanish architecture. I’m told that there are more buildings from the 1600s, built by Spain, than there are in Bogota but I have yet to go there and verify this fact. It’s a very nice city to stroll around in.

Before leaving we took a quick drive to the equator, or what they told us was the equator. I’m sure I’ve passed the imaginary line a hundred times in my travels but it was kind of cool to think you were standing on it.

One of the things which may or may not be true about the equator is that you are lighter when standing on the center of the earth. Well, as you can see in this picture this is either a fact or my eight year-old is going to have a future in women’s basketball.

Being in the globalization business, I couldn’t help but to ask our tour guide what the minimum wage in Ecuador was. His answer of $250 per month didn’t surprise me. What did was his added response that the president is trying to install a $4000 per month maximum wage. That’s such a socialist policy that it borderlines communism. Apparently, the president of Ecuador is good friends with the leader of Venezuela which explains a lot. I couldn’t help but think of a quote I had just read in The Voyage of the Beagle which was written all the way back in the 1830s.

Charles Darwin – “And when the old bloody-minded tyrant is gone to his long account, Paraguay will be torn by revolutions, violent in proportion to the previous unnatural calm. That country will have to learn, like every other South American state that a republic cannot succeed till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principals of justice and honour.”

I’ve enjoyed reading his journals. Some good parts are when he says something which must have been quite normal in the 1830s but seem rather ludicrous now.

Charles Darwin – “The second day after our return to the anchorage, a party of officers and myself went to ransack an old Indian grave, which I had found on the summit of a neighbouring hill. “

The best part of the entire book was, of course, where we can witness the birth of the theory of evolution. Years before he wrote his On the Origin of Species he writes about the Galapagos on page 400 of the copy I have, what you see in the paragraph below. It’s a bit long for a quote but worth reading.

Charles Darwin – “The natural history of these islands is eminently curious, and well deserves attention. Most of the organic productions are aboriginal creations, found nowhere else; there is even a difference between the inhabitants of the different islands; yet all show a marked relationship with those of America, though separated from that continent by an open space of ocean, between 500 and 600 miles in width. The archipelago is a little world within itself, or rather a satellite attached to America, whence it has derived a few stray colonists, and has received the general character of its indigenous productions. Considering the small size of the islands, we feel the more astonished at the number of their aboriginal beings, and at their confined range. Seeing every height crowned with its crater, and the boundaries of most of the lava streams still distinct, we are led to believe that within a period geologically recent the unbroken ocean was here spread out. Hence, both in space and time, we seem to be brought somewhat near to that great fact—that mystery of mysteries—the first appearance of new beings on this earth.”

 What everyone realizes when they set foot on the first island is that you can get incredibly close to the animals, reptiles and birds. You could literally poke them if your guide would let you. That’s really the best part. You are part of the eco-system while there. I swam  with sea lions, sea turtles and penguins. How cool is that?

You can sit there pondering all sorts of crazy thoughts. You’ve heard that the dinasours were both reptiles and birds, right? Why is it that all the endemic life on the Galapagos Islands are also reptiles and birds of all sorts? It seams to me to be a view of what the earth was once like. Recently cooled mounds of lava with reptiles and birds everywhere, etc… Anyway, you don’t think thoughts like that when you are sitting behind a computer launching websites.

The entire trip was really an incredible learning experience. I hope my kids can retain even a portion of it. Hell, I hope I can retain a portion of it. Before I left I thought blue footed boobies were something you saw on the French riviera. Well, maybe the Spanish riviera. I don’t think the Frenchies would wear Crocks.

Another thing you learn is that the world is a dangerous place. It’s an eat or be eaten world. You hear these stories about birds that have two eggs and the stronger of the chicks pushes the weaker one out off the cliff onto the rocks to die so he doesn’t have to compete over the food his mother is bringing. Or you watch baby sea lions starving to death on the beach because their mothers abandoned them and the guides do nothing about it because they can’t alter the eco-system. The humanity in you says, “well feed the damn thing” but you know they are right so you just shake you head and move along.

The birds in this picture have blue feet. I just thought that I’d point that out.

Would I recommend this trip? You bet I would. Take your mate, your kids or both. Learn to dive first if you don’t know how because the best stuff is all under the water.

 

Some trips really are once-in-a-lifetime opportunities

Tomorrow I leave for the Galapagos islands. It’s the type of trip you have to book two years in advance and spend enough money to buy a small country.com to get there.

Other than checking email Friday from a hotel in Quito  I’ll be offline for a full week. I’m not sure if that will be therapeutic or traumatic.

People keep telling me “Wow, that’ll be great memories for your children”. I suppose they are right but I didn’t book the trip thinking about them!

I’ve always wanted to make this journey so I’m pretty damn excited. I’ll be armed with a 150 year-old copy of The Voyage of the Beagle, Charles Darwin’s journal during his 5 years at sea in which he spent much time on the Galapagos and later developed and published his theories on evolution as  On The Origin of Species. I’m not sure why I bought a 150 year-old copy. I saw it in the used section on Amazon.com and thought it would feel more authentic, I suppose.

I will not be sending any of my daily emails next week, nor will I be replying to any forms filled out on this site. Basically, don’t expect crap out of me until around the 1st of July.

SouthLakeTahoe.com under development

Hopefully in a few days I’ll be launching SouthLakeTahoe.com. There is a temporary site up there now but it’s not good enough.

I’m a little more excited about this one than most GEO names. It is an actually city for one thing but what really gets me thinking good thoughts are the numerous hotels, cabins for rent, time shares and potential advertisers there. Talk about a tourist destination!

I’ll be keeping this one for a while and not selling it. Hopefully I’ll have it in the top 3 listings on Google within a month.

If any of you actually live in that area and are looking for a job, hit me up.

Sold Names

I get asked a lot what names I’ve sold recently. Very often people ask me not to announce it so a huge chunk of the real list below is missing from this post. Looking at them now, combined they would make a nice portfolio. So here’s about half the names I’ve sold in the first five or six months of the year.

206.com- seattle
208.com- idaho
209.com- CA
213.com- Los Angeles
214.com- Dallas
215.com- Philadelphia
312.com- Chicago
408.com- San Jose
510.com- Oakland-
513.com- Cincinnati
602.com- Phoenix
610.com- Penn
619.com- San Diego
703.com- VA/ Arlington… 
704.com- Charlotte, NC
707.com- Napa Valley, CA
714.com- Orange County
805.com- CA
860.com- Ct
916.com- Sacramento
Actors.com
Directors.com
FollyBeach.com
Lilburn.com
Nis.com
Our.com
Screenwriters.com
Via.com
Waterloo.com
cny.com
uaa.com
Medics.com
DebtCollectors.com
MountZion.com
ilu.com
dfl.com
Racetracks.com
Enschede.com
mcminnville.com
newberg.com
Piranhas.com
Alabaster.com
Wield.com
LakeView.com
fireinsurance.com
GroupTherapy.com
LakeLosAngeles.com
SaintAugustine.com
CTR.com
PieceofMind.com
lovespark.com
EuropeanArt.com
Beagles.net
SkiResorts.com
Stcatharines.com
elcampo.com
Sororities.net
Fargo.net
croydon.com
plums.com
HardwareStores.com
Evelynne.com
WebDesigners.net
Daryl.com
midwestcity.com
seafoodrestaurants.com
siegen.com
FrenchTutor.com
SpanishTutor.com
Mankato.com
digitalvideos.com
Judo.net
SimiValley.com
Gadsden.com
Burien.com
Mukilteo.com
Treinta.com
ClactononSea.com
SansSouci.com
Trusts.com/livingtrusts.com
dependentcare.com
RealEstateOffices.com
Johnnie.com
SummerSide.com
BridgNorth.com
TrailerParks.net
fastfoodrestaurants.com
Terrebonne.com
Shreveport.com
Bossier.com
Metalband.com
WoodyPoint.com
Coeds.net
LeewardIslands.com
Hayes.net

 

Decisions, decisions…

I often get questions about the Lincoln in the header of this website. That car, isn’t actually mine. I told my designer I had an old convertible Continental so he just looked one up on the net. Being that he lives in the Philippines, it wasn’t exactly easy for him to come over and take a gander at the real thing.

What I own is a 1965 Lincoln Continental convertible. It is a frame off restoration done by Mobsteel Customs out of Detroit.

I bought the car off of Albert Haynesworth. He’s the Tennessee Titan football player that stepped on that guy’s face a couple of years ago. If you pay attention to such things… It was a big deal at the time for Sportscenter fans.

These pictures you are looking at were taken from Mobsteel’s website. The car for the most part still looks the same but the roof isn’t working and one of the door handles fell off. Thus, it is at a specialists shop at the moment.

Some of you might recognize this car. It’s the same make, model and year as the ride from the opening sequence of HBO’s hit T.V. series Entourage. The big difference is that their ‘65 Lincoln had the original wheels, hub caps, etc.

Which do you think is better? Now that I have it at that shop, I’m trying to decide if I want to replace the Mobsteel logos with Continental logos and put the original wheels back on the car.

What would you do?

My Thoughts on GEO domains

While I made a promise to myself to never regurgitate press releases and only blog when I had something I wanted to talk about, I must chime in on the GEO domain conversation which my peers are having.

I suppose I’m more bullish than Sahar and more bearish than SimplyGEO and Elliot Silver.

Many domainers, myself included, value city dot com names by population. For example, poor U.S. cities have a minimum valuation of 10-25 cents per citizen and simply can’t fall below that amount. Wealthier cities and cities with tourism can sell for 10 times as much. However, this is meant to be a guideline, not the rule. Let’s look at a few examples.

The town of Edisto Beach doesn’t even have 1000 citizens. Yet, edistobeach.com with stellar search engine rankings generates over 50 dollars a day in AdSense revenue. At just ten times earnings the name is worth $182,500. Not bad considering I bought this name for $50,000 only two weeks ago and the current design is just terrible. At the moment it isn’t for sale because my guys are working on a better design and we will be signing up some new advertisers.

In the same breath I’d agree with Sahar that the upside potential of EdistoBeach.com is limited. Or to put it another way, it doesn’t have long legs.

An even better example would be MyrtleBeach.com. The owners of that site are quick to tell you that they generate over a million dollars a year in revenue off that city of 28,000. They can do that because there are so many hotels and even more timeshare units. They’ve managed to land over 1000 advertisers paying 3000 dollars per year. Clearly it isn’t just population but the number of potential advertisers that can determine how long those legs can be.

Everything I’m saying is also based on yesterday’s metrics. Now we have a glimce at tomorrow’s possibilities. Dr Ham recently launched his beta version of Vancouver.com. Not only is his site incredibly polished looking (yes I’ve forwarded the link to my designers) but he can do a few things that regular folk like us can’t do. Most notably if you look at the image I placed in the start of this article you’ll see that he doesn’t have anything that says those ads are pay-per-click. Missing are “Ads by Google” or “Yahoo Publisher Network”. I’m sure it is due to his relationship with Yahoo or possibly he’s using a 3rd tier PPC provider. The user will surely think those ads are part of navigation so his click-through-ratio will be through the roof. It’s a great design but I’m still looking for ground-breaking stuff on his site which I haven’t found yet. Most of it is actually very normal. I would suggest to him that he ad more text to the home page for search engine optimization reasons.

I think Sahar’s real point is that sites like funeralhomes.com can make more money if they could sign up funeral homes around the world and I’d agree with him on this point. That doesn’t mean that great GEO names aren’t great names that can make a lot of money. To me, it’s just about having a balanced portfolio and they are a critical component.

There is really a lot to say on this subject so maybe this will be part 1 of another series of articles. There are cctlds like Tijuana.com.mx and foreign cites like ChristChurch.com which to me fall into a different yet still valuable categories.

I will say this. I think GEO names are easier to make profitable. It’s realitively easy to get high search engine rankings and a whole lot easier to land advertisers.

 

The United States has a real opportunity with Barack Obama

I consider myself an amatuer historian. I’ve read biographies on more than half of our U.S. presidents. I love reading biographies because I feel as though reading about great men helps you become one yourself. I don’t know if Obama is one of these great men but he certainly appears to have the ability to become one.

A good friend of mine once asked me what I thought all the founding fathers had in common. My answer was that they were great thinkers. Way before television and radio these men wrote letters and published them in newspapers to get their opinions out. To do so, and to do so well, they were well read themselves. All of them read thousands of books in their time.

When I hear Barack Obama speak it is like listening to one of these great men. He speaks with logic and as one that has a firm grasp of what is happening around him. It’s inspiring to know that he could be the next leader of this great country.

It’s a happy day for me now that he has secured the nomination of the democratic party.

The Bob’s Rug Syndrome

When I was younger, GTE used to have a commercial for their Yellow Pages that featured a fictional character named Bob. Bob owned a store called Bob’s Rug. In the story he’s asked why he doesn’t advertise in the GTE Yellow Pages and his answer was, “I can’t advertise in the Yellow Pages. If I did, someone might buy my rug”. I always loved that commercial.

I tell this story often. It’s my answer to the reason why there are so many domainers that won’t sell their name no matter what you offer them. If you buy it from them, they won’t have it anymore. You’d be buying their rug.

I have never-ending faith in my ability to continue replacing my assets. I start companies, I sell them. I buy domains, I sell them. I have zero fear of selling any asset because I don’t suffer from Bob’s Rug Syndrome.

Take the owner of America.com. He won’t take less than a million dollars for that name. It appears he wants twenty million dollars for it. Does he honestly think he’d get that much? This country isn’t even called America. In fact, there isn’t anywhere called America. The United States of America is in North America. To not sell it is just foolish.

Now you might even suffer from this disease. You might think your name is priceless or worth twenty million. Ask yourself, how much money could even be made with the name if all the stars were aligned. Does this owner think a travel company could earn more than twenty million dollars off of America.com? Of course they couldn’t. My country’s government would also never buy this name for that kind of money. It isn’t even their name.

He’ll never sell this name until he begins to seek a cure to his Bob’s Rug Syndrome. And what harm has he done to himself and his family by turning down high six-figure offers? I’m sure he could have eliminated significant debt, started another business or more.

Bob’s Rug Syndrome is a terrible disease that affects tens of thousands of domainers. It causes them to turn down huge offers, often at large multiple of the domain’s true value, out of fear of being able to replicate their success. If you think you may suffer from this disease, please seek help immediately.

The Bob’s Rug Syndrome

When I was younger, GTE used to have a commercial for their Yellow Pages that featured a fictional character named Bob. Bob owned a store called Bob’s Rug. In the story he’s asked why he doesn’t advertise in the GTE Yellow Pages and his answer was, “I can’t advertise in the Yellow Pages. If I did, someone might buy my rug”. I always loved that commercial.

I tell this story often. It’s my answer to the reason why there are so many domainers that won’t sell their name no matter what you offer them. If you buy it from them, they won’t have it anymore. You’d be buying their rug.

I have never-ending faith in my ability to continue replacing my assets. I start companies, I sell them. I buy domains, I sell them. I have zero fear of selling any asset because I don’t suffer from Bob’s Rug Syndrome.

Take the owner of America.com. He won’t take less than a million dollars for that name. It appears he wants twenty million dollars for it. Does he honestly think he’d get that much? This country isn’t even called America. In fact, there isn’t anywhere called America. The United States of America is in North America. To not sell it is just foolish.

Now you might even suffer from this disease. You might think your name is priceless or worth twenty million. Ask yourself, how much money could even be made with the name if all the stars were aligned. Does this owner think a travel company could earn more than twenty million dollars off of America.com? Of course they couldn’t. My country’s government would also never buy this name for that kind of money. It isn’t even their name.

He’ll never sell this name until he begins to seek a cure to his Bob’s Rug Syndrome. And what harm has he done to himself and his family by turning down high six-figure offers? I’m sure he could have eliminated significant debt, started another business or more.

Bob’s Rug Syndrome is a terrible disease that affects tens of thousands of domainers. It causes them to turn down huge offers, often at large multiple of the domain’s true value, out of fear of being able to replicate their success. If you think you may suffer from this disease, please seek help immediately.