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It sounds pretty ridiculous that someone can make a windfall, just because they happened to buy the tesla.com domain name 20 years ago. But comparatively, it's

by whack 11y ago

It sounds pretty ridiculous that someone can make a windfall, just because they happened to buy the tesla.com domain name 20 years ago. But comparatively, it's not really any more ridiculous than someone buying a plot of land on the cheap, later finding a huge oil reserve underneath it, and selling it for tens/hundreds of millions of dollars. I'm going to posit that domain names are actually going to be less valuable 10/20 years from now, compared to now. When you think about it, domain names are really a crude bridge that connect users to the website that they really want to go to. Search engines like Google are already undercutting the need for this bridge. Anyone who wants to go to Tesla's website simply needs to google for Tesla, or Tesla car, and they can find the site they are looking for almost immediately. I posit that this trend is going to accelerate in the future, until we get to a point where pretty domain names are about as valuable as pretty IP addresses: A novelty item, but one that most users don't actually interact with directly or care about.

drzaiusapelord 11y ago
Its not like its a nonsense word they've been squatting hoping someone would buy it. Obviously its the eastern european inventor, a popular band at the time it was registered, etc. If Elon wanted the kind of branding where you can easily get a .com then he should have named his company something else. Using established names are a risk. I can' just start a company called Turing and expect to get Turing.com. Its long been taken.
mxuribe 11y ago
I agree that domain names might be less valuable in the future, but only because there will be lots more choice instead of just .com...That is, more people will assume the web is full of more than just .com domains, and will take other TLDs more seriously. (At least I hope.) Also, if more and more users rely ONLY on search engines rather than domains to arrive at a website, that is essentially the definition of a walled garden...because if i'm a small - even a somewhat medium - business with a website, I now have to spend even more effort than before on SEO, just so when searchers type in my business name it won't get confused in search results with other similarly named companies, or push me down on a search results page...And then there's the whole concept of being at the whim of a search engine's policy: if i piss off a search engine and they prevent me from showing up in results, my business almost entirely "disappears from the (silo) web"...No offense, but i hope your prediction does not come true. ;-)

by whack 11y ago

drzaiusapelord 11y ago

Its not like its a nonsense word they've been squatting hoping someone would buy it. Obviously its the eastern european inventor, a popular band at the time it was registered, etc. If Elon wanted the kind of branding where you can easily get a .com then he should have named his company something else. Using established names are a risk. I can' just start a company called Turing and expect to get Turing.com. Its long been taken.

mxuribe 11y ago

I agree that domain names might be less valuable in the future, but only because there will be lots more choice instead of just .com...That is, more people will assume the web is full of more than just .com domains, and will take other TLDs more seriously. (At least I hope.) Also, if more and more users rely ONLY on search engines rather than domains to arrive at a website, that is essentially the definition of a walled garden...because if i'm a small - even a somewhat medium - business with a website, I now have to spend even more effort than before on SEO, just so when searchers type in my business name it won't get confused in search results with other similarly named companies, or push me down on a search results page...And then there's the whole concept of being at the whim of a search engine's policy: if i piss off a search engine and they prevent me from showing up in results, my business almost entirely "disappears from the (silo) web"...No offense, but i hope your prediction does not come true. ;-)