It is important to understand the risks in any business plan. I don’t write these to be a naysayer, rather to help us domainers be complete in our business planning.
Here are some risk questions that some might say are already answered pessimistically:
What if users learn to use the search bar rather than the address bar and type-in traffic declines?
What if Google becomes a natural monopoly and reduces payouts to parked domains?
What if Google “optimizes†its search results to exclude parked domains virtually cutting out search engine traffic?
What if Verisign substantially increases the costs of holding domains?
Domainers expect their domains to be valued more in the future as more people become educated about the value of quality domain names and as increasingly more commerce moves to the Internet making Internet properties more valuable. These assumptions contain general risks:
What if people don’t get “educated†in a reasonable time? Or get educated oppositely? What if examples like google, amazon, yahoo, ebay, youtube, and myspace inform the public that “quality†domain names don’t matter much?
What if commerce can move to the Internet without making keyword dot coms more valuable?
What if the possibly thousand or more new gTLDs expected in 2009-2010 cause users to get comfortable with using “any TLD†and thus reduce the premium of dot coms?
Got any more?
