Domaining is an often misunderstood industry so we thought we would take the ‘online real estate’ analogy and see how far we get with it as a method of explaining what it is all about.
If we imagine domaining as a city wide industry it is possible to see parallels to offline events, structures and patterns.
At the center of the city high value properties exist; impressive skyscrapers containing offices, apartments and on the ground floor shops. The offices are the high value single word or three letter domains as used by companies or individuals, often purchased early on before domain names (or the property prices) became out of reach. The ground floor commercial areas are the generic type in domain names, Sport.co.uk Music.co.uk Poker.co.uk Clothes.co.uk etc. these are properties where whatever is inside people will always end up due to their location.
Moving further out it becomes more common to see individual ownership of decent properties but they often lack the location of the prime real estate. Bob Jones cannot afford Bob.com so ‘makes do’ with BobJones.com , likewise another Bob resorts to BobJamesJones.com . A growing trend in domain registration is to choose screen name domains, so BobJones76.com would be the equivalent of buying a green field on the edge of town and building your own home due to high prices and also lack of available land closer in.
As with real estate, some areas rise and fall in popularity depending on redevelopments or the kind of people living and working there. Recently .TV has been ‘redeveloped’ into a media based social networking extension, likewise new land (.info .mobi) is newly zoned and those who are not able to get into the city center move in at a small premium hoping that the area becomes very popular and grows into a rival center.
The owners of domains also mirror offline property owners quite closely. The city center is owned by corporations, financial institutions and very rarely individuals yet newer land is often quite diverse, yet the core services is often pre-allocated before development to ensure big businesses protect their interests. In domaining terms this is often the sunrise period in launches, the offline version of making sure big brands are included in any development.
Without stretching the analogy too far it could be said the search engines are very much like transport links. Google is the taxi company that moves people into specific areas on request. The rail network is the type in traffic, it heads one way into the city as people vaguely know what they are after and have a vague idea where it is located.
Typo traffic domains are like the Keith’s Fried Chicken outlets in the dodgier areas of town, it may say KFC above the door but it certainly is not Colonel Sanders cooking inside.
How far does this stretch? Use the comments below to add some more Domainer City analogies 
