http://www.dnjournal.com/newsletters/2008/august.htm
Go ahead and give that page a read then come back to read this article as my response.
I read the article by Duke and it’s fantastic as usual. It highlights perfectly the problems of “domaining” and that is development. Not one word about development from Schwartz. Here is a guy that’s top 10 in our industry. A leader and a showman. Yet in his big speech makes no mention of adding value to domains. As long as guys like that continue to simply park or sell I believe domaining will have a bad reputation.
He mentions a lot about PPC but in reality he is talking about parking. Google won’t kill PPC for sites….but they can easily strangle parking companies. The internet wasn’t built nor has perpetuated based on landing pages to actual legit content sites. Parking companies are just unnecessary middle men that provide a minimal service. They are the pizza delivery boys of the industry. They should not be paid well for their low positions on the ladder of the internet.
While I fully believe domains inherently intrinsic value I do not believe that value should be related to parking PPC. It should be directly related to development potential. Natural traffic is excellent and usable but it’s goal should be content.