All .us zip codes taken by one co.

[sevent]

In case you missed the DNJournal newsletter there is a story here:

http://www.dnjournal.com/newsletters/2006/september.htm

Do you think this was a smart purchase?

Approx 43,000 zips times $7 = about $300,000. That's a significant renewal bill for .US names, no?

And they say nothing about promoting! It seems like both these guys and Marchex are basically saying "we will build it and they will come", but their landers are just OK, nothing special. And do people really automatically type-in lots of zip codes. Is that really the best strategy? Are they doing other numeric owners a favor or a disadvantage by just putting up a lander on TENS OF THOUSANDS of numerics and waiting for things to happen?

[Tia Wood]

Hopefully they will develop them into something that has to do with business and/or community.

[Onward]

I've been on the internet for over 10 years and I have never entered zipcodes into the browser as a .com, .net, or .org

If anything I may look up a zipcode on a search engine for a certain location I am trying to send something to...

For locations I would type in the 'city'.com or 'state'.com, but not the zipcode...

maybe with the proper marketing...zipcodes would work, but it is not intuative for me.

[sevent]

I've been on the internet for over 10 years and I have never entered zipcodes into the browser as a .com, .net, or .org

If anything I may look up a zipcode on a search engine for a certain location I am trying to send something to...

For locations I would type in the 'city'.com or 'state'.com, but not the zipcode...

maybe with the proper marketing...zipcodes would work, but it is not intuative for me.

That's just what I'm getting at here. If you own 100% or even 80% of the market (like Marchex) that's great, but what is the market? The entire .US zip code market right now I would bet is worth a few thousand dollars per year in PPC, maybe .com is worth 10x that. This market isn't going to grow by itself, by magic. The general .com market didn't, LLL.com didn't, even NNN.com didn't grow just because it was there. These things grew because big players spent millions (billions!) to develop and promote sites on these properties.

Ownling every zip code is like owning every acre of property on an island. Unless you develop AND PROMOTE that island into a Macau or Hong Kong it is just as worthless as acres on other islands of the same size with very few visitors.

[fundraiser]

The domains are part of a directory / search project requested by the US Department of Commerce and is a partnership between Neustar (operator of the US registry) and Vendare Media. It is one of several initiatives included in the last contract between Neustar and the DoC designed to increase the use of the dot us name space for commerce and e-government services and to make it a more recognized public resource.

I doubt any fees are being paid for the use of the domains as they remain reserved by the registry as a public resource.