For Sale Are Canadian Businesses "Getting It"

[Anthony Ng]

Why don't they just make dot ca available to the world? Only good can come out of this.

Why? Because .CA domains are supposed to serve Canadians in the first place. By making it available to "the world", it will only encourage UNPROPORTIONAL speculation. (Speculation is a fact of life, but too much speculation will hold back healthy growth.)

 

[DropWizard.com]

The first to snap them up if they were unrestricted would be the folks in California...

Yep. It would be possible for us to do lease/rent deals with californian companies and individuals however. The company owning it would then still be canadian.

Might be a great market if anyone decides to try it.

 

[revolution1]

my question about this is when will be the first reported xxx xxx canadian sale.

 

[DropWizard.com]

my question about this is when will be the first reported xxx xxx canadian sale.

There have already been several. If you believe "loudmouth larry" he says he paid that for [censored] himself. Not that I believe him.

 

[revolution1]

well i mean actually reported sales? who is loudmouth larry?

 

[DropWizard.com]

well i mean actually reported sales? who is loudmouth larry?

I'd probably better drop that line I don't want flak from the mods.

 

[Efim247]

And what do you think about LLL's.ca - would we finally see sales to end users for x,xxx- xx,xxx range?
Btw, some of the L-L.ca are still free for registration, it seems strange, while the LLL's sells for 150-200, if compare to .com, the L-L should cost about 30% of that - ~$50, so does we have a great opportunity here?

 

[DomainLobe]

And what do you think about LLL's.ca - would we finally see sales to end users for x,xxx- xx,xxx range?
Btw, some of the L-L.ca are still free for registration, it seems strange, while the LLL's sells for 150-200, if compare to .com, the L-L should cost about 30% of that - ~$50, so does we have a great opportunity here?

I recently rejected an offer of mid-XXXX for a very nice, pronouncable and meaningful LLL.CA after a few low XXX offers.
The game is out there!

L-L.ca should have some value based only on their rarity in a rapidly growing .extension.
I suspect they will make a showing in the next 2-3 years?

 

[MainstreamDomains]

what would be the value of ei.ca ??? as of right now?

 

[Belzibut]

.

 

[revolution1]

Belzibut about your comments:


i too think the growth is a bit slow but better slow and steady than sprint and get winded.

also regarding your observation, or lackthereof, that no dot ca has been promoted to Canadians is a complete fallacy. They are everywhere pick up the Toronto star or watch CTV and you will see hundreds being advertised from consultants to car companies. They all use dot ca. So just keep your eyes peeled.

I am a bit conflicted as to whether or not they should open the extension, i am sure that doing so would make me some quick money but it might also hurt dot ca`s credibility and thus in the end run the value of my names.

At any rate, i am sitting tight for the 1, 000, 000 mark to see what i will do. I sometimes get the urge to post names for sale but the offers i get are ridiculous. BATMAN offered me 100 dollars for bad.ca and i think the offer had a time limit as well. I mean F?%k him the extension is still relativly small but come on...seems to be a lack of dollars out there when searching for a sale, dunno maybe its me maybe i suck at sales but I think the extension needs more people and registrations before people start ponying up the cheddar. And in the end thats what it comes down to, the pro and con people for opening up dot ca are seeing their side of the argument through dollar signs and its the reason we all come back to this forum.

Quite frankly i`d rather be watching porn. Woops that slipped out.

thanks

 

[Jacksplat]

Most domain extensions are available to everyone. Keeping the dot CA Canadian is what is killing the many Canadian online industries.

Canadian Industry is climbing quite high this year. In fact more American industry has been bought out by Canadians than Canadian industry being bought out by Americans. Canadians used to buy quite a large bite of American residence (properties) as well but now are opting into the Western Canadian places between Canmore AB to Golden BC to Revelstoke and so on. I'm out here now in the Construction biz and its a freekin madhouse.

Statistics shows that Canadian prefers to buy / browse from a dot CA because it tells them that the information or product is targeted to them Canadians. If an American or and company in the UK likes to offer their services or products to Canadians it would be best if they could promote via a dot CA and not UK, JP, or US

I cant say I'd click on .us or .jp in search results, but .uk I certainly would. Canadians have close ties to the UK with family, industry, and even kinship. Most industry will make their Canadian Presence through the appropriate channels given by our gov through cira's authority..

I don't know where you see a healthy growth in the Canadian domain industry. It's been over 10 years and a LL.ca sales for less than $15 000. How healthy is that? When a .name or .info domain is worth more than the same name in your Country domain extension something went definitely wrong, especially a big Country like Canada.

The value of a .ca is in fact protected by how we keep it a snug Canadian Presence ccTLD. Opening it up will ruin it. To be honest 15k is a bit much for a LL.ca, I'm still paying 2k (bought three this month or two). Many of us wont sell for the going rate, myself included. Most of us Canuck Domainers know being frugle and having patience will pay off in the long run. There isnt alot of room these days for making 5000% unless your willing to wait. Most every domain I've earned 100-200 times ROI have been over 3 years. I can't say that I've made much more than double over a month (excluding traffic revenue).

Kevin.

 

[StuntPope]

On the .CA market: It is still early in the game, there are still many generic .CA's just waiting to be registered and the drops often contain premiums.

All markets have stages and in .CA we are still in the accumulation phase. This is good news for domainers, not bad news because there are no blockbuster sales being reported in .CA. If you keep a long term view, then the "distribution phase" will be years down the road.

The key difference is that .CA generics do not and will never receive the same kind of type-in as .COM's This isn't the end of the world, I'm one of the people who thinks we're past "Hubbert's Peak" in terms of type-in. The value in .CA portfolios will be built on development and branding.

On CIRA's role as a marketer for .CA is something I always opposed during my time on the CIRA board. My view was (and still is) that the job of marketing .CA as a brand belongs to the registrars. CIRA should just run the registry and stay out of the way. Cut the marketing budget and lower fees.

No amount of CIRA's marketing will make .CA's more appealing. The best thing CIRA can do to make .CA more appealing is to streamline the utterly unfathomable registration process and lose about 96% of the ridiculous 300+ page registrant agreement people are expected to read in order to simply register a name.

I own a CIRA certified and ICANN accredited regsitrar. We have a lot of Canadian customers who don't have their own .CA, they have the .COM but not the .CA and the sole reason they don't register .CA is because the they tried and found the process vexing and pointless. So they just moved on.

Forget marketing, try some usability.

On opening .CA to the rest of the world I think the CPR serves us well from almost every perspective. For Canuck domainers, there is still low hanging fruit to be had, both in terms of available names and TBR drops. Opening it up will accelerate depletion without a lot of upside because it won't drive type-in, it'll just bring in international domainers.

 

[DropWizard.com]

Unfortunately the vast majority of registrars simply don't make enough money to take on the expensive task of promoting the brand. Cira is making millions off the reg DB and putting none of that back in.

If anyone is in a position to promote CIRA is.

What is hubbert's peak??

 

[Belzibut]

Cira should have ads on tv telling Canadian companies about .ca and how it is important to get a smaller nice name than an ugly long dot com name, they should be the one in charge or educating Canadian companies.

The ones presently in charge of promoting .ca to Canadian companies are the designers. I've been designing for 10 years and only in the last few year I started telling my client to buy a dot ca, before no one would have ever promoted a dot ca to their clients. I think still 80% of designers tells their client to get a dot com instead of dot ca for mainly one reason, they are not that bright.

The only reason I'm promoting .ca is because I became really interested in these domains in the last few years otherwise I would still be promoting .com before .ca due to the lack of use from present Canadian companies.

Here is a good one: http://www.vancouver2010.com . This would have been a good opportunity to promote the dot ca in the world. Now how bright do you think the guy in charge of the domain for the olypic is? With their budget, they could have get 2010.ca

I just got braces, makes me cranky.

D.

 

[Zoobar]

NetFirms took out a 1/4 page ad in todays Metro News.

http://www.metronews.ca/uploadedFiles/PDFs/20080227_toronto.pdf
(Business section, page 8. Toronto Edition)

 

[DropWizard.com]

This isn't exactly Canadian business but the example illustrates what we're up against.

The IT manager for a fairly large company in the insurance industry (big bucks) contacted me about a .com domain we own. This domain is the exact generic domain for the industry and around 110,000 companies in north america. They have his picture and bio online. Many degrees etc etc

After establishing that we will consider offers on the domain his second email asked why if we would sell it wasn't it represented by someone like SnapNames??

This is good I thought. At least he knows Snap and must have some clue about domain values. So I write back and say "I don't really need to pay someone to do what I can do already"

Next email: How come we don't have an online presence (web site). So I explain we are a private company and no longer offer our services to the public. I still have the domains but they go to PPC now.

Next email. He's unsure about the sales process and Escrow. So I explain that after we arrive at a price he can open an account with someone like Escrow.com wire the $$$ and then we transfer the domain. Once transferred Escrow sends the $$$ to us.

Today I get an email from him:

"I assume this is for the full sale and rights of the domain? If so, we’d like to bid $150 on the domain."

I already have had solid 4 figure offers on this one and expect it to sell in the 50k range eventually.

Time wasted 2 hours (at least) on email composing. I just sent him a link to the cowboys.com story and a link to dnjournal .

 

[Belzibut]

You should let him know that you'll send him a bill for wasting your time.

At least 80% of the population are idiots
http://cansim2.statcan.ca/cgi-win/cnsmcgi.pgm?Lang=E&SP_Action=Sub&SP_ID=3433

 

[liberator]

Wow, thats all I can say lol talk about a low ball offer!

 

[hugegrowth]

Stories like that remind me how young the domain industry still is.

It's like someone thinking they can buy waterfront property for the price of a candy bar.

Amazing that almost everyone uses the internet, yet so many haven't clued in to the value of a good domain.

Maybe this guy will follow up with a serious offer, hopefully he was just trying a lowball.

NetFirms took out a 1/4 page ad in todays Metro News.
http://www.metronews.ca/uploadedFiles/PDFs/20080227_toronto.pdf
(Business section, page 8. Toronto Edition)

also look at all the ads using .ca's in metro news, including metronews.ca itself. beside the netfirms ads, there are three other ads using .ca's