The pleasure of buying domains
2000 new gTLDs coming! Let’s splurge.
Domain names are about to change. Massively. Hundreds of new generic top-level domains — extensions like .club and .education— are to be released starting now. It’s a good time to tell the tale of a indulgence inherited from the 20th century: buying domains for the sake of it.
Over the years I registered around two dozens of domain names: a few for projects and business use, and the rest just for the pleasure of it. I also leave most of them unused – I even let some of them drop back into the available pool. (I’m sure to be then grabbed by squatter-bots registering everything that was once registered.)
I buy domain names on two occasions:
for a dedicated project, event or community (that makes sense, isn’t it?).
for… well… because sometimes, I feel like spending 5 hours listing words, combining them, looking them up on domai.nr, OVH and all. Because it’s fun to list names. Because buying words is a guilty pleasure.
What does it feel to buy a new domain name? It feels like having a new idea. Buying a domain give you the same excitement, as if making the first step into a wide open valley of interesting possibilities. You list names, you try to be clever, and each one of these names could be something really interesting (or not).
Then, there is this feeling of having found an unearthed nugget — “what, nobody ever thought of registering ilovepuppies.io? It would be crazy to let this opportunity pass!” Oh, indeed it would. Land-grab feeling. I was first.
The other side of this land-grab feeling is the loss-aversion bias. Loss-aversion is a mean trick our emotions does to our rationality. Marketers and landing-page designers believe it’s the key to selling you things you don’t really need.
And it just happens than I’m inclined to pay a small fee to ‘keep’ a domain I just found, because I fear I will lose it forever if I don’t. Which is totally irrational. You see, I never thought of this domain in all my life. Not before actively testing dozens of crazy combinations of words and TLDs.
But now, I don’t want to lose these words I summoned up from the ether. I want them to be mine for all eternity (I’ll let you insert the adequate pop culture reference here. There must be some).
A good name tells a story. A good domain name is both a way to give access to this story, and a fantasy of owning the story all for ourselves.
That’s what makes them so irresistible. It’s a quick and cheap way to feel like I created something great already. I have a title for it! It exists on the web! It exists then. I’m the original author of this. The rest can wait. Ah, one year already? Let’s renew.
What’s the most important domain I ever bought? That’s boring: it’s my full name as a dot com. What domain I regret not having bought? My last name as a dot com. How original.
Still, I’ll keep listing words, imagining projects, and buying improbable domains for non-existing web sites. It beats buying shoes. (betterthan.shoes, anyone?)
