If you’ve not heard about the shot around the world known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and all it impacts, then where have you been?

GDPR is now less than a month away (May 25, 2018), and has greatly impacted a number of entities, both personal and business, worldwide, especially domain registrars.

What is looming in growing uncertainty is how ICANN will respond accordingly to the impact of GDPR on Whois services — which are used by a number of registries, registrars, domain investors and the general public to conduct business on a daily.

Domain valuation conversations are likely the most spirited and opinionated conversations one can witness or engage in with industry professionals.

Even closing in on 30 years since the early 90’s digital gold rush for sacred .com domains, there are a wide range of formulas and methods tossed around to gauge a domain’s valuation.

From the Rosener Equation to search traffic estimation to type-in traffic to cost-per-lead to cost-per-click to revenue multiples, there are countless ways for one to calculate a domain’s worth.

Most likely everyone investing in domains has a hope and dream to realize substantial ROI for their domain portfolio.

And if you don’t, then you might need to consider your motive for domain investing in the first place. 🙂

I’m not going to tell you that you can or can’t make a reasonable amount of money buying and selling domains.

The truth is, domain investors can make money, lose money or do a combination of both, hopefully more of the former and less of the latter. 😉

Not much has changed with the domain name search experience since the early days of the internet.

The process in and of itself is timeless in general. I mean, a person either has a dream or idea about launching a website of some sort, and they visit a domain registrar of their choice to verify domain availability.

If the .com domain is taken (which is highly likely these days), then searchers likely append or prepend words or letters, in some cases they add hyphens or dashes, or get cute with adding or removing an assortment of letters to create a brandable domain.

Nevertheless, searchers spend quite a bit of time searching and hoping their domain of choice is available while using a less than stellar domain name search user experience.

While attending NamesCon 2018, I attended a Tools Talk (Why Searching For A Domain Name Sucks) given by Tony Kim, Chief Marketing Officer of Hexonet, that outlined Hexonet’s three-pronged strategy for transforming the future of the domain name search experience.

It’s been a little over a month since I attended and shared my NamesCon experience as a first-time attendee.

One of the most talked about presentations from day three of NamesCon was Paul E. Nicks’, GM of GoDaddy, keynote: Lessons Learned from Operating the Most Valuable Portfolio in the World.

But what you might not know or heard about was the very lively breakout session focused on domain appraisals: Mastering Aftermarket Appraisals.

Traversing the domain industry to find your place under the sun can be quite challenging, especially when your a newcomer.

There are many casualties and carcasses along the domaining journey to learn from or join. YIKES! 😳

One doesn’t have to blindly throw money down the drain purchasing ill-advised domains.

In fact, you’re likely better off attending a few conferences and touching base with experienced domainers BEFORE  spending a dime on domains.

And speaking of conferences, I recently attended NamesCon 2018. I met with a number of domain investors and industry professionals throughout the conference.

Now that the NamesCon dust has settled, I’m eagerly looking forward to attending a few additional conferences in 2018.

Having already registered and made arrangements to attend NameSummit in New York at The Westin, Times Square August 6th through the 7th, I received a Google calendar reminder to make sure I registered for MERGE! 2018.