There are nearly 4.75 billion people connected via the Internet worldwide. That’s nearly 60 percent of the world’s population.

Once limited to the physical location where we reside, the Internet has vastly opened the door for everyone to connect with one another around the globe with a few simple keystrokes.

The Internet, especially search engines, has forever changed the way we live and do business. In fact, most of us now use Google, Bing, or Baidu our way through daily living. But have you heard of The Bulgarian Search Engine?

If you’re like most domain investors, especially those driven by emotion, participating in expiring domain auctions is likely a rollercoaster experience, to say the least.

It’s the thrill of watching seconds tick off only to be outbid at the last moment and the clock reset. Or maybe the back-and-forth nature of auctions brings you an adrenaline rush and not the given name.

Whatever the case may be, if you are an emotion-driven or emotionless data-driven domain investor, I would like to share a simple tool with you to help gauge and value a domain name based on the number of registered extensions.

The domain industry chartered into the new and virtual territory by debuting the first-ever digital investors’ online conference sponsored by Dan.com: TheDomainShow.com.

Its Founder and Executive Producer, Page Howe, is no stranger to the industry, investing in domains for 20+ years, having sold 5,000+ domains (most notably sold Seniors.com for $1.8M), and once known for his domain tip sheets, emoji domain investing, and occasional DomainSherpa appearances through the years.

As all eyes were on Page and the team, industry professionals eagerly awaited and anticipated the shift from a paid in-person to a free virtual conference experience spanning three days, July 23-25.

There were many questions to be answered from the time it was announced in early April:

• What would be the format of the show?
• Who and want would be presented?
• Would sessions be live, pre-recorded, or both?
• How would the show address time zone challenges?
• and many more…

The Chinese Domain Market is likely to be daunting or mysterious to understand, to say the least, especially if the only information consumed is Western-based domain investing.

Since entering into domain investing in late 2012, I’ve stumbled upon sites — 4.cn and ename.com — dedicated to domain buying and selling in China.

Personally, I’ve never quite understood the ins and outs of domain buying and selling in the Chinese Domain Market in great clarity, if any at all, even after making 2 4-figure sales during the 4L .com craze, as known as the Chinese domain bubble.

No need to fear though if you too are in the dark about understanding the Chinese domain market.

Almost a full decade since the “new gTLDs”, now simply referred to as gTLDs, have made their dubious debut in promising to offer exponentially more domain options than that of saturated legacy domain extensions — so some think.

While many arguments have been made for and against the release of gTLDs, there have been just as many cases made for and against investing and developing the same domain extensions.

It’s hard to believe that another year has come and gone, and with it, a decade too.

The sky is the limit in 2020, and the future is quite bright for all aspects and persons in the domain industry.

It’s that time of the year to look back to see how those lofty predictions actually turned out.

For 2019, I made 9 predictions pertaining to domain sales, new domain extensions, bloggers, conferences, and the overall economics of the domain industry in general.