A new study by the Oklahoma Technical University reveals that Rick Schwartz was being rather optimistic about the quality of domains owned by the average Joe Domainer.
Back in September, Rick blogged about how “75% of domainers should drop all of their domains.”
The reference was of course to “pigeon shit” domains, a term coined by the Domain King to define domain names of really poor quality.
“We worked with several domain parking companies and ran a test against aggregate data”, said professor Kilmer Johnsen of the IT department of the Oklahoma Technical University.
“The average test run involved domain lists that were compared to dictionary entries and the results are quite shocking”, said professor Johnsen.
It appears that only 10.5% of those domains parked at various parking companies such as Sedo, Parked, Bodis, Domain Sponsor and even Internet Traffic were of any serious quality. The rest is pigeon shit.
In a nutshell: most domainers own and park pigeon shit domains that generate little sustaining revenue.
“It’s impossible to determine whether part time domainers go after bad names because they are the only ones left, or if the average IQ of part time domainers is lower than 100”, said professor Johnsen. “We will continue our research with larger samples into 2012 as well”.
The 89.5% figure is an astounding indication that a lot of money is being wasted into domains, all while it could be invested in various other beneficial projects, such as the colonization of Mars or human cloning.
Many domains are misspelled by intention, As 3+ domain owner, I have one that is my own word, another one that is in Hebrew to English (Ivrit), and another one that combines that number 4 instead of “For”, so judging by dictionary is really impossible.
A supposedly serious study of domain value that uses only parking revenue as the primary source of empirical data is doomed to start.
Parking revenue has pretty much proven itself as being the worst possible method to truly create revenue for a domain name.
Develop, develop, develop.