DNHeadlines Exchange

The other day, a domainer friend of mine with whom I had recently had a conversation about the value of hyphenated domains forwarded to me the article on Elliot’s Blog about the Castello Brothers making some of their geo domains available, starting with the hyphenated “Caracas-Venezuela.com”. My interest was piqued by both the BIN value ($7,500) and the resulting feedback, and the fact that “Boise-Idaho.com” sold for $65,000 a few years ago, although I couldn’t find that in a quick search.

I thought I’d take a few minutes to remind myself of what was available to register in the hyphenated geo arena, so I started with the US and city-state.com combos. Since I was away at the time and caught without my notebook (which has all my domain spreadsheets on it) I had to resort to trying to find available city-state combos manually on iWhois.com, and to my surprise, on my 5th try (a random city that popped into my head), I found an available domain – “Hartford-Connecticut.com”. I ran it through Google Keywords to see the kind of search attention it received and the result is 301,000 broad searches and 74,000 exact searches – not bad numbers at all.

So, even though the article on Elliot’s Blog tends to support my feelings about hyphens, I must still take it and all other pro-hyphen articles with a grain of salt, in that this blog post in particular is for a domain sale and I can’t let others influence my domain purchases, but I tend to agree with their views, and frankly, for the registration fee, I was willing to throw caution to the wind. A quick look on Castello site ccin.com shows a huge number of hyphenated domains on their home page, although the “big ticket” domains are not hyphenated (the ones with logos).

What amazes me is that there are plenty of domainers around registering and investing in / developing geo domains, especially these days as geo domains seems to be getting more and more attention, but when an article like this one on Elliot’s Blog comes out, there aren’t any domainers around suitably inspired to bother running a city/state spreadsheet into GoDaddy’s bulk registration tool to see if any domains are available, just for shits n’ giggles.

Now that I am at home, I’ve run the top 200 cities and the largest US cities and their corresponding states through GoDaddy, and none are available; no dotCNO’s or dotINFO, it seems this was the only one, unless someone ran the list in last two days and just thought that Hartford wasn’t worth it to register.

To all, may I say “thanks” for not bothering to take it.