2006-03-27 thoughts on the possible sale of redhouse.com
Ethical Ramblings
The idea of selling redhouse.com put me into a bit of a quandary, because I really hate domain squatters – that is, people who buy up a useful-sounding domain when it is available, put up a token web site (usually a search engine with pay-per-click links from Google or whatever), and then resell the domain at an exorbitant price (in the hundreds or thousands of dollars). It basically prices many desirable domains out of the reach of small businesses and individual entrepreneurs who are just testing the waters to see if a concept will fly, and (meanwhile) ties these domains to sites which might be charitably described as redundant fluff.
As a result of my annoyance with this, I typed up a Domain Resale Code of Ethics back in July 2005, wherein I wrote that "The sale price should not be in excess of twice the amount invested in the domain's registration (i.e. the initial registration plus renewal fees)" seemed like a "pretty definite should-be rule".
Faced now with the possibile reality of reselling a much-used domain of my own, however, things look a little different.
First, there's the money and work invested in the site which was at redhouse.com and the money and work invested in the name "Red House Media". Both of those items make me think "wait a minute, shouldn't it be worth more than standard wholesale markup?" However, neither of these things has much commercial value at this point, and any value which was salvageable has been ported to other places.
Second, there's the thought "but what if I need a nice, short, memorable domain name again?" When I write it out like that, it seems silly; there are still memorable and reasonably short domains out there; you just have to be a bit more inventive these days. So this one basically comes down to being a packrat, which I will confess to ;-)
Third, and more relevantly, there's the thought "but hey, I got into this whole internet thing really early on, and snagged (for $100, during a time when cash was very scarce for me) a domain which other people now want. Shouldn't I get some reward for that foresight, especially if it is well worth it to someone else?" In other words, shouldn't it be okay to charge whatever the market will bear?
If I sell the domain at a fixed price, then either (a) nobody will want to buy it (unlikely) or (b) more than one party will want to buy it, and how do you decide between them?
Assuming (b), what I could do is set a price, get proposals from each party interested in the domain, and then award the domain to the best proposal – but this would have two negative effects: (1) the interested parties might well become less interested as a result of this requirement (which might well come across as high-handed), and (2) I would be doing more work in order to get less money.
Auctioning is beginning to look more and more like a reasonable, even ethical, compromise between ideal principles and practicality. Perhaps the Code of Ethics should impose some kind of time limit on holding onto a domain if you're not going to do anything with it, but that discussion belongs back in on the Code of Ethics page.
In the end, I think the only thing that still makes me feel a bit reluctant is that redhouse.com was, in a weird way, my online "home" for such a long time. I had extensive personal pages and several time-consuming projects hosted there, nick@redhouse.com was my email address for many years, and of course it reminds me of living and working at The Red House (which wasn't always a happy thing, but definitely had its good bits) – in other words, nostalgia. I think I've convinced myself that it's not worth clinging to at this point, however.
Other Notes
Part of the reason it took me so long to come around to thinking seriously about selling redhouse.com was technical:
- it was set up as the primary domain of the dedicated server I use, and I wasn't sure if the control panel would work without the domain (it does, yay!)
- There were still some pages getting substantial traffic on redhouse.com, and I wanted to move the contents elsewhere and redirect those pages so as not to lose that traffic (the hardest parts of this have now been done).
There's still some cleanup to do, as of this writing... and I need to make sure I specify in any sales agreement that the redirects should remain in place for some amount of time after the sale.