Catching Trends Before they Blow Up

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Catching Trends Before they Blow Up

Saturday, July 19, 2008

It’s easy to get caught up in hype and get all excited about an idea that you think will be the next big thing online. The problem is, by the time you hear about it, a lot of times it’s too late to act upon it.

I was reading an article in an old Domainers Magazine about investing in profitable ccTLDs. Frank Shilling, a highly successful domainer with millions invested in his properties, stated that the domaining industry is becoming gentrified. Large VC firms and hedge fund investors are now taking note in the value of online assets which is pumping the value of the properties held by first generation domainers. One of the more controversial “golden rules” of online marketing is that you need to have first movers advantage to really profit from a new idea or trend. A lot of us jump in early at every profitable opening that we see, we don’t invest the proper amount of time to exploit the effort and we jump out as become discouraged and enticed by the next big thing.

However, as Frank pointed out, first movers advantage does help, the rich will always get richer, but exposure and publicity allow MMO efforts to remain profitable as they head into the the long tail. For example, in domaining, quality, industry specific domains that lend well to the online arena have always commanded top dollar. Purchasing a domain like cars.com, sex.com or even something plain like “walkers.com” is going to be a 8,7 or 6 six figure investment respectively. What the general public doesn’t understand is that ccTLDs and platform specific TLD’s (like .mobi) can still command a good 6 figure sell price. If the domain industry didn’t garner the attention and participiation that it has today, this wouldn’t be possible. The more eyeballs you have monitoring something, the more profitable it becomes. Domaining is often compared to the real estate market since it is in a since a “virtual property”, but as investors build domain portfolios, we know have a currency exchange on our hands, a stock market if you will.

As I mentioned in my about me page, I often catch myself losing focus and getting caught up in the next big trend. The ”Crazy Catch by Ball Girl” viral video post on my blog received over 1,000 uniques this month as a result of one small digg comment that was later deleted. I tried to spike traffic again in a similar trend post (the one just before this) and failed miserably. I even took a risk and posted something that could be seen as controversial, knowing controversy sells. In this case, it didn’t.

The moral of the story (for those of us with morals remaining) is that jumping after trends will leave you empty handed. You need to make a solid investment of time and money into your efforts to make money online (and in life for that matter). Get rich quick is always appealing, no matter how many times we fail at it. So it’s back to the grind. I promised a projects post on a few MMO blogs earlier and I didn’t come through w/ it. I’ll try to get that up by the end of this weekend. I hinted at it in an early post… it’s related to proven methods to make small amounts of money on a reoccurring basis. We will see how it works out, but the lure has been cast and I’ll continue to throw bait out there (just maybe not jail bait).