Lately, I have been seeing a lot of new names in the .tv game. This is great news for the .tv extension and an indication that .tv will continue to show strong growth into 2007.

I wanted to write this article as a primer for those who may be new to domaining. I am no expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I think this article should help you avoid the pitfalls and common mistakes made by novices when they fist enter the domain name business, and understand what strategies the experienced .tv domainers are discussing.

This article contains tips, strategies, and techniques to help you acquire a diversified .tv portfolio. It is not meant to be a bible, but is a great place to start: 

As I write this, I realize that I was late to the .tv game.

“In 1998, the Geneva based International Organization of Standards, assignor of country-doe, ‘top level domain’ names on the Internet, assigned .tv to Tuvalu, just as it had dealt .jp to Japan. As a result, Tuvaluans owned that Web address, and could license it for non-Tuvaluans to use.

In 2000, Tuvalu agreed to lease its .tv extension for 12 years to dotTV Corp, an Ideallab company, for close to $50 million in cash, a minority ownership stake in dotTV Corp., and a seat on the company’s board. VeriSign, the company that maintains registries for .com and Dot Net domain names, subsequently bought the dotTV Corporation, which became a wholly owned subsidiary of VeriSign.”

At least this is what I could piece together from my research. 

Has .tv eclipsed .net?  This quote may suggest that Hollywood is willing to embrace .tv over other extensions:

“We had our dot com snatched by squatters; now we are a dot tv. We learned a lot in the past decade, but good stories are still good stories.”

http://losangeles.craigslist.org/wst/tfr/278562712.html

When you purchased your .tv name it was not worth any more than you paid. After all, what something is worth is what someone is willing to pay, nothing more, nothing less.

Now that YouTube transformed the way we view online video and the cost of bandwidth and site development has come down, it is more than likely your .tv names have increased in inherent value. As more and more companies release streaming video sites on the Internet and on .tv, you can expect to receive more and more inquiries about your domain.

Perhaps you already know the price you are willing to accept or you know you want something above a minimum price. Regardless, you probably invested in the .tv market for either speculation or development. The longer you can pay your registration fees and hold the domain, the more it will be worth in the future (assuming the trend continues). Finding the optimal time to sell if you are a speculator, or develop if you are a developer, will depend on how much money you have, how much time you are willing to wait, and what your short term and long term plans are.

I only bring this up because of a recent conversation I had with another .tv developer.

We felt that .tv is now entering, if it is not already in, the second stage of its growth cycle.

The indications are all around us, but we may not realize it until we step away from the activity over the last six months and look closely at what has happened.

YouTube in a matter of two years delivered an average of 1 million streams a day before Google purchased the site.

YouTube is not the only place one can visit to find a library of user created content, but the transaction is a barometer of things to come. 

Some people say the Internet and TV are converging simply because they have heard others say it, but rarely do they see the wheels turning.  When you are involved in this industry, you may or may not get a glimpse of this in action.  However, I continue to notice a trend: The Internet is changing what people do with their free time (and even time at work).  We no longer have the patience to watch as much commercially saturated television; we now enjoy short bursts of entertainment. 

People continue to ask me whether they should expand their domain portfolio to include .mobi domains. My answer is maybe, but only if you acquire good general keywords.

However, they were most likely taken in the first few rounds of the .mobi acquisitions since they were somewhat affordable as compared to .tv keyword names, which are priced as premium names. 

I thought some of you might enjoy this:

Frank Felker is the proprietor of Radio Free Enterprise and is a seasoned marketing veteran who literally sees the complete marketing picture from blogs and the Internet through radio and print. The scary thing is that he has executed well across all those channels.

Visit the site to learn more.

http://www.technosight.com/frank-felker-on-what-video-internet-means-to-biz-owners/