Here is some interesting information about the .in domaining space. .in domains became available for registration only in 2005 (there was .co.in before that, which is less popular now) and all the top names are taken by several individuals/organizations.

There are currently around 400k-500K .in domains registered. For comparison .asia which just started recently has a similar number of registrations and is perceived by many domainers as “quite useless” and .ca domains have just crossed 1 Million registrations.

Indian economy is growing fast and many companies are eager to establish their online presence. Only about 6% of Indian population have internet access and the potential for growth here is enormous. While the prices are still quite low it provides an excellent investment opportunity.

.in domains can be registered by anyone, no Indian presence required (in contrary to for example .ca domains, which are only for Canadian residents).

Cybersquatters beware .in registry imposes very strict rules to protect trademark owners. Offenders may face very high legal charges and fees.

The highest reported sale for .in domain so far was poker.in for $60K (check other high sales here), which to a western person makes perfect sense, but in fact poker is not popular at all in India so the may actually be much harder to monetize than it seems. As usually there are many high value unreported .in sales and the end user interest is quite high in these.

There are no 1-2 character .in domains, but the LLL.in and NNN.in are quite popular and are traded a lot. Premium LLL.in domains reach around $60-100 minimum prices and in my opinion they represent one of the best investment opportunities now. We’ve seen in .com, net, .org and even in .ca domains how 3 letter domains grow in price on the reseller market and have very good end user potential due to many possible acronyms. Indian domaining space is expected to grow significantly over the years and the value of these names should skyrocket!

Some historical registrations figures, available from INregistry

• Feb 17, 2005 - 24,000 domain names registered on first day
• Feb 21, 2005 - 75,000
• April 05, 2005 - 100,000
• Nov 7, 2006 - 200,000

Generic and GEO .in domains are almost impossible to get now as most are owned by several entities below.

• Indiaportals.org own an amazing portfolio, including some of the best generics. The best among these can easily go for 5 and even low 6 figures.
  bakery.in
bank.in
bar.in
beauty.in
books.in
box.in
buy.in
call.in
card.in
care.in
casino.in
casinos.in
cell.in (more…)

LLLL.com Drops Reduce according this this graph posted over at namepros by Ergo

(click the  image for full page picture)

The reducing number of dropping LLLL.com’s should have a positive effect on the market pricing, because there will be less 4L domains on auctions while the demand stays the same, prices are expected to rise faster.

A great post from Lord:

This is My True Story

There was a time when I was extremely frustrated with my domaining business. I was seeing people sell domains for hundreds of thousands of dollars and yet I had so many domains which no one was willing to pay even registration fee for, let aside thousands. What was worse was that I was not making much money in parking either.

Whenever I saw the domain-sales charts I would cringe. What was I doing wrong? Was there a fault in my investment strategy? I had to do something about it or simply get out of domaining business. It was a do-or-die situation for me.

There is another thing — I hate failing.

So, I sat-back to take a rational look at my investment strategy and find out what was wrong with it. And very soon I did. (more…)

Check out this recent DNF thread

Who Really Knows?
I go against all the “rules” here for buying domain names. I get super long names (3-4 words my norm), often with hyphens and always a .org or .net. In the appraisal section, my names always get no response, 0 or “reg fee” values.

For instance, I offer up my watch-videos.net, a name everyone here said was a dog. And I agree. What’s to like? But somehow, someway…well, here are its last 6-month stats at parked.com:
Domain Name Clicks Revenue
watch-videos.net 2,751 $196.75

And I’ll share these few more examples of modest parking successes.
Domain Name Clicks Revenue (6-month parking stats)
stateboardofequalization.org 184 $209.58
equalemploymentopportunitycommission.org 61 $194.58 (more…)

Update: bidding up to $500K now, reserve seems to be $800K

Pizza.net at TDNam at 420K, 4 days left and reserve not met yet.

I do NOT believe this.. I could see the .com going at that price, but the .net? Looks much like shill bidders trying to capitalize on the big pizza.com slice. As long as the reserve not met it doesn’t count. We’ll see if it’s true or not, my bet is it won’t sell. The description also says:

The ORIGINAL Pizza Search Engine It includes 60k pizza restaurants, Prior art to Microsoft’s zip code patent

But that doesn’t add much value. The site looks quite simple, you could get a similar one built for a couple hundred bucks with the ready database.

View the pizza.net discussion on DNF for more info

Either way good luck to the seller.

Our programmers just finished this, check out the new small site on Mind Reading

Nothing big yet, just a flash game, but I have bigger development plans for it so this is just a placeholder.

Eventually I’d like to build it into a Mind Reading related community, with discussion boards, lots of free material and selling ebooks and other stuff. Hopefully I can get to it soon.

Any suggestions and comments are welcome.

Hey all,

If you haven’t noticed I’ve been adding and testing some wordpress plugins and additions to the blog.

So far added:

• Related posts plugin to show related posts under each post with excerpt
• Show Top Commentators - to show top visitors of the blog that left most comments this month
• Subscribe to comments - to let my readers subscribe to comments for individual posts in order to track responses to their comments.
• AutoTag - creates tags based on yahoo keywords. These tags are then used to extract the related posts.

I’d appreciate any feedback and tips on new plugins to add.

This is the first of a series of interviews with different domainers intended to let everyone express their views, opinions and share their experience.

I think it will be interesting for most domainers to see how their fellows are doing. If you’d like to get interviewed feel free to contact. Domainers with all levels of experience will be given an equal chance here. (more…)

In this new section I’m planning to post a series of interviews with other domainers.

Unlike other Interviewers I’m not going after the domaining celebrities, but rather much smaller scale domainers and domain professionals like the average readers of my blog in order to give everyone a fair chance to express their opinions and share their views on the industry.

You’ll get to see domaining through the eyes of various people with different domain portfolios and experiences, as well life backgrounds. An unbiased and straight forward approach to domaining by a wide range of domain investors from the newcomers to experienced professionals.

I received several inquires lately from people interested in being interviewed and
some interviews are being prepared now. If you are reading this and you are interested in getting interviewed feel free to contact me by pming on DNforum or Namepros (My username: Michael_Goldman), or by sending an email to ‘contact’ at this domain.

stay tuned for more updates and the interviews

ICQ.ca in now at auction in Pool.com with current high offer $2302 and over 3 days to go.

Now obviously this LLL.ca domain is only that valuable due to the popular IM program with the same name. So it’s very likely that icq.ca has some very good type in traffic that can let the owner make the money back in just a few months.

But the problem is ICQ is a trademark, which now belongs to AOL. Even if the domain icq.ca will be used for something unrelated to the icq brand AOL can claim it and most likely receive the domain. (more…)