There’s no way to sugar-coat it, today we are an industry divided

2017 marks my tenth year in the domain industry. Ten years ago I had real money to invest for the first time in my life; I was 25 at the time. Instead of investing in mutual funds (which was what my Dad wanted me to do) or real estate (which is what all my friends were doing), I took all of my savings and put it into domain names.

I’ll be honest, in the beginning I felt like it was probably the biggest mistake I had ever made in my life. I lost almost all of my life savings – yes, like most new Domainers I bought a lot of junk. Note that at the age of 25 your life savings isn’t a lot of money, still, putting all of it into domains felt like taking my nest egg and exchanging it for magic beans.

Fast forward to today and I couldn’t be more grateful to have put my money into domain names, it changed my life forever. At the same time, today the industry is more divided than ever. I can still remember my first TRAFFIC Conference, it was back in 2010 in Las Vegas.

Honestly attending my first conference was like meeting all of your favorite celebrities all at once. It was overwhelming. The first morning Ron Jackson invited me to breakfast and I sat with Rick Schwartz, Howard Neu, Ron Jackson, I got goose bumps, it was amazing.

Now, with new gTLDs dominating the industry news we are an industry divided. We’ll get through it but it’s a bit sad to see. What I always appreciated about the domain industry is that it was a small group of people united by a common passion. Today, we’re just not united in the same way, not matter how you slice it we are arguing with each other like it’s going out of style.

That being said, argument is good, sharing opinions is important, and I’m actually glad in many ways this is happening. Still I do hope that a year or two from now we can come together again because one thing I can tell you is that we’re all a lot more similar than we are different. Or at least I’d like to think that we are.

What do you think? Comment and let your voice be heard!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton