Solomon Amoako’s keynote talk at NamesCon 2016
Solomon Amoako, Chief Sales Officer at Sedo.com, was thrilled to address so many familiar faces in the crowd for his NamesCon 2016 keynote: “It’s a testament to what we are and what we stand for as an organization.”
“The secondary marketplace is alive and well,” said Amoako. What’s going on with Sedo’s business is indicative of overall domain name industry activity. In 2015, Amoako saw China surge in domain transactions, with an eleven-fold growth in involvement in domain buying and selling.
“Last year, we all celebrated thirty years of .com. That’s a big deal. They are the crux of the secondary marketplace… I know what most of you folks are thinking,” Amoako said with a laugh, “I am not kissing ass!” He added, “.com is king today, but we want more.” He wants to see brokers as excited as other TLDs as they are about .com.
“Dare I say, it’s not .com versus other TLDs.” The new gTLDS are our greatest opportunity to educate the world, Amoako said. Calling this the “Not-Com Revolution”, saying that “we’re educating on online identity.”
“We’re not competing against one another,” he said: “We have a responsibility to educate that consumer.” With over 3.2 billion Internet users online today, “there’s more than enough food for everybody to eat.”
The four main elements of a worthy extension (“Yeah, I said it: worthy extensions!”) are market, price, easy integration, and consumer education. Market is easy to explain: does the domain resonate with a particular community or group? Think .miami, .sexy, .blog, .ninja.
Price-wise, historically people said “let’s create pricing similar to the pricing .com had.” Higher-priced domains also emerged, but some vanished without a trace because they were priced too high.
Who and What We Are
“People need to learn the thinking,” said Amoako regarding the consumer education element of his formula. The dot-brand emergence will happen, he said, “but we can’t wait. As individuals we have to do something.”
Amoako said that awareness is growing: his dad asks him less often what he actually does for a living. His kids know what gTLDs are. (This experience echoes that of Uniregistry CEO Frank Schilling.) That responsibility of which he speaks, he said, is to become evangelists for the exciting opportunities that await domaining professionals and potential customers alike.
NamesCon in Full Swing
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