Let’s say you’re currently starting up in the cooking school business in Los Angeles. If you were you might wish you had thought of doing so a long time ago because back in the 1990s you could have snagged the domain cookinginstruction.com. Of course, here and now in 2010 that domain is long gone … or is it?
Turns out that some of these highly prized “generic” domains are available for localized use through a service called RootOrange, a service that routes requests for one of their managed domain names by geolocation.
If you owned a compelling generic domain name such as cookinginstruction.com then by contracting with RootOrange and changing your domain records to make RootOrange’s DNS server authoritative for your domain, you could be on to an interesting and potentially very lucrative business. RootOrange would sell six or 12 month leases for redirection for a particular geographic area and voila! The companies that lease the redirection of each area would be paying you a fee.
For the domain cookinginstruction.com in the Los Angeles area the fee would be a very reasonable $19 per month. Given that there are over 360 metropolitan areas in the U.S. the owner of cookinginstruction.com could be looking at a potential revenue of more than $82,000 per year!
That sounds great but consider the potential for one of the most valuable domain names in existence, attorney.com, a domain that RootOrange has a special arrangement with. This could be worth millions per year!
Currently the service is still in beta release and exploring some of the domains they currently manage such as yogaclasses.com reveals a surprisingly lame framing of the redirected domain; a navigation bar at the top of the page that allows you to change location (not bad) as well as the offer “Are you trying to reach customers in Los Angeles CA? / Make ‘yogaclasses.com’ yours today” along with a “Lease it now” button all delivered in bright red on a grey background (awful!). This is a hideous and amateurish presentation totally at odds with what I would expect for such a clever idea. Given that this localized domain is leased for $99 per month and if I were the lessee, I wouldn’t be too thrilled to be sharing my branding.
The value of being associated with the domain is obviously dependent on the quality of search engine optimization of all of the lessees and that’s an aspect that I’ve not found any commentary on yet.
Even so, given that over 80% of all Internet searches are for local resources this is a very powerful business concept and one that could prove to be a huge business for RootOrange. Definitely a service to watch.
