There is a *must read* interview with Frank Schilling over at SEOBook (If you are wondering why the hell you should care, Frank’s domain portfolio rakes in $20 million a year.) This guy knows domain names and he puts his money where his mouth is. This quote stuck out to me — “if you build the world’s biggest ceiling fan company at fanhub.com and then you want to acquire ceilingfans.com .. it is going to get much more expensive as time goes by. Names like those are going to be worth millions one day, so the time to acquire them is when they seem cheapest and unimportant to you.”

Even if you don’t share the same .com optimism you may want to consider holding on to those names that get type-ins. $4,000 today might be a fraction of what you can get 10 years from now.

Frank is posts a lot on his blog. Here is another good quote from today — “In 5 -10 years the largest commercial registrants (domain-name based media companies) will probably be the retail registrars themselves. Like a casino in charge of the count room, the house always wins.” Why? To grab dropped domain names.

Consider this: Registerfly sucked for years. Their user interface was buggy. Domain names users renewed didn’t review. Their customer service was all but useless in the 12 months proceeding their execution by ICANN. Registerfly was a reseller for eNom. eNom was purchased by Demand Media. One of the domains I lost in the Registerfly mess is currently sitting on a parked PPC page with registrant data resolving to eNom. That was a single domain. Now imagine this on a very large scale.

So what do you need to know? Good domain names will probably be worth more than you think and sometimes it is in your domain registrar’s best interest for you domain renewals to fail.

Have a good weekend.