Silicon Palms was incorporated in Florida on 9.9.99 and has always been the culmination of my desire to become financially independent from the proceeds of web design, development, and marketing. My first company OffshoreNet was the precursor of the dream but the company name was misleading and stereotyped me too much. To this day OffshoreNet is one of my favorite projects and a component of the Silicon Palms cyber estate developer network.
I always thought that the term “cyber estate” would have caught on to become a part of our lexicon, like cyber space, web surfing and virtual malls etc… because of the direct comparison to “real estate” however I think everyone understand what it means, it’s just not commonly used. My own belief is that Domains have a value and the more exact to a specific or generic term they are, the more intrinsic value they hold. Then like all real estate, the more improvements made to the property the higher the likely resale value.
In the late 90’s Domain auctions and over-hyped Domain name sales grabbed all the attention of the business media. I was at the middle of some major stories, such as being the webmaster of a site that brokered the sale of Autos.com at $2.2M in less than 30 days, which triggered articles in WSJ And LA Times, which caused hundreds of emails of enquires, leading to thousands of listed for sale Domains and the birth of the secondary Domain name market, or at least the explosion of the said market, since it had already existed for several years and still thrives to this day. Well it was short lived, the explosion in prices anyway, popped when the dot-com bubble popped. Exciting none the less.
My approach to cyber estate development is now more pragmatic vs my auction cars review. The value of a Domain is more related to the website that resides on the Domain, the value of that website is related to the traffic or unique users, and the value of the traffic is related to the amount of money derived from the sales of products and or services to the visitors or from advertising revenue sold to a third party. Yes a great Domain name has value, especially if it wins lots of traffic from search engines because it matches a commonly searched for keyword phrase, such as “invest offshore” but if the website has no pages in the search engines then some other publisher will win those seekers.
The secret to success with cyber estate development and making money online from website publishing is to remember that even Rome was not built in a day.
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