This post began as a response I received in the comments section of the recent post about the sale of the premium domain name TheMedicalSupplyStore.com.
Jaime from DotWeekly.com took exception to my use of the term “premium” in describing the post about the medical supply store domain.
Jaime’s comment read:
Just because a domain makes some $$ from PPC parking doesn’t make it “Premium”. The likely hood of it getting “direct navigation” are extremely minimal. Was it getting some traffic, yes it could but they were likely coming from links and not direct navigation.
I just do not want people to get the idea of a domain name with an “extra word” like The is premium. Now if the domain was MedicalSupplyStore.com, that is a little different story.
Congrats on the sale btw.
My response to his comment became a bit lengthy as I explained the rational as to why TheMedicalSupplyStore.com is in fact a “premium domain name”, and how the domaining landscape has changed in the aftermath of the death of domain parking.
Without further adieu, my response goes as follows:
Jaime,
The term “premium domain name” is completely relative. In the case of this domain, a quick Google query revealed 28.5 million results for the term ‘the medical supply store’ without quotations, and a whopping 82,000 pages containing the exact phrase “the medical supply store” with quotations.
The name is 100% generic and quite specific. Among the top-20 or so results are several different companies each operating under that same very name. These companies sell medical supplies. Most of the people searching for these companies online are looking to buy medical supplies. When you combine the keywords (which are phenomenal), the search density (180,000 exact or nearly-identical searches monthly according to Google), and the commercial viability of the term/phrase, this has every component of a premium domain name.
The days of parking are over. The defining characteristics of a premium domain name are increasingly boiling down to the search volume of the word(s) in the domain, the commercial value of those searches and the usefulness for SEO purposes of the domain post-development. As a developed website, this domain (themedicalsupplystore.com) has an inside edge on more than 100,000 monthly searches conducted by people looking for a medical supply store, most likely with the intent on purchasing something.
The domain does (or at least did under my ownership) receive a significant amount of direct navigation traffic, likely from people searching for a specific medical supply store in their respective hometowns that goes by the same name (“The Medical Supply Store”).
I tend to take exception to preconceived definitions of what constitutes the ever-elusive meaning of “premium domain”, especially when those espousing such notions are not privy to the stats, analytics and other important information specific to the respective domain.
For all intents and purposes parking is dead, and the value of a domain (and hence the definition of what constitutes a “premium” domain) has largely shifted to the name’s value to the eventual site, post-development.
Jaime, I do appreciate your inquiry, and I thank you for your comment and graciously accept your congratulations on the sale. Though we disagree on the matter, I thank you for your thought-provoking comment and the debate it has brought about. Please do feel free to respond to this post if you wish to put forth a counter-argument or for whatever other reason you may wish to chime in.
Best Regards,
Fat Lester
P.S. A quick search for “the medical supply store” revealed something I had previously missed. The domain (still parked with the exact same Fabulous page I’d had it at) is ranked #13 overall out of those 82,000. That’s with few if any inbound links, going strictly off of the strength of the keywords in the name itself.
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Thanks, Les. I was just looking at a domain and it, too, had been classified by Godaddy et al as “Premium” for the dot net version. This goes a good way toward explaining why it gets that treatment.
Still, I think that mindset shows the typical short-sightedness so prevalent in the last half of the last century. Certainly, dot coms are popular addresses historically, and recent information shows that dot net addresses are now the favored address.
But in a way, what’s happening on the internet is akin to growing cities. There’s a great chance that a mature internet will favor top level domains not even dreamed of yet. I’ve only owned a couple of dot com addresses, and the ones I have now are simply to protect my dot net addresses, most of which I’ve owned since the 90s. When I develop a site, I nearly always choose the dot net address as the primary.
Now that dot nets are “Premium” I guess I’ll try to figure out which ones will be ‘hot’ next. I’m thinking country specific, what do you think?
Oh, and late to the party I still want to congratulate you on the sale and success.
(ps – what is this death of parking you’re talking about? seems like the past 3 months all I find is parked squatters thinking they can make a million dollars off of a domain they bought in 1995 and never even developed anything whatsoever… wasted spaces.)
Jon,
Thank you for the insightful comment. I was/am tempted to turn it into a guest-post rather than leave it as a comment, but didn’t want to do so without your permission.
Thanks for reading my blog, and if you’ve got one of your own, but sure to include it in future comment. If you don’t have a blog at present and would like to have one, I’d be happy to help you get it set up, just let me know.
You have some interesting things to say, and I appreciate your readership and your comment(s).
“… In the case of this domain, a quick Google query revealed 28.5 million results for the term ‘the medical supply store’ without quotations…”
It’s important to know – word “the” is stop word in Google. So 28.5 million of results are related to term “medical supply store”. It’s like Google doesn’t acknowledge word “the”.
Nice blog, keep up the good work and thank you for sharing.
Great work! keep the posts coming… i’ll keep reading them. Thanks
Thank you for this article. I have always asked myself when exactly a domain name became a premium domain. The information you shared here, does help me a lot with that question.
Just what I needed to know. I was unaware of the effect that “the” had on the price of a domain name. Thanks. BTW love your blog.
I’m glad you found the post to be informative. Thank you for stopping by my blog, and if there’s any other topics of interest that you have questions about don’t hesitate to suggest a topic for a future post.