Nine years ago today started a journey that I had no idea would be so long. The .TV sub forum at Namepros was started and 20 hour days discussing, debating and posting content about the country code of the the tiny island nation took hold.
I went back and looked over years of private messages starting last year, and when you never delete anything it makes for a lot of reading, some funny, some weird and some bat shit crazy.
From midnight calls to talking people down who wanted to travel cross country to show up at another member’s door and punch them in the mouth, it has been a really interesting experience.
The forum did bring a few old time domainers into the fold, but mostly it brought together a lot of people who missed the first .com rush, it was 2005 and many had no great .com domains and were looking for another opportunity, a lot of members never had any meaningful domain sales, that changed for some and they went on to sell way into six figures in .tv. Of course there were those that overbought, did not buy quality names and lost money.
The forum came from a thread that really only had about six of us participate, and then when I wanted to have an extension specific forum things started to take off. In the early days before any blogs were really going, the amount of content pumped out was substantial. A thread about an idea I had about numbers one through ten, in English, Spanish, German and French saw every name registered and several sales over the next couple of years.(Six.tv $25,000, Acht 10 in German $10,000, etc…) Seeing a concentrated effort around an idea where everyone shared their insight was valuable.
Of all the things I have done in domaining from 3Character.com to brokering names to consulting, this has always been the most fulfilling from the standpoint that there were a number of people who commented over the years that the sub forum helped them, that they would have never got into .tv without it and many would have not made the money they did without it.
There are many members to thank over the years and they include: John Van den Berg who sold Me.tv to Demand Media for six figures and many more big sales, Richard Kligman, Bob Brookes, Ronnie McKenna, Jeff Overman, Makis Mourelatos, MonteChristo, James Black, Jim Holleran, Ammudamus, John Everett, Jean Francois Arrou-Vignod, Donnied, eVirtural, Amcy.org, Badger, Lance Block, Tom Rice, Claude Dauman, Cate Colgan, Atypical, George Pickering, Antonis, Dottie, James Barclay, Finster, GarpTrader, LinM, SKG, Two Moon, Vito, Elequa and many, many more.
Special thanks to RJ for allowing this wacky experiment on his forum.
HybridDomainer/TLDinvestors.com also reached its four year anniversary last month.
So thanks to everyone who participated on Namepros and thanks to all of you who read this blog. In the spirit of the 9 year anniversary of the .tv subforum, the two cheapest places to register a .tv are Name.com and Dynadot at $10.99. So the first three people that leave a comment saying they would like to register a .tv name, I will register a non premium $10.99 domain and push it to you at either Name or Dynadot. Make sure your email address is the correct one as I will be emailing you and asking you for the name you want and the info for the push.
alan says
I would love to reg another .tv name, it’s
one of my favorite extensions!
Thank you
donnied79 says
Thanks for this post.
We <3 dot TV and the tiny little island of Tuvalu
Bob says
Good post, happy memories of a mad time back then!.
Some great guys in that list Ray, and as you said ,some have had some fantastic success in .tv and domaining in general.
Cheers for all your work Ray,not sure when you sleep but I love reading your seemingly endless contributions on the blogs!.
Kassey says
Congratulations on your anniversaries. I have learned a lot thanks to generous people like you.
RU says
I would like to register a .tv domain 😀
RU says
Domain received (m/a/l/w/a/r/e/./t/v)! Thank you very much, Raymond!
Kind regards,
RU
Jay says
Great post Ray. Thanks for keeping the faith for so long. Our time (dot tv’ers) is finally here 🙂