I immediately started thinking …yes; maybe I could register some valuable dictionary domains and somehow make money from them. That potential bubble was quickly burst when virtually everything I could find about domain names indicated all good names had been registered. It seemed to be true. I spent hours thinking up names, then checking, only to find they had already been registered.

Now, true to all I’d read, I was only attempting to come up with .com domain names since by now I too had come to believe best chance of making money from domain names was to own names with much more popular .com extension. There are, however, significant exceptions but that will not concern us here.

After my initial failure to find decent domain names …almost all first two hundred names I thought were good were already taken, I decided maybe I should take a different approach. I had read several articles indicating dictionary domain names had intrinsic value compared to non-dictionary URL’s. I agree, however it still is not easy to sell a dictionary domain name, or any domain name for that matter, in my experience. Even more so, it seemed like all single word dictionary names were already registered, adding to my dismay in trying to find good names to register.

It now became a challenge to find unregistered dictionary domain names, with dot com extension. I vowed to find some, no matter what. Being a researcher at heart, but not totally sold on pure Internet research, I decided to straddle fence. I would think up words and write them down on paper, then check them out on a popular Internet website for correct spelling, then check with a registrar to see if they were available to register. It was rare to find any single word domain name that was not already taken. Exceptions were very long undesirable words.

Ok I thought, back to my college days. I got one of my original college dictionaries, now some decades old, and started looking up words. I started with letter Z since I figured there are fewer and less common words beginning with that letter. Knowing it would be unlikely to be able to register any word I already was familiar with I quickly scanned for unknown (words I did not know) words. Bingo! Almost immediately, when I entered word zebeck.com to register it I was shocked to find it available to register. I double-checked spelling and definition. When I was sure there was no mistake I registered it.

A few days ago I decided to take a quick look at some of those domains. I had a new idea for a few possible websites and wanted to see which ones were getting enough hits to warrant further consideration. As I created a report showing traffic on some of my domains I was amazed to find one of my domain names had a lot of impressions (website page views). Where normally that name had a few impressions each day it had several hundred that day along with several dollars of profit where there usually was none.

That was first time I had noticed such a drastic change in one of my domains in such a short period of time – one day. The previous day there were normal few views and no money to be made from that domain name. I asked my co-worker if he heard anything in news involving video games since domain name showing unusual traffic was related to video games. He said no, he had heard nothing. Since he was a thirty-something and was usually aware of such things I first thought it might be just an aberration, but it was unsettling nevertheless. As a stock and options investor, I am very familiar with effects of news on those financial instruments so news was first thing to cross my mind that might change activity on a domain name so fast.

Later that evening, right before turning off my home computer, I thought of that domain name again and took a quick glance at its statistics. Wow! There were a lot more impressions and many more dollars showed as profit off that surge of hits.