Over the last 8 months quite a few people would have bought .tel domains and many are probably wondering if they made a wise investment or not. I’ve read a lot of coverage in the last few days that might suggest buying these domain names was not a good move – and my anecdotal observations are that I tend to see more bad coverage than good. So, what’s the deal?

Let’s assume first that .tel domains are like equities. And, so, if this were a financial advice post, it’d only be right that I declare my interest, which is that I have a varied portfolio of .tel domain names on which I spent about £3,500. When I brought my domain names I saw it very much as like buying stock. I diversified the sectors under which I brought names, both in terms of the business areas they relate to and the way in which I might monetise them. I also realised it was a punt, and that the value I might get back on these in the future would depend on the potential the investing community saw in it. Like stocks, some domain names are better than others, but I was interested to see last week that marketing.tel sold for €850, which would have been double its original purchase value. So, for the original owner, that worked.

Of the bad coverage I’ve seen, and, based on some of the feedback I’ve elicited myself, an observation again is that those who are slating the domain are also missing the point about what it is that makes .tels different. If the negative article you read mentions .mobi and .tel and waste of money in the same paragraph, then you need read no further. The two are not the same thing.

I think telnic could have done a few things better with the roll out of this technology, but I’m not going to list those here, or even berate them for it. At the end of the day, I didn’t effectively invest into telnic because of its ability to market itself, I did so because of the strength of, and the differentiating factor of, its technology. A few days ago, telnic won an award, but it’s not mentioned the fact on its website. But then I didn’t hire them to be my PR agency!

At the moment, I think its too early to say if the money I spent on .tel domains was a waste. In my opinion, what will make the difference is the level of take up in the developer community to launch applications which deliver on a need. Telnic’s launch of an API from the outset is key to this. VHS as a video format was not invented for Porn. But Porn made it win the battle against Beta. Likewise, where the community takes (or doesn’t take) .tel will define whether my money was wasted or not. Its not down to telnic, in my opinion, to build adoption. It’s down to developers to adopt.

Going back to the theme of investment, my initial financial outlay aside, we’ve not over the last 6 months given as much time over to .tels as I thought perhaps I might when I first brought my names. There’s just not been the buzz around it required to make it worthwhile. As a business, we focus where we see the most value, and if we get it wrong, we move on. For a while, this has just not been a prio. If buying a load of .tel domains was a mistake, it won’t be my last.

However, in the last few weeks we’ve had some downtime in which we’ve been able to dig a little into the API and we’ve come up with a way to automate the service we built at www.miggletel.co.uk. We’ve had some interest in this from various domain owners in the past – but it was the lack of an automated back-end which cooled the interest. In the coming weeks we’ll be blogging a bit more about our solution, learning more about .tels as we go, as well as talking a bit more about what we’re doing with the domain as a whole. Watch this space. And, in the meantime, if you want to tell us about good or bad .tel apps and coverage you’ve seen, or want to tell me about the best (or worst) return you’ve ever got out of a similar investment, do let us know!

Based in Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.

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Tags: .tel domains

This entry was posted on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 at 8:33 pm and is filed under .tel domains, miggleweb. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.