Frank Schilling Interview is Worth a Read — Paul Sloan’s
Take 10 minutes to read Frank Schilling’s latest interview.
Paul Sloan’s latest interview of Frank Schilling has been posted at Sloan’s fresh “Playing the Angles” web site. Although the interview was posted last Friday, Sloan (and sidekick David Carter) sent out a message announcing the site launch today.
As always, Schilling exudes humbleness while espousing prophecy. That’s what makes Schilling different from a lot of horn tooters in the domain industry. Here are some of my favorite parts:
ANGLES: So what ought to people do?
FRANK: The name of the game right now is to keep your cash close. So if you’ve got cash and a good opportunity comes along, you can go for it. Look for distressed situations. But for now, save. There will come a time to spend, based on the prices that I’m seeing…
ANGLES: Have you been selling more names than you used to?
FRANK: Yes, we have actually. People come to us and try to buy names that have very little revenue or traffic but are useful for them. Where in the past, maybe we didn’t sit down and look at those offers at all, now we’ll consider.
And I’ve definitely seen a marked increase in people coming to me and saying, ‘Will you buy these names?’ And whereas ahead of they were thoroughly crap, now they are a little bit better. But they’re still not great names…
ANGLES: What does the parked page model look like five years from now? Does it exist?
FRANK: Absolutely. There will always be a buyer of that traffic. It works. It converts to sales. Advertisers are happy with it at the end of the day. But if we continue in a bi-polar Google-Yahoo world and payoffs diminish, you’ll see a disruptive force come along and take some of that revenue away.
Let’s say Google tomorrow stated we’re cutting our payouts in half and Yahoo does the same, for whatever reason. Now, if you’ve got a portfolio that has a lot of value – say 100,000 visitors a day – and someone’s getting paid $1,000 or $2,000 in revenue. That’s too low…
I don’t want to post too much of the interview here. But it’s a must read and a great start to Playing the Angles. Read the rest here.
