Nucite Network

I’ve decided to go back and provide an analysis of my original trip to the Target Traffic conference in Las Vegas, 2008.  Although I had tracked some of the happenings of the TRAFFIC conference for about a year prior, I never felt the need to actually attend.  On a whim, I decided to attend the Vegas conference with the primary intentions of visiting Moniker’s live auction.

Within my first few hours at the conference I realized that it was a networking wonderland. I’ve never attended a conference where the attendees were all so intensely curious about what the other is doing.  Rick and Howard create such a warm atmosphere that even the shyest of people would have no choice but to collect the business cards of at least 20 of their colleagues while attending.

I attended TRAFFIC West, 2008 representing myself as a partner in a (then potential) 3-person LLC that was interested in picking up a few quality domains with the intentions of developing them into leading web sites in their respective niches.  I left that conference with 6 great domain names.  Although only one did not get developed, there are 3 that are truly worth mentioning as they are not only great domains, but ideal brand names: DVDs.com, ConsultingFirms.com and AlaskanKingCrab.com.  All three sites are now (September, 2008) live and in an ongoing development/analysis phase.  They were great buys and each is climbing in the search engines for its respective niche.

Because I’ve been receptive to joint-venture partnerships, I quickly made some interesting contacts during those three days in Vegas… not the least of which led me to begin development of Bar.com – what an amazing domain.

What I Noticed

I quickly realized that this conference was different from others in another way – these people are almost entirely domainers.  There are very few developers in the crowd.  However, the buzz to begin development was in the air in Vegas.  People were talking about needing to get started on developing their domains, but not many had taken any serious steps toward action.  These were premium domain holders, many of whom had been burned by developing near the dot com bubble burst and were very hesitant to throw more dollars in that direction.

There didn't seem to be much of an urgency to develop and most people that I spoke with left the conference with only thoughts of development lingering in their minds.