Thursday, December 29, 2022 at 2:51 AM
I'm selling my name...
So I've been out of work for a while, so to raise cash I've been selling all the extra stuff I have. It's amazing how much money one can spend on tech gadgets, only for the prices to drop to literally 10% of what you spent on them! I tell my son all the time that it would have been nice if I had developed a deep interest in something like real estate or cars or something that held value, instead of being a techy. So I've liquidated the garage full of stuff I had - most of it just becoming e-waste, honestly. I mean, I had a box filled with all my smart phones dating back to the 2000s and every Android device I worked on at Amazon, which are almost worthless after five years. I truly wonder what it's like to sell stuff for a profit?
I also realized I have non-physical things to sell as well. Noooo... I'm not talking about anything crypto related! I'm talking about the original online ownership-of-nothing scam that we all know and love: Domain names! I actually put the first one up for sale a month or so ago on sedo: rb.io . (If you know anyone with those initials or a biz or maybe a ruby developer who wants a nice domain, send them my way!)
Update: I auctioned the name off and someone won the auction with a bid of $4k, which was great - but then they didn't complete the transaction. Ugh! Will be re-listing again now.
I've never been overly attached to the rb.io domain, but this made me start thinking theoretically about the rest of the ones I own... I wonder... How much would my personal domain name be worth to someone out there who happens to share my whole name! Not just russellbeattie.com, but also .info, .net, .org and rbeattie.com to boot. I mean, if you don't share my whole name, they're all pretty worthless, I get that... but it has to be valuable to somebody! There's got to be, what, a few thousand Russell Beattie's out there in the world, right? I wonder what the chances are that a few are doing well financially who really want their own name domain... There's got to be a law firm out there (there used to be I know) with a combo of those names, right? I know there's at least a few active Russell Beatties out there - I regularly get some of their Australian bank's spam as they can never seem to spell their own email address correctly.
It's such an oddly specific question of supply and demand.
But wait... As an early adopter, I own that name (however long and unwieldy it is) on all the major services. What do you think the whole lot would be worth to that random Russell out there. Facebook, YouTube, Google, Yahoo!, Telegraph, PayPal, Instagram, LinkedIn, Github... I also am just "Russell" on Skype and Nintendo Network. (I deleted my original Twitter account with my full name years ago, so I don't have the full set for maximum business card potential, sadly.) I can sorta imagine some seething Aussie, who has been a few months behind me when registering their username since the 1990's cursing me every time I show up before him.
Anyways, If you've read this new blog, you're probably aware I'm not particularly attached to my name anymore anyways, so why not? What would a complete digital namespace like that be worth? Especially given having to restart with a whole new digital life, right down to the email address. Has anyone done this before? Sold their whole digital imprint? (Yes, I'm aware the joke is that it might actually be the preferable option, and maybe I'll pay someone to take it all for me someday.)
-Russ
P.S. For your amusement, here's a DALL-E 2 generated image when I prompted it to "Create a logo for a company called 'rb.io'". I discovered it's not good at creating specific logos, but it is amazing at creating insane usernames. I am totally using Riiboiblio as everywhere if someone wants to buy my domain names for enough to pay off my credit cards. Fuck, I would change my name permanently to Rii Boiblio in that case for sure. (Or Rii Boi Blio or Riiboi Blio?)
I mean, you have to admit. It's absolutely majestic.
