Personalised Number Plates and Domains

On a recent break, I had to do a reasonable amount of travel by road and I couldn’t help noticing how many personalised number plates there were on passing cars.

I’ve noticed this trend for some time happening in our area, which is quite an affluent part of the country, but to see what it’s like elsewhere is also interesting.

Personalised number plates/ cherished number plates/ private plates, whatever you want to to call them, have been around for quite a few years, but it’s only relatively recently that a greater number of people have been buying them.  I would say that 50 percent of all the cars I see have one.

What’s this got to do with domains?  Well, the personal number plates were initially bought by the rich and those who really knew about them and cared enough to buy one - they were not common place.  Yet recently, in a viral way, the ‘need’ to own one has spread rapidly.  One person bought one, their friends thought ‘I want one too’ and so they became popular and appear to be getting more so, even in the current economic climate.

This is what domainers want to happen with domains, to spread the word; the more people want them, the higher the demand and the more valuable their domains become.

From reading domaining forums, blogs and so on, I may be wrong, but I get the impression domaining in the UK is a few steps behind the US.  We UK domainers need to try and promote domains, (and domaining)  and turn them into the viral success that personalised plates are.

’til next time

Marcus