One day at the car wash a few years ago I met a guy who was around 18 years old driving a $100,000 Bentley. So I asked him, “Who’s car is that?” He told me it was his. At the time I was 27 years old, and struggling to make enough money just to pay the rent, even after having a $100,000 education.
I know it was not the best manners, but I asked him, “How can you afford a car like that?”
He told me the story of how his great, great, great grandpa had been awarded Rancho Bernardo, by the whoever it was that awarded large land grants in this area in those days. He was by the way the nicest, most well mannered kid you could come across, and I am sure is now a great man contributing to this world, so I could not dislike him, only be a little jealous.
That land is obviously worth something like a billion dollars plus. They don’t own it all now, obviously, because we have a city in San Diego called Rancho Bernardo, which I believe is the old Rancho Bernardo Land Grant.
So at least in this country, I don’t think most of us are going to get the opportunity to grab huge pieces of prime real estate like that for free any more, just because our bro, happens to know the king!
There is a way though that I will get to below.
It used to be you could just set up a house on a nice piece of land, and homestead it, which means that once you proved you had improved the land and lived on it a while, then the government gave it to you. I believe my uncle even toyed with that idea when he was younger. I think you can still do this, but it is mostly on land where no one wants to live. In the 1800’s you often did not have to buy land, but could instead just set up shop, kill off the Native Americans and the land was yours! (Just in case you don’t know me, I love Native Americans and their culture and the above is tounge in cheek.)
Well, those days are gone forever, at least in this country, but there is something else interesting going on.
A domain name is the part that comes with the .com on the internet. Amazon.com is a domain name, as is BodyABCs.com or earthlink.com There are only as many of them, as there are words. It is pretty limitless, kind of.
Back in the 1990’s pretty much all of the English language one word domain names were taken. Now the two word ones that make gramatical sense and are common words are almost all gone. You can still often buy a domain like ClairmontPlumbing.com but you can not find names like DenverPlumbing.com or fasttrack.com or autorepair.com available.
One word domains could originally be registered for ten or twenty bucks. One word domains now sell from anywhere around $10,000 up into the millions.
The number of people on this planet continues to grow. The number of people using the Internet continues to grow. The number of people who will be trying to make a living on the internet, or using it for marketing, in my opinion, has not really even begun.
Although those of us who are deeply entrenched in the internet read each others blogs, and forums, and spend hours per day on the net, most people I know still do nothing more than search for a pair of shoes occasionally, or e-mail.
It is still a very techie thing. WordPress is a revolutionary product in the history of publishing, but it still took me a few days to set it up the first time. As things become simpler and simpler over the next few decades, it will become the major form of comunication. Television, phone, radio, movies, talking, all of it will merge into the net.
Now some day domain names may disapear, and be replaced by some other adress system. But, if we look at phone numbers as an example, they started being used (almost a hundred years ago), and with a few minor changes over time, they continue. So it appears when a comunication system is this widespread, it hange onto its roots for a while.
So while buying a share of some stock may be fairly expensive, and will hopefully at most go up a few hundred percent over ones lifetime. How much will the new plumber in town be willing to pay for a two word domain name when he sets up his new business in 20 years?
Interested? All it takes is going to a domain name registrar such as ENOM.com or Moniker.com, setting up an account, searching for available domain names, buying them, and then kicking back and waiting. That’s what Moshe did in Israel, and I just gave him $550 for San Diego Chiropractic (dot) com, and I was happy to do it.