The 2017 Industry Leaders survey responses are continuing to come in and the top three contenders so far are Frank Schilling, Rick Schwartz and Jothan Frakes. If you haven't filled in the survey then make sure you share your opinion.

Click Here to do the Industry Leaders Survey

I've had a number of questions raised since I launched the first industry leaders survey a few days ago and I thought that it would be worthwhile answering the questions.

How long will it take to fill in the survey?
There are only 10 questions with a slider from zero to ten next to each so it should only take a few minutes.

What if I don't know how to answer some questions?
The questions look at how YOU feel about the person that you are nominating. This means there are no wrong answers. Also, if you don't know how to answer some questions then just move the slider to zero.

Since the survey is looking at your experience with the person then this would be a reasonable response if you have not had any personal business experience with the nominee but have viewed there community activity.

I recently wrote a number of articles on my thoughts on how to assess who is the "greatest domain industry leader." Rather than just thinking about who is the greatest I decided to put some thoughts into action and develop a very simple survey.

The real question that should be asked is who, in your opinion, is the greatest in the last 12 months and why you think so. To really simplify things I’ve boiled the survey down to ten questions that are in three distinct categories:

1. How successful are they in each of the 4 primary domain business model(s) ?
2. How much have they contributed to the community?
3. How do they conduct themselves in one-on-one business?

The questions can be answered with a slider on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 represents “not at all” and 10 “very much”. The totals of the different questions are then summed together to create a rating. This means that we can easily see who people believe is deserving of this year’s honour.

I’ll be the first to say that it’s not perfect but I think that it’s a step in the right direction. I should also mention that in order to view the results you will need to login to whizzbangsblog. So, the only thing that is required is for you to spend a few minutes reflecting on who you think is the “greatest”.

Click here to view the survey.

Earlier this week I posted an article which opened up the topic, “Who is the Greatest Domainer?” From feedback, it became evident that there was a problem around the whole definition of “Greatest” and over what period of time. I hope to outline my thoughts on this topic here.

To define “greatest we need to first ask, “Greatest in what aspect of business?” When a domain investor buys a domain name they typically have one of four ways they plan to make money from the transaction:

BUSINESS MODEL

1.       Traffic – the domain has traffic that can be monetized.

2.       Stock item sale – where the goal is to sell a lot of low value domains each year.

3.       High value sale – typically sell a few high value domains each year.

4.       Development – building a real business on a domain(s).

When we look at “greatest” then we need to consider in what business models is the individual regarded as being great. For example, Rick Schwartz is amazing at selling high value domains but last time I checked he doesn’t do development and certainly doesn’t optimize his traffic. This doesn’t mean he isn’t great (I think he is) but it highlights what he is great at.

I read an interesting article on The Domains asking the readers who they thought was the greatest domainer of all time. Why was it interesting? Because it didn’t ask the most important question, “By what measure?”

For instance, are we measuring someone’s success by the amount of money they earn or amount of profit? Whether they have built a sustainable business or sold one off high value domains? How about whether they actually give anything back to the industry versus take, take and then take some more? Or, how about how they treat others that may not be as monetarily successful as they are?

Can a person be regarded as “the greatest” if their personal life is a complete mess? They may have even sold a lot of high value domains and yet not have much to show for it after multiple family failures.

In this article, I’m going to let you into a little secret. You may not have heard of anyone else approaching domains the way I’m about to outline but in my opinion, it’s the future. These ideas are what keep me so entranced by domains.

If you are wanting to extract the maximum amount of value from your domain names then the answer is in the data. It really doesn’t make a difference whether you are a buyer, seller, developer or traffic monetizer, the key to generating additional revenue always comes back to the numbers.

As I’ve spoken at conferences or written different blogs I’ve been accused of many things but there has been one consistent accusation that I’m actually quite proud. “You’re always banging on about the numbers!” I love my numbers and more than that, I love trying to interpret what they are telling me.

Over the past 10 years, my ParkLogic business partner and I have continued to be fascinated by domain names because the data tells so many different stories. We’ve taken this to the extreme level by tracking around 250 different metrics for every domain on our platform each day. This leads to hundreds of millions of data points that can be algorithmically analyzed and trend curves plotted over time to see where the next seam of gold will come from.