We at AssociatedGeoGenerics.com have the overall goal of getting geo-generic domains into the hands of end users who will develop the sites and with any luck join with each other to form an association that is able to negotiate for all geo-generics and that will distribute advertising revenue to the individual geo-generic sites that normally wouldn’t be able to approach the larger national and international companies. Getting actual end users to acquire these geo-generic domains is the first step towards that end.

We have some decent geo-generic dot coms that should be highly desired by end users and have approached a few prospective end users without any sales pressure - just to get an idea of what their motivations are. We employed two techniques - the first one was to point out how much value the domain would bring to their business, the second was to point out how their business would suffer if their main competitor was to acquire the domain. The end-user interest was by far the greatest when the second technique (fear) was employed.

Our conclusion - not hope of gain but rather fear of loss is the greater motivator. Purchasing for gain motivation pales when compared to purchasing to prevent a competitor from purchasing the same item. Of course, jealousy could also be a factor, or even THE FACTOR. We didn’t actually sell the domain(s) that we used in our “test” - that wasn’t the point, we were working on composing a generic offer to sell and wanted to see how much difference in interest that was generated by using either fear or profit as motivators. In the end we will undoubtedly go with some combination of both but in our study we went with one or the other but not both.

Further experiments are planned. For example we will want to take into account how competitive the subject’s main competitor actually is and how many competitors exist. We suspect that in a situation where there are too many businesses serving the area and therefore some will fail that the interest generated by fear will be greater than when the particular industry has room for both or is even underserved in the area. 

We don’t intend to do any real “fearmongering” and we didn’t attempt to quantify any difference in price that might result from using one technique over the other. We believe that the best price for a domain will be obtained by making sure that we get as many competitors as possible (which of course seems obvious) which can best be done by making sure that the competitors are aware of the risk of their competition buying the domain.