Interview with Solomon Amoako, Sedo

Solomon Amoako and Marcus Glaad at NamesCon 2016

Solomon Amoako is the Chief Sales Officer at Sedo (the worlds biggest marketplace for premium domains), and one of the keynotes at this years NamesCon conference. Solomon has extensive experience from the domain industry and a full game bag from the field – prior to Sedo, he’s been at both the registry (Rightside) and the registrar (Tucows) side.

What can you tell us about Sedo?

-We focus on connecting buyers and sellers on the secondary marketplace for domain names. We make sure that they have great domain names, and we help to communicate those transactions with each other. We are a global brand; so we like to say “global reach, local touch”.

Numbers, please!

-We do about 1-1,5 million dollars in sales per week. We’ve got approx 17 million domain names in our system, and 650 costumers around the world through about 150 countries.

Can you share with us – briefly – from your keynote session; what do you see happening in the domain market right now?

-The important thing is to start looking at things in the long term. I said yesterday that .com is a fantastic partner – and they will continue to be a fantastic partner – they are kind of the back bone of the secondary marketplace today. And one of my big messages was that we want more. We need the other domain extensions to step up more, working together, do the marketing, and educate the consumer, so that we can see them appear more and more in the secondary marketplace.

We are, as an organisation, taking the lead to help educate the consumer jointly with a lot of the registrys. So I believe that over the coming years, we’ll see more and more coming up from the newer TLDs (edit: top level domains).

I think that right now, companies that .club are really showing that there is a secondary market for new TLDs and we are very proud of being close partners with them.

We are working hard to make sure that new TLDs are prepared, and at a point where they gained enough of notoriety, to be a part of the secondary marketplace.

At the live auction at NamesCon the other day, the new TLDs really took the lead. Is that something we can expect in 2016?

-Absolutely! But, the interesting thing is, that the industry has to educate the consumers, and I think that we need to be in the forefront of doing this. The lowest hanging fruit here is the new TLDs! The new TLDs is where we, as a community, can do a good job at educating consumers, letting them understand that there are different extensions apart of .com, that’s available for them, and that can really help them to communicate their identity and vertical.

Speaking of 2016 – what´s your prediction domain wise?

-This is a tough one. About a month ago, I would have said that China is going to be the thing. But the question now is if – and this nobody seems know – if there is a bubble that is going to burst? We are seeing all this numbers, but there are so many factors that are coming into play, that are causing this. I am hoping that China, and India, and some of this large populations will be able to adopt our extensions and that we will see more growth there.

I think that we are going to see more traction in Latin America as well. Hopefully we can see a secondary market develop there too.

And we are going to see more of collaborations within the industry with the purpose to educate consumers.

What can you say about Sedos perspective regarding trading with ccTLDs (edit: country code top level domains)?

-The coorporate answer is that, when looking at numbers and so forth for ccTLDs, we don’t see specific drops or anything, they are pretty steady.

However, I almost feel bad for ccTLDs right now, because, there’s a lot of talk about TLDs, especially because of the new extensions. And these geo extensions are going to start resonating with people. Do I want .de or .berlin, for example? If I´m a Berliner, I would want a .berlin if I knew it existed. That is my personal opinion.

If my name is taken under .com already, do you think I should go with longtail .coms (for e.g. adding go or the to the domain) or should I go with new TLDs?

-My first answer is to check out our marketplace and we’ll get the right name for you. Secondly, right now there are so much choice, so there is definitely the opportunity to go and find your name under new TLDs.

There is no big secret that I am a big fan of new TLDs, and as a big fan of new TLDs, I would always suggest that you should start with looking at all relevant extensions – including .com and new TLDs.

If you were to pick your favorite amongst the new TLDs, what would you say?

-I would say .club! I like the brand and the people that work there. It spans all boarders, it means something everywhere, it’s easy to integrate *and* it has the right price, too.

Thank you Salomon and Sedo!