Are we all tired of ESPN’s “Who’s Now?” tournament-de-gravitas yet?  Or are we just tired of Stuart Scott?  Let’s assume we take Stuart Scott out of the equation and implement the same “Now” concept to the web.  On the web…or at least in web monetization…the two Divas of the Dollar are SEO’s and Domainers.  So, let’s take a look at who’s more “Now”.

First, what is “Now”?  In ESPN’s bracket, “Now-ness” is defined as the ultimate sports star by considering both on-field success and off-field buzz.  Online, “Now-ness” is time-to-profit potential, scaling profit, and who has the buzz.

The case for SEO’s is this.  If you gave both an SEO and a Domainer $50,000 and a year to go make as much money as they could, the SEO will likely leverage that into more profit.  The SEO will go spend $10-15k on a good domain and the remainder on audience building.  It’s really hard to compete one site at a time with an SEO if you’re leveraging type-in traffic.

The problem with SEO model is that it’s terribly difficult to scale all that expertise and monetization on a per-site basis into a hundred thousand domains.  This is the real value in a domain portfolio.  The cost-to-scalability is unbeatable.  While domaining is damn hard work, it’s doable.  Developing a hundred thousand quality domains at the level SEO’s develop domains is currently not possible.  Unless you have a hundred thousand SEO’s, of course.  It should also be pointed out that no true SEO portfolio has ever been bought in the hundreds of millions. 

Let’s look at The Buzz Meter.  SEO blogs are some of the most popular on the web.  We take on the fastest growing large cap company in the world and their thousands of PhD’s every day and we throw lots of cash in the coffers doing so.  Our blogs are also much more funny as we are completely willing to throw each other under the bus.   

On the other side of the table, the best Domain blogs are still in their infancy…linking to news, using stock templates, and generally not ruining friendships for the sake of a joke.  Some would call that maturity.  When bloggers are in the news, they are usually featured in luminous stories regailing the world with stories of rags-to-riches.  When SEO’s are in the news, we are compared to Al Qaeda and malaria.  At least in public.  You get any group of Puritanical do-gooders in a closed room with an SEO and they all want you to rank their site for [Christ] or [trees]. 

So, SEO’s completely house Domainers in low-scale development.  Domainers completely house SEO’s on scalability, the lower level of resources required to scale, and upside on liquidity events.  I’m going to give the SEO’s the edge on buzz, but that may only be because we’ve been doing that longer and we own the blogosphere like American League owns All-Star games. 

Who wins?  Unfortunately, I think Domainers are more “Now” due to the sheer difference in their liquidity at the highest level.  But, more importantly, those of us SEO’s and Domainers who work on a daily basis to solve the vast expanse of profit between both camps’ competencies will not only be “Now”…we’ll be “Forever”.

But that’s just me.  Who ya got?!!

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