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There are many similarities between baseball card collecting and domain names.
I suspect that many domainers collected sports cards growing up.
There are a lot of similarities between baseball cards collecting and domaining. We like to show off our prized domains. We often gravitate toward certain themes, such as collecting four letter domains. We monitor pricing trends. We go after “scarce” domains such as LLL.com. And we constantly try to buy, trade, and sell our way to a better collection.
That’s why I think many of you will enjoy the book Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession by Dave Jamieson. The book chronicles the creation of baseball cards in the late 1800s through the near demise of the industry at the turn of the century. It’s style reminds me a lot of a similar book for our Industry, The Domain Game.
After reading the book I see even more parallels between the industries. There are the same types of characters, personalities, and egos in both industries. Some of the people profiled in the book remind me a lot of the more colorful people in the domain world. There’s also the lack of respect and heavy skepticism sports card collectors had until they proved everyone otherwise, which many an early domainer experiences. There are also conspiracy theorists in both industries. And there are the scandals: talk of manipulating cards and shill bidding at auctions.
I collected baseball cards as a kid in the mid-80s, only to stop and forget about them in the early 90s. Like Jamiesen, I checked back in on the baseball card collecting universe after the turn of the century. About a decade ago I created an online store selling unopened wax packs, primarily from the 80s. I would buy boxes on eBay and sell them by the pack at a hefty markup.
But I was also jaded. The industry had changed. Baseball cards were no longer scarce, meaning that card companies had to find ways to manufacturer scarcity. Thus started the era of selling baseball card packs like lottery tickets with so-called “insert” cards. You also needed an encyclopedia to keep track of the dozens of sets available each year. Not to mention plucking down a fiver to get one pack. It just wasn’t fun. Kids naturally started to gravitate to video games and the web.
By the early 2000s I was already a domain collector. While I flirted with getting back into baseball cards I realized what I didn’t like about it. I would organize my cards by team one day, only to want to organize them by set the next. Then I’d want to organize them by player. It was tedious. The internet and PC world have made things instantaneous. I can sort my domains by expiration date, alphabet, or TLD at the click of a button. If only they came with nifty pictures.
Mint Condition ends on a down note for the sports card industry. I can’t help but see parallels with the domain industry of late. Those people who got into baseball card collecting once the press started touting the value of cards got burned. We might look back and say the same thing about people who got into the domain name industry after the hype.
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