Back when I was suffering through graduate school and making a feeble living as a music critic, I received as a gift a cassette of an unreleased album by a rock star you'd recognize - and was asked to refrain from making copies. I soon learned that it was the only one in circulation that didn't sound like it was recorded through a baby monitor.
During that period, I shunned several unsolicited requests to make copies of the tape. Some were from people I knew; many more came from strangers, some of whom sounded like they were calling from bus-station pay phones. I refused them all to keep my word, but even if I hadn't I would have kept the tape to myself because so many of the callers were obviously bootleggers. No one who simply wanted a private copy of the unavailable record would offer such large amounts for a cassette dub.
If the same scenario came up today and I didn't have an obligation to keep the music private, I might be tempted to make it available via Napster or Gnutella and sidestep the bootleggers. But back then I had one copy, and the singularity of the item was what gave it value. (I never did discover how people knew I had it.) To be honest, it wasn't that great a record, but to others it held tremendous value.
I remembered all this late last year when, out of nowhere, I received a large number of inquiries regarding my company's domain name, vineyard.com. More than five years ago, I registered the domain name on a lark, much as someone orders a vanity license plate. I had some vague idea what I might do with the name and was happy to make it a Web address for my modest consulting business. Every few months I received an "are you for sale?" query, but I never paid them much attention.
But in 1999, the inquiries accelerated from once every other month to more than once a week. Despite the legal restrictions involved in selling alcoholic beverages online, many of the requests were from those who wanted to do just that. Some of the offers were laughable. One prospective buyer granted me the "opportunity" to invest in his business with the vineyard.com name, which I'd hand over to him as my investment. Other offers were large enough that I couldn't dismiss them automatically. Shortly after making an offer, these buyers usually would disappear like, well, bootleggers. I didn't even respond to the absurd bids proffered by people with Hotmail and Yahoo accounts.
Still, the inquiries intrigued me. Prodded by my wife - who likens the domain name to a pricey piece of junk I ought to unload - I decided to test what vineyard.com would be worth. I paid $75 to domain broker GreatDomains.com to appraise it and received a certificate that placed a nice six-figure estimated value on the domain. Yet when I asked GreatDomains to showcase vineyard.com on its site, I was informed that it wasn't worthy. I guess my little domain was small potatoes compared with romancatholics.com, for which someone was asking more than $250,000, or synagogue.com, which can be had for $2 million.
The e-mail messages still arrive at least weekly. I know to ignore the ones with text in all upper case, as well as the ones that misspell "vineyard" or, in some cases, ".com." I suppose one day I might deal with someone who wants to build a Net business and decides that they can't do it without my domain. But right now I'm happy to have it, just like the cassette I've owned for 15 years and still enjoy. So what if I'm not doing anything interesting with it? Don't you have something around the house that makes you happy when you think about it?
Jimmy Guterman runs the Vineyard Group, a consultancy in Massachusetts.
