I, too, am disheartened at the change of not be able to offer out names that are just parked elsewhere. SH stands as the place for people to come to get ideas that canât come up with ideas, arenât good at ideas, or donât have time for ideas. If weâre having people come to us looking for ideas for these reasons, then they are missing out on a DAILY parameter narrowing market.
These people are wanting BUSINESS names, not just domain names. For businesses, it is a lucrative strategy to have a website domain that is professional and aligns easily with their business name. With .coms, .ios, .nets, etc being regged everyday, the ability to get those domains that fit this is becoming harder and harder and soon thereâs not going to be much option than offering other extensions or 3 or 4 word domain names. And given the statistics we have seen via SH CHâs this would not be favorable to 90% of their desires.
Sometimes a more premium and available elsewhere name would have to be acquired. Guaranteed contests ask CHs to pick a winner of the originator or finder of the idea and pay them the contest award. That contest award, to us, stands as not an âawardâ but payment for our time, our ingenuity, our research, our ideas. Do you realize that most of us are not out there scouring for ideas on the web â weâre coming up with ideas via research and then when we go to type that idea in the formfield and it redflags as being taken â thatâs our first knowledge of that domain being taken. From there, that is when we often open another tab and pull up that domain. Sometimes they are blank â a lot of times they are blank (meaning they are parked) and that means we wasted time, effort, and we thought we had such a great idea and yet someone else came to it first. However, there are those times when we have come to a marketing page where it says the domain is for sale for so much money total or even sometimes offers monthly payments. This name is not being used otherwise â it was only bought for the same reason those on our very own marketplace have been bought for â it was a highly selective, ingenious name that could be TAKEN at a moments notice where there could be money to be made instead.
If this idea was generated doing research and doing all the finger/leg work that the CH couldnât have had time or know-how to do otherwise, why is it a problem to offer it to them as an idea? Weâre going to be offering them our ideas we had a chance to register with SH first or SH got to register for us first in which there is a lot more money involved, how is it any different other than the CH will pay for the contest, because the creative did do the research, did do the work of brainstorming and coming up with an idea only to find out that itâs taken yet itâs not at the same time. Whether we give them the name and its available, we give the name and it can be bought from the marketplace, or we give them the name and it can be bought elsewhere â we are still doing the brainstorming for them and the process and work that goes into it.
You said that a lot of them werenât aligned right in scope. I have a problem with this, too. It may not have been purposeful. Different people have different ideas when it comes to what can be âalignedâ and what may not be. Sometimes creatives have very open minds â weâre doing this daily â hourly â and seeing connections in ways that not everyone may be able to see unless it is thoroughly described. Even then it could be argued that it would be broad, vast, or not a direction someone was expecting. But that doesnât mean that it was done purposefully to misalign or create misunderstanding. Thereâs many reasons that an idea can be rejected and it said as being misaligned (price, idea, keywords, connotation, trajectory, brandability, trademark ability, and many other things), so I hope you realize that even some of the creatives that were possibly seen as having misused it becomes a subjective topic.
I have the highest and utmost respect for SH and I â like most everyone here â would like SH to be the best it can be as a business not only for us as creatives but for the clients/customers and for SH itself. And I do apologize if Iâve said anything out of turn, as that is not my intention. Rather, I am wanting SH to see that the approach of giving ideas â marketed elsewhere, created on SH, available on SH, or otherwise is a lucrative offering of idea creation and generation. We are brainstorming for these CHs and sometimes that brainstorming comes to a fork in the road of something thatâs been obtained elsewhere for the same reason that SH now has a marketplace. If our ideas landed to that idea that has already been TAKEN just to further market and not use in any other way and CHs wouldnât have come up with that idea without us, why canât we offer it as an idea?
I would think that anyone could see the propriety of having a great name and a great domain name, no matter where the name comes from-- the only thing it depends on is what theyâre willing to spend. So instead of taking away this feature, why not allow it to work for us for the CHs, and for SH as a whole? Ask CHs if they are open to outside SH marketed names and what their price range for such (outside of the prize amount) is. This way CHs can get great domain names to match their business names, creatives get to be more open in their creativity, and SH truly lives up to being the place of ideas and generation to find and obtain what you need for your business, product, etc.
Again, this is just my input to further the discussion. Itâs not my intent for any of this to be out of turn or disrespectful, but rather become a showing of how this feature can help ALL in these situations and how we may be able to use it moving forward instead of getting rid of it.
Thank you everyone. 
When a CH had a really good budget and I found a name I thought was really right, I subbed those. I thought that SH reached out to the owners of those domains to get the prices for the CH. There were some that had huge budgets and I knew that they could get the name for far less than the top of their budget. Yikes,