Ah, millennials… People love to talk about them and they always seem to be trying to figure out what they are going to do next.

Apparently, one of their next moves is to pick the names of their children based on available Domain Names. When I saw the article a couple of days ago, I kind of chuckled and thought of my own obsession with domain names. I happen to own dozens (and dozens) of domain names. Heck, I have owned my own name as a domain name for more than 20 years. So, yeah, I bought it at about the time most of these new parents were in diapers. And, yes… I own the domain names for each of my children. I guess I was in on this trend way before my time.

According to the research, as many as one in five (20 percent) millennial parents said they changed or seriously considered changing their baby’s name based on what domain names were free at the time. – brobible

Please don’t ask me how I found this article on Brobible… Ok, it was in a news feed. I swear, man.

Their study shows a much larger percentage of millennial parents picking the name of their child based on available domain names than the older and wiser Gen X parents. The article also says that “48 percent of millennials believe it’s important for their child to have an online presence early in life, compared to just 27 percent of Gen X respondents.”

I wonder what the online presence of millennial children will look like. I wonder what their social network of choice will be. I wonder if a standalone website will be more, or less, common for the youth of today. Personally, I have “always” felt that it is a good idea for people to “own their own content.” Social networks come and social networks go. Yesterday’s Twitter, tomorrow’s Facebook, etc. There will be new, shinier objects in the future. I guarantee it.

Heck, I have teenagers. They don’t read email. They watch videos, they Snap, they text, they have a much different digital life than I do. We communicate in different ways than I did with my parents. One of the reasons why I bought their domain names when they were born was the fact that I believed it to be a small investment in something they could put to use in the future.

The top two reasons parents said they created a website include for future job searching (48 percent) and college application (47 percent) purposes.

Some parents (37 percent) believe personal websites will take the place of social media, and created a website with this in mind.

Millennials seem to have many reasons for wanting to own their domain names: From wanting to create a digital baby book, to teaching kids how to build websites, showing them what should and shouldn’t be shared online, and for using their own site to apply for college. The reasons seem to be many and they seem to have long term goals.

I’m sure people in our industry will continue to try to predict what is next for millennials and for the market in general. I’m also sure I’ll continue to hang onto my own domain name(s) for a long time.

Marketing Like a Millennial:

While it’s not exactly the same as buying the domain name of my children, we currently buy the domain names of homes we have for sale. Maybe we should start offering the sites to people as their own personal nostalgic website?

So, what’s in a (domain) name? Quite a bit, actually…

Originally posted on Phoenix Real Estate Guy. If you are reading this anywhere but inside your RSS feed reader or your email client, the site you are on is guilty of stealing content.

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