Remember the movie - Jerry Maguire.

It has some of the best memorable quotes like “Show me the money,” “Help me help you”, and “There’s genius everywhere, but until they turn pro, it’s like popcorn in the pan. Some pop… some don’t.” All the quotes are 100% apt for domainers.

Just as Superbowl creates a huge fan frenzy and massive ad market, India has its own  version of superbowl – Cricket. Its NFL for US and IPL for India.

Over the next 2 months, everything in India comes to a standstill and most of the movies run to empty shows, there is less traffic on the roads, malls turn empty, bars get full-house, beers flow like rivers,  and buddies rejoicing echos through the roofs and most of the senior citizens are waken up by blaring horns of fans of winning teams who speed on bikes venting out their happiness in the middle of the night.

Gaint screens spring up to air the Cricket shows aired by TV channels, digital bill boards show updates on scores, Stadiums are booked in each city to view the matches on live gaint Screens, fans come dressed  up with their eccentric attires to get noticed. Social Media sites are abuzz with latest opinions on each match, some even tweet by each ball bowled.

All sorts of theatrics are  at display along with banners to get the attention of the media cameras. Every run is cheered by the respective teams Cheer leaders whose attire can make the Godaddy girls look like kidstuff. Brands rush to pump in millions of dollars to advertise for the 10 second and 30 second slots, players sign multimillion dollar contracts to endorse products which they have no clue about.

ComScore and IMRB released results from a study of Internet traffic to cricket websites during the 2011 Cricket World Cup. The report states that visits to cricket sites in India surged as fans went online for the latest results and match updates. On 2nd April 2011, during the “World Cup Finals”all the cricket websites attracted a little more than 5 million Indian fans. Some stats:

• Average Time spent by user – 38 Minutes
• Busiest timeslots during the day was between 12pm – 6pm
• 1.73 Mn of them visited Espnstar.com/cwclive
• 1.7 Mn visiting the Espncricinfo.com
• 1.6 Million visited Cricket.yahoo.com
• 0.3 Mn visited Cricbuzz.com

With the next season of IPL in progress, it will be interesting to  see how the numbers stack up. Indian Gaming companies like Zapak, Ibibo, Games2Win, Yatra.com not wanting to be left behind successfully launched Cricket-theme games.

In all this California-type Gold rush, is there money to be made by Domainers?

Be it US Superbowl, Indian Cricket, or the Olympics – sports domains were always mega bucks for the shrewd investor and developer. Some of the “category killer” Names see huge traffic during these periods and the parking revenues just shoot up. With technology catching up, mobiles and tablets are creating new markets as viewers would like to watch the matches on-the-go.

Names like Mobilegames.in, Livecricketmatch.com recently got offers which the owners rejected as low ball offers.  In the past, Jets.com domain sold for $375,000 and Cricket.com went for $1.75 million. What other SPORTS related names do you think will make it  to the charts this year? Any Guesses?