Moderator:

• Brett Tabke

Speakers:

• Mark Klein, Director of Business Development, Sedo
• Jeff Libert, CEO, DirectoryCompany.com
• Tom Murphy, Vice President Business Development, NameMedia
• Monte Cahn, CEO, Moniker.com

After a short round of introductions by Brett, the discussion begins with Mark kicking it off.

First up is Mark Klein, the director of Business Development, Sedo. In terms of background, Mark says it is all about descriptive "direct navigation." With this,people type in a domain name in the search bar instead of Google for it. Apparently, almost 10% of Pay Per Click traffic also is traffic due to direct navigation. Next, he pulls out a Comscore study.

Why should marketers purchase domain names?

• Brand
• Brings in traffic. As for example, pc.com, loans.com
• Vertical ex: baby.com

In the case of Baby.com, it already was a well-implemented advertising site. Established domains add a lot of credibility. This also brings out better organic search engine result placement.

Why should campaigns have specific domains?

• I have a headache.com is a great example

Mark goes on to showcase some slides about the work they do at Sedo.

The second speaker of the discussion is Monte Cahn,the CEO of Moniker.com. He begins by telling the audience what his company does etc. currently, the handle over 2.7 million domains.

How do domains generate profit?

Pay per click, cpa, affiliate sites, search revenue, and selling domains

Yearly advertising is estimated to increase by billions

Domains generate about 15% of Google/Yahoo’s total revenue

The current trend shows an upward rise of people who own many domains. About 15 people last year had about 1,00,000 domains. Currently, 138 million domain names are registered all over the world (Wow!). The second quarter has seen a 31% rise. Of all these domains, 88% are live while 76% get renewed. Germany is No.2 with its .de.

What makes a good domain name?

• Natural and generic brand
• Easy to remember
• Clear, concise and descriptive
• Commercially and profit-oriented
• Industry segment
• Aesthetically pleasing
• Existing type in traffic

Check whether a domain is blacklisted. Take advantage of the way-back machine in order to check whether the domain has content on it in that is beyond the past aka archive.org

Mistypes

Make your friends, colleagues and family members type your company name and find out misspellings. These, you should register too.

How do you generate revenue

• Domain traffic (direct navigation)
• Domain sales
• Domain development

Creating your profile

• Keep an eye on after market
• Watch domains drop

Mark Klein takes the example of asthma.com. This company has medicine for asthma. We should also be watching over other languages. For example, Spanish is growing at a big rate.

Next, is Jeff Libert, the CEO of DirectoryCompany.com. Jeff has a few questions about domain name portal and also of Webmaster World.

1. Creative domain acquisition finance.

   Letting pay per click revenue pay the costs

   Your revenue is not their revenue

2. Acqusition of underperforming (parked) domains

   Purchase cheap, fix it and use the new found income to pay for the domains

   Auctions: You can find some great steals

3. Auction sniping
4. Bottom fish at particular resellers

   Jeff says he has personally been a bottom feeder

5. Diversify revenue stream

   This is where you test different services

6. Macroeconomic adjustments (foreclosures, debt, etc)

   The market is dicey. Currently, debt and foreclosure domains are doing well

7. Track the buzz in the forms and emerging buying opportunities

   If people are crabbing about income, This might be an opportune moment to purchase domains.

8. Dailychanges.com and observe domaining trends

   Domain tools has some nifty tools.

   Dailychanges is helpful for research/intelligence

   Watch what the big guys are doing and keep track of the trends that they are showing.

9. Intelligent proactive acquisition vs waiting for domains to drop

   Connect with owners who are dropping domains to find out whether you cant just buy it

   This way It becomes easier instead of fighting with the big guys once it’s open

10. Business owners purchase keyword traffic domains
11. Domainers set their focus on the value of converted leads from KW domains
12. Domain parking experimentation: images, rotating companies, etc.
13. Specialization, tasting, patent, and informed domaining.

After this, he cites some domains that he recently purchased. Nevertheless, he says there are still some worth purchasing.

Next up to speak is Tom Murphy, the Vice President Business Development of NameMedia. Tom will discuss the state of Aftermarket and effective domaining strategies.

Basics

• Buy domains (whether in primary or secondary market)
• Focus on areas you know ow feel will increase in value
• Sell domains
• Reap in profits as you see fit
• Maximizing the revenue from your portfolio
• Test

Drivers of valuations

• Incoming traffic
• Popularity
• Vertical
• Comparable sales
• Language, etc.

Many players have entered the after market sales.

Buying domains

The question Tom hears the most is what to buy if someone had $5,000 or $50,000. Tom’s answer is to treat domain names like stocks and mix it up.

Selling domains

• People should always have domains for sale
• Parked domains sell five times better then those that are non-parked

Important Points:

Domain Purchase Potholes

• Trademark Violations?
• Understanding market values
• Domain statistics- Are they inflated?
• You may have to stealth acquire to avoid inflation
• Financing cost
• Does owner have control and rights to domain name
• Bad Guys (protect yourself by using a domain escrow service)

IMAGE SOURCE: Andy Beal

Comments

Tag:

Moderator:

• Detlev Johnson, VP, Director of Consulting, Position Technologies

Speakers:

• Jon Lisbin, Chief Strategist, Point It, Inc.
• Andrew Beckman, President, SearchAdNetwork
• Monte Cahn, Founder and CEO, Moniker
• Sean Moriarty, Director, Business Development, Yahoo! Search Marketing

In the place of Danny Sullivan now is Detlev Johnson the VP & Director of Consulting, Position Technologies.

First to speak was Monte Cahn of Moniker. The talk stated on a positive note with Monte describing the vusiness of Domain as "healthy". Come to think of it Business.com sold for a king’s ransom of $350 million. This year saw a rise of 25 % as 10.7 million domains were listed within this year’s initial first quarter.

Useful tips for entrepreneurs:-

• Choose a natural, organic domain name as this means more search volume.
• Pick a descriptive, easy to remember and simple domain moniker.
• There are opportunities to make money via CPA, direct-traffic deals, CPC and CPM.

Jon Lisbon of Domain Parking & PPC, in true Jedi style said a "dark side" existed in domaining. With Domain parking business worth an estimate of s alittle below $1 billion. Some other problems that are part of the dark side and existed in domaining are typo-squatting, click fraud, domain kiting or tasting and cyber-squatting.

CHECKLIST:

Investigate your referrer report. If your advertisements are surfacing on sites that generate clicks but if these clicks do not translate into conversions, stay out!

Mention the zero combination sites in your listy of sites that have been excluded.

Next up was Andrew Beckman of SearchAdNetwork.

Andrew states the importance of using a conversion tracking tool or even Google Analytics or another web analytics tool on all of your domains to investigate traffic levels. This way you get an idea of whether you are losing or making money. For supplemental information, Andrew also suggests using Google’s new placement report through which one can even know the source of your traffic.

A current trend among major corporates today is the acquisition of generic sites which are then redirected to the main site through a 301.

Apparently yahoo too has a similar tool which they will be unveiling very soon.

The fourth and last speaker of the day was Sean Moriarty, who is the Director, Business Development of Yahoo! Search Marketing. Moriarty states that parked sites have evolved and progressed to now becoming full-on, full-fledged websites. Depending on factors like trademark typos, conversion rates (CR), domain suitability etc quality search engines like Yahoo! filter out domains. These are all done to serve the advertiser better.

TIPS:

To create a domain name of popular keyword or query use both .com and .net. However, if you are creating company domain names, make of every possible variation.

Stealth acquisition is a good idea for those seeking to buy domain names.

Comments

Tag:

SES: Let The Domain Drive

(Our on-scene WebProNews staff has passed along this latest news from SES San Jose 2007. If you can’t be there, you need to be here with WebProNews this week, for videos and reports.)

The Domaining & Address-Bar Driven Traffic session arrived in the wake of a couple of massive domain-oriented deals over the summer months.

Business.com sold for an eye-popping $350 million, making Answers.com’s Dictionary.com buy for $100 million look pedestrian.

Monte Cahn of Moniker said the whole domain market has been healthy, with 10.7 million domains registered just in the first quarter of 2007.

Entrepreneurs will want to keep some of the points made today in mind when building or rebuilding their online identities. Everything starts with the domain name. A natural, generic brand can lead to heavy search volume, and that equals mindshare with the prospective audience.

Go for clean, concise, and descriptive domains when building a portfolio. Revenue generating opportunities exist for CPC, CPA, CPM, or direct-traffic deals. The latter will want to choose from the most relevant domains, which makes Cahn’s suggestions important.

Jon Lisbin of Point It acknowledged a ‘dark side’ to domaining. He mentioned click fraud, cyber- and typo-squatting, and domain kiting or tasting as problems.

Andrew Beckman offered an interesting point about competition for traffic. Secondary search engines have been buying domains as a way to find quality traffic for their advertisers, as they strive to thrive in a Google dominated ad market.

In some ways, domaining provides a look at the future. Sean Moriarty of Yahoo Search Marketing said parked domains have been evolving, and becoming full-fledged Internet sites.

Within that period, domain tasters will measure the popularity of the site to see if the potential revenue will surpass the yearly registration fee (approximately $6).

Six dollars seems like an innocuous amount in isolation, but when this is manipulated on larger scales, it can have big impacts. For example, a domainer can buy up 10,000 domains, slap AdSense ads on them and monitor their profitability for four days.

If 200 of those made-for-AdSense sites show a positive profitability, the domainer can return the other 9,800 and repeat the process. This can go on, obviously, indefinitely.

It may be safe to say that smaller, less inventive (read: less weasely) business owners don’t think in gaming terms. They have an idea for a business, a domain name they like, and then register the site without even realizing there is a grace period to begin with.

But it may have larger implications than just bulk domainers being clever enough to leverage a bureaucratic loophole. Manipulation like this can affect organic rankings in the search results, and most likely has a direct impact on the cost per click of paid advertisements.

And there’s where the smaller businesses (i.e., not so much the search engines) have a problem. 

ICANN seems to not like this practice, as it does tend to screw with their numbers (and revenues), but ICANN being the quasi-governmental entity that it is, it has to go through the proper channels before cracking down.

They put out the following notice over the weekend:

In view of the increase in domain tasting…the GNSO Council recently considered an Issues Report on Domain Tasting and resolved to form an ad hoc group for further fact-finding on the effects of this practice. The ad hoc group has prepared these questions to assist in gathering facts and opinions, while inviting both qualitative and quantitative input.

The fact-finding mission includes some interesting questions. The questionnaire asks: which industries benefit and which ones suffer; whether there is a security and stability issue associated; what are the reasons for the practice.

But more importantly to those in the domain game, the inquiry seeks guidance on just how ICANN should handle the situation. Suggested options are as follows:

A) eliminating the AGP so that domain registration fees are non-refundable between registry and registrar;

B) making the ICANN annual transaction fee (currently 0.20 USD per year) apply to names deleted during the AGP, or to a significant portion of them;

C) imposing registry ‘excess deletion fees’ charged to registrars for disproportionate deletes (for example in .org, PIR registry charges 0.05 USD per deleted domain if more than 90% of domains are deleted in a given time period).

This suggests that something will be done about domain tasting, and that earlier questions merely seek additional justifications. And that will leave a bad taste in the mouths of a few.

But that few will most likely be the ones making a tidy profit by gaming the system.

"If  ICANN did away with the five-day grace period on bulk buys only," suggests Susan Coppersmith, Director of Sales for iEntry, Inc., the publisher of WebProNews, "it would possibly help clean up organic search – could actually help the traditional small business owner be found a little easier.  I think it would also make the quality of the click better in paid search campaigns."

One of the main things that I’m pleased about was my effort to be as objective as possible in writing the article — not only did I want to report on what is going on in local-oriented domaining, and who’s involved, but also to provide some concrete conclusions and recommendations which people could take away. I was upfront in disclosing my past negative bias about domaining, and in the course of writing the article I found that I had to revise my assumptions a few times over – in favor of Domaining, actually. Working off and on, I wrote the article over the course of about two months.

While doing the research, I became aware that the Domaining industry seems to have a bit of “younger sibling complex” — as an industry, they wish to be considered a respectable, bona fide line of business. Unfortunately, they have a few things which have been hampering that aim to some degree:

1. Many people have been exposed to cybersquatting, typosquatting, and trojan-horse sites which have damaged the public’s perception of domainers. While a number of companies have been springing up which have highly ethical practices and do only high-quality domaining, the industry’s been sand-bagged by the past sins of a lot of anonymous individuals who have exploited domain names for a fast buck.
   .
2. The industry has been disrespected by a degree due to the perception that domaining isn’t very sophisticated. This isn’t really accurate, since the top domaining companies frequently have very sophisticated tools and processes for selecting domains, registering domains, hosting and deploying content on domains, and algorithms for estimating the traffic potential of domain names. Further, on the face of it, that bias isn’t really fair — someone who’s developed an elegant, simpler method for making money should be admired so long as it’s not a criminal method.
   .
3. There’s little independent reporting of domain industry traffic figures. This is a case where there are significant challenges to independent reporting agencies in identifying “domaining” traffic from other types of traffic, since one has to assume varying amounts of user motivations in going to domains directly — this is something that Danny Sullivan mentioned in my article’s comments in reference to the Visual Sciences statistics — and, there are tech reasons why traffic sometimes has referrers stripped out — so, the few figures currently published on direct domain traffic are not clearly all attributable to domaining. In addition, a number of the top domaining companies have valid reasons for avoiding the disclosure of all the domain names in their portfolios since that could reveal some competitive intelligence about their strategies and proprietary processes.

Since the domaining industry is a bit defensive/insecure about how the public perceives them, it wasn’t really a surprise that my article immediately attracted some criticism from folks. Frank Schilling, in his Seven Mile blog, posted a write up about my article called “Search Engine Land of Make Believe“. In it, he mentions a number of positive figures about direct navigation traffic, but none of the figures are very reliable.

He mentions one figure about large amounts of Yahoo ad usage coming in from domain name traffic, though it’s apparently from an analyst’s estimate — and Wall Street analysts typically do not understand how internet metrics are computed, and particularly don’t understand the issues involved in lumping all types of apparent direct navigation traffic in together (no independent traffic reporting agency I know of can differentiate between traffic coming in from a user typing in a domain name versus clicking on one of their favorited bookmarks, and we won’t even go into all the situations where referrers are not being passed due to browser/platform security settings).

Another figure he cites is an Efficient Frontier report on direct navigation, though others have already pointed out a number of issues with accepting that report at face value. The graph I see in the report actually shows a pretty sharp degradation in conversions after a few months of the ads running — a normal enough progression since CTRs typically drop off as users become more familiar with the ads, though not not a progression that I would expect if the majority of the traffic on those sites were from new users visiting them for the first time through directly typing in assumed domain names.

Finally, he cites an anecdotal mention from someone within Google quoted on how AdSense was seeing 5 million unique visits per day from the domain distribution channel, but if we assume that number is still accurate today and compare it with comScore’s estimated number of Unique Visitors to Google for May (120,010,000), it’s not all that significant. It’s also not all that interesting if you compare it to the total estimated number of worldwide internet users. So, Frank doesn’t really convince us that things are fantastic with these figures.

So, the reason why I or any other informed analyst or tech reporter would write a cautious and conservative article about domaining is that there’s just a lack of independent validation of the traffic figures, along with something of an inability for collective assessment of true conversion quality. As Danny noted in his comment on Frank’s posting, advertisers can’t opt out of this subset of Google’s nonsearch traffic, and parked domains are not segmented out in reporting stats.

My conservative assessment is merely based on the amount of independent data at-hand, and not on a bias in favor of search traffic. For all of us who lived through all the hype associated with the radical new business models that were promoted during the dot-com boom some years ago, we remember all too well the implosion of the dot-com bubble. The lesson we learned was to focus on the business model and on good statistical evidence from objective sources.

Frank’s hope that:

“Perhaps one day I will visit ‘Search Engine Land’ (the website) and read a less cautious piece that accurately portrays the domain name traffic industry and gives it much deserved respect….”

isn’t all that likely to happen until there is a greater degree of transparency and more solid, independent reporting on traffic and collective conversion rates.

I conclude in the article that there’s significant traffic in domaining networks of sites, and that there’s good money to be made from it for local business companies. But, I suggest caution in monitoring of the quality of that traffic and its associated conversion rate (real conversion rates – not just CTR). I should have also suggested that not all domainer companies should be considered the same — some are great, while others have portfolios full of scummier sites that publicly-traded companies would want to avoid. I actually am impressed with some of the businesses in the industry such as SEDO (who were quite admirable in their recent efforts to police the domaining of names purchased by the unscrupulous in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings), and REIT impresses me as well. In any case, I didn’t beat anyone up in the article, and I gave the whole thing as fair a shake as I could.

The domainer industry doesn’t need unqualified, glowing reports from analysts and reporters like me — they can continue to laugh all the way to the bank with the money they’re likely generating. But, if they do wish to get more approval and admiration as an industry, there is a way to accomplish it.

Independent traffic reporting companies are currently unable to assess and report on the traffic for the overall industry, or for particular large companies within domaining.

So, Domainers, if you want to prove to everyone the amount of traffic going through your industry, I suggest that you partner with comScores, Nielsen/Netratings, and Hitwise and talk to them about how they might be able to better identify and report upon your traffic. Most likely, this would require that a number of domaining companies would need to team up in order to report all of their domains to those metrics companies after which the traffic reporting firms would be able to group together usage data collectively. Perhaps the domainers could supply their domain portfolio lists to an independent agency, such as the Internet Commerce Association, which could then privately provide the collective list to the reporting agencies.

So, how about it, domainers?  If you want to really make the eyes of CEOs and investors shoot open everywhere, move out of the shadows and get some more independent reporting on what’s going on with all of your many sites!

Comments

For instance–is your domain name usable? Things that could make a domain name unusable include:

• Having a domain which is not easy to spell. If your site should ever get featured on radio or TV, you want viewers to be able to easily type it into a browser after hearing it. Otherwise you’re going to lose a percentage of them.
• Having a non-dotcom domain. People have a tough time remembering non-dotcom TLD extensions, period. Again, you’re going to lose a percentage of potential visitors by having a
  non-dotcom.

Remember, these visitors you’re losing aren’t just visitors, they’re potential linkerati.

Anyway I just thought this was important to bring up since so many SEOs and marketers seem to be getting into domaining. Don’t forget about usability!

Comments

An Example of a Domain Waiting to Fall:

In spite of making 5 figures a month, one of my unappealingly named domain names has cost itself significant credibility and links. Since it is an invisible cost it is hard to estimate how much it has cost, but I have a perfect example of showing how much it hurts.

One time I tried sponsoring an event and they said sure. They got my credit card details and then asked for the domain name. Once they saw the domain name they said sorry they couldn’t accept my money. And this is a reputable content site in a field that is easy to like, but on a junky sounding domain name. Ouch.

Being Honest With Yourself:

If you have a quality legitimate content site, and people who typically sell reviews or links are unwilling to take your money you know it is time for a change.

Other Signs of Trust:

If people who need sponsorship are unwilling to take my money imagine how much a bad domain name suppresses my click-through rate in the search results, and how many other links it cost me. If and when relevancy moves toward an attention based metric I am screwed if my house is built on a cheesy domain name that looks spammy.

Domain Buyer’s Pricing Tips:

You can sometimes capture emerging field names cheaply, but you are probably going to have to spend at least a few grand to get a good name if you are in an established field.

If you are new to domaining, and can’t afford a great .com there are still a lot of great .org and .net names out there available for $1,000 to $10,000.

Is a 301 Redirect Risky?

I will eventually 301 redirect my high ranking ugly domain name to the undeveloped MyKeywords.org domain that I just spent $8,000 buying. Short term I will probably see some drop in traffic, but long-term it is going to be far less risky to create an leverage what looks like a real resource and a real brand.

If you do something like this, make sure you have enough other passive income streams to afford the risk, and keep developing links to the new domain name. Keep that old trusted domain registered and redirecting for many years into the future. If you lose it you will probably lose a large portion of your link authority.

There is No Value in Being Anonymous:

You can spend the money your site is making as a passive income source, but if you believe in what you are doing, and have money in the bank, there is no reason to use a bad domain name. It is like writing nameless.

You can get a decent design for few thousand dollars, or a design modification for a few hundred. You can get good content for $50 a page or less. You can move a CMS for a low price too. The cost of moving and re-branding a non-brand site are negligible compared to the potential upside.

If you ever decide to sell, you are not going to get much out of my-ugly-do-mainz.biz, but if you create a real brand on an undeveloped strong domain name you will be able to sell it for a premium far in excess of the domain name cost.

Comments

Furl

Bookmark WebProNews: