Domains

And the dunce of the week award goes to… Aspen Technology of Massachusetts. After a decade of pestering they finally gave away chesapeake.com, for free, to the city of Chesapeake. Turns out the city didn’t really need it. They just sold it to another company for $120,000.

Or I could be wrong. Some people have so much money that a valuable internet property isn’t really worth bothering about.

I’m not a big fan or English or Grammer. I find the rules anoying and restrictive. I am a lot more interested in ad copy and writing to sell. That being said, it doesn’t hurt to know a few things about words.

There are a lot of domain “investors” with absolutely horrendous portfolios. Lets call them domains that stink. If you visit the appraisal sections of domain forums (Domainstate, DNForum, NamePros) you’ll see a more than a few of them. I’d venture to guess stinky domains waiting to be appraised outnumber good domain names 20 to 1.

Here is my theory about what happens. A would be domain name investor reads an article in Business 2.0 or the Wall Street Journal. Thinking, wow, if Word.com sold for $1 million (totaly made up, not sure what it sold for) then ExcellentWord.com has to be worth more than the registration fee, right? And if thats so, what about 123word.com, abcword.com, eword.com, and valuableword.com?

Once and a while stinkers do make money, but its not often. Most of them used to be existing websites with real backlinks — that holds value to search engine optimizers reguardless of the domain name. If you can afford paying $6 a year for hundreds or thousands of domains, go ahead. If you are on a budget it pays to hold out for those needles in a very large haystack.

A general rule of thumb: If your domain name is a made up word or a phrase that no one uses, its value is questionable (with the exception of short .coms) Sometimes something as simple as making it plural can land your domain in this category (e.g. petmice.com vs petmices.com.)

Great domain deals are hard to find. When you do find one chances are high its going to be for 4 or 5 figures, not 2.

AOL is now providing free e-mail addresses on domains it registers at the user’s command — at no cost.

You read that correct, anyone can go to domains.aol.com enter a new domain name and AOL will register it for them if it is available. The catch is AOL owns it, not the user. John DeMayo speculated how AOL could turn a profit on a move that could cost them millions of dollars. I have a few different ideas on how this could help both AOL and impact the domain name market.

First, AOL is making use of an SMS confirmation to use this service. That would make it very difficult for spammers and blackhatters to abuse. (Hmm, wonder if someone has patented this idea yet.) Besides being an effective anti-spam tool could AOL use this number for other commercial means?

Second, how could this impact the domain name market? My guess is very little for most name niches. However, this could have a huge impact on entertainment and human name domains. I’d like to take a look back at this in a year and see how many domain names AOL owns.

As you may or may not know, Google offers a domain parking service for high-traffic domain investors. As an Adwords advertiser a lot of traffic comes from these sites. While some people consider a web site with no content but ads a con or scam, I have found domain traffic to work modestly well.

Since some of my campaigns do particularly poorly in either search or content, I will often change my bids or turn one of the networks off completely. My question was, does Google’s domain parking traffic qualify as the search network or content network?

Here is the response I recieved:

Thank you for your email. I understand that you would like to know if AdWords ads syndicated through Google’s domain parking qualify as search network or the content network. Please note that ads syndicated through Google’s domain parking qualify for both search network and content network.

Google AdSense for domains is part of Google’s family of monetization services that enables effective and legitimate distribution of your ads. It has been proven to deliver high quality and high value traffic to advertisers. Like all our ad solutions, advertisers are only paying for the actual click generated once their ad shows, not for the impression.

Being on both the publishing and advertising sides of the playing field gives me a two-viewed approach to these issues. On one hand, as an advertiser I would like to be able to pick and choose traffic channels very specfically based on how the traffic converts. Since AOL traffic converts great, being able to bid double what I pay on Google’s SERPs could help increase my profit margins.

On the publishing side of things, I don’t want to miss out on potential income because a really picky advertiser thinks my site is ugly. If all traffic is created equally then I can increase my income by sending lower quality traffic to advertisers in volume.

Thats not all. Some publishers are concerned that a massive volume of Myspace traffic (thanks to a billion dollar deal signed with Google) is going to drive down their revenues. PPC advertising is a real market and more inventory between the same number of buyers will impact your revenue.

Traffic discrimination based on the source is an interesting issue. Whether you are an advertiser or a publisher you don’t have a whole lot of choice. Google is looking at these issues from one perspective — their’s.

What do Domain Kiting and PPC arbitrage have in common? Not much.

A reader, J-P, made a comment under my post: Pathetic Post of the Day, Calling PPC Buying Publishers Con Artists. J-P thinks that most sites in the PPC arbitrage game are involved in “domain kiting” and are in fact criminal. I think J-P is wrong and here is why:

PPC arbitrage is the practice of buying incoming PPC traffic and sending it out through a higher paying PPC traffic stream. Typically this involves buying penny clicks on second or third tier PPC sites and sending them to a page with higher paying Adsense or YPN PPC ads. This is not fraud because the visitor has to consciously read and click the ad just like they would on any other site. I have observed from my affiliate campaigns that traffic on arbitrage sites does convert, so lets leave conspiracy theories aside on this one. (That being said, turning a profit from PPC arbitrage is no walk in the park.)

The second issue is domain kiting — which is unrelated to PPC arbitrage. Domain kiting was a term coined by Bob Parsons of Godaddy.com. Wonder why you search for available domains, come back a day later and they are registered? This is why. Click the Bob Parson’s link to get an in depth look at what is going on here.

Here are my personal views on the two issues:

Domain kiting is a problem with ICANN and Verisign’s rules. Perhaps an issue that could go to civil court but certainly not criminal, unless something else illegal is going on here — which I seen no evidence of.

PPC arbitrage — a completely separate issue — is a good thing. Just as there is nothing wrong with buying and reselling stocks, there is nothing wrong with buying and reselling internet traffic. This is an evolutionary market. As in any other real market some people don’t like arbitrage. Capitalists are called profiteers & exploiters, domain investors used to be called squatters, and the list goes on. This is the free market — and it works.

I have been a regular reader of Mashable for a while now. The thing that sticks out at me time after time is the domain names Web 2.0 startups use.

Take a guess what niche these domains represent before visiting the sites:

OakTreeIdea.com
DoveTail.tv (the extension gives a hint)
ZingFu.com
Meez.com
Traineo.com
CrazyEgg.com
ThisNext.com
Twango.com
YFly.com
Burrp.com
Loowa.com
Kiko.com
XuQa.com
Kevo.com
KindFish.com
Badgr.com

But hey, it works out for some. Bebo.com is flying high, and Xanga isn’t doing too bad either. However, if you are targeting a specific niche I would recommend having that keyword/phrase in your name.

Without a doubt, I believe that the lack of government regulation online has been very important to its massive growth and the ease of publishing information. Unfortunately, there are some downsides. Chris over at WebSitePublisher.net made a post about some of the shenanigans that have occured over the .EU domain.

Chris also mentions how sometimes you look for unregistered domains and then they suddenly are mysteriously registered. I have had this happen to me as well, but I suspect that in some cases its just the whois database messing or really bad timing.

For example, a few months ago I recieved an issue of Business 2.0 with a cover article on space tourism. Billionaire Richard Branson is involved with Virgin Galactic and a space port is being built in New Mexico. Another company which put the first tourist in space for $30 million, Space Adventures, recently announced they were building a spaceport in the middle east. All the indicators say that this industry is going to explode over the next decade.

Within a matter of minutes of paging through that issue of Business 2.0 I was scouring the web for good space tourism domains. I located SpaceVacations.com for a mere $1,500 on BuyDomains.com. This was an unbelievable bargain! This was in the early afternoon; I decided I would take a look at my finances and buy it the next day. Three hours later I checked the domain and it was gone. I contacted the buyer but never recieved a reponse (feel free to give it a try if you’d like.)

Perhaps some registrars are snapping up good domain names. If you have a big list you have compiled over the past month and half are taken when you try to register them, don’t blame the registrar. Bottom line, if you really want a domain, buy it immediately.

As reported by DNJournal, Mortage.com sold for $242,400 this past week. This sale set a record as the highest reported typo domain name sale in history.

If you have been reading my blog since the beginning, you know that I’m generally very bullish on domain names. In addition to direct traffic, they also provide search engine optimization bonuses and strong branding value.

Was this domain overpriced? I have no idea without seeing hard statistics for its earnings.

I just noticed an article on domain name traffic on Sitepoint. If you have any intention of buying a website or undeveloped domain in the future its worth your time reading this article.

Without access to the logs, it can be difficult to determine if a domain is receiving paid traffic, but a savvy domain buyer will look for a few key pieces of evidence: do the domain statistics align with the Alexa ranking and the number of incoming links?

I was trying to find ImageShack’s website today. Instead of typing in the correct url of ImageShack.us I entered in ImageShack.com. The result was the best looking parked page I’ve seen yet. It took me a couple of seconds to say, hey, this is just a PPC page!

Gone are the days of the blatently obvious domain parking page. Its becoming more common for these sites to have actual logos complete with photographs and other images. More examples: GermanAutos.com and FurCoats.com. What else could domain portfolio owners do to increase their earnings without developing the domain?