Here is something funny for the weekend.

I have just returned from Ad-Tech New York. This is the first time I attended, although I was at the far smaller Ad-Tech Chicago this past summer.

Event highlights included the shoulder-to-shoulder packed after party at Pacha sponsored by PepperJam, RocketProfit, and whole bunch of companies which I do not remember. I also managed to attend a networking event for women in advertising, and consequently am now one of a handful of paying male members of Ad Femme

On a business owner to business owner standpoint I walked away realizing a few things:

Premium dot com domains are still significantly undervalued. Are those record breaking sales signs of a speculative bubble, or are buyers getting flea market priced bargains?

The online ad marketplace is going to become increasingly competitive between networks — high quality publishers (and type-in domain owners) will benefit greatly.

Annual internet advertising revenue projections are now moving north of $50 billion for 2011. Fair to say, you are in the right industry, at the right time. Don’t let the boat leave without you.

A month ago I ran a small advertising experiment where I displayed a non-hyperlinked URL. In order for someone to visit the particular site they have to enter the URL by hand (or copy & paste it.)

I am left with some interesting statistics. Out of 4,092 visits, 3,870 were direct visits. The user typed the domain name in the browser’s location field. However, 116 of them, or 2.83%, arrived from search engines. All search engine visits are for the site’s full domain names. This includes domain.com, www.domain.com, and http://www.domain.com, along with a few typos.

Worthless info?

Here is another one. “webpublishingblog.com” and variations only show up twice for the past month’s stats. However, a bunch of other “domain.com”’s are scattered throughout the search traffic data. One of the top search keywords for WebPublishingBlog is plentyoffish.com (due to an interview I did with owner Markus Frind back when no one believed he had a real web site.)

You can draw a few conclusions from this. First, domain names matter a lot whether you are doing paid search or organic search engine optimization. You want your users to find you for your own domain name, and your competitions!

Second, there is a war going on with direct navigation. Toolbars are driving large volumes of visitors who, rather than use the browser’s navigation field, are using the toolbar’s search field. The two largest players here are Google and Ask.com. Considering Ask.com gets their PPC feed from Google, this is all about Google. Microsoft has a home field advantage when it comes to typos, directing Internet Explorer typo traffic straight to their search engine.

Google has a balancing act to play. Google must make as much money as possible while delivering the most relevant results so that one day they themselves don’t become irrelevant. Sometimes they get it wrong.

Finally, this puts domain name parkers at a massive disadvantage. Why? Because they are missing out on all that free organic traffic. When someone goes to Google and types in shoe.com shoes.com ends up being the winner. Domainers are figuring this out (what took them so long?) Be prepared for a lot more search competition when yourkeyword.com swaps PPC parking for content.

How do you visitors find you? No matter what type of web business you are in, the search engines are cashing in on a chunk of your business. You can’t escape it.

Before starting, this is not a post for or against Ron Paul. Rather, I am trying to point out a few things about demographics, something any web publisher and marketer should understand & study.

There has been a general representation, not only in the mainstream press, but also web sites such as Digg that Ron Paul has a very tiny, core group of supporters. These supporters are spamming polls, online and offline to give the illusion that he has a huge backing.

Judging by the comments I have read on various forums & blogs, as well as by statements I have seen on television, there is a perception that Ron Paul’s supporters are imaginary. More than a few bloggers feel that comments supporting Ron Paul are “auto-generated.” Earlier this year there were stories about Ron Paul supporters gaming Digg. Today Wired reported that someone was e-mail spamming messages in support of Ron Paul.

The reason why this appears to be “a Ron Paul fraud” is because the Republican polls are polling registered Republicans. Additionally, the groups polled are samples as tiny as 500 people. The most recent Zogby poll puts Ron Paul far behind at 3%. Thats not the 30%+ number we saw at the end of the last Republican debate.

Lets take a look at what groups can & do include Ron Paul supporters:

-Anti-War. None of the Republican candidates express any views but escalation.
-Pro-Small Government. Again, no other Republican candidates express interest in this, yet the Republican party pushed the concept very hard in the preceding decade.
-Libertarians. This group alone represents probably 2-3% of US voters, they would not be reflected in Republican polls.
-Democrats. Watch a debate. Ron Paul reflects the anti-war position as strongly as the further left Democratic candidates. Democrats watching a Republican debate will either vote for Ron Paul or no one at all.
-Crazy People. People who believe they don’t have to pay taxes, conspiracy theorists, etc. This group is showing support for Ron Paul.
-The Disillusioned & Non-voting. This group can include all of the previous groups. Only about half of Americans who can vote do.

Add all these groups together, and you have a very significant audience. This is far from an illusion fraud created by a tiny, core group of supporters. Certainly you will have rogue individuals too stupid to understand their attempts at gaining influence will actually destroy themselves and damage the candidates they allegedly support.

No matter what market you are involved in, do not buy into the distracting noise and well worn theories. Unlike politics, being #2,#,#4, or even #15 can net you a fortune. Go after the under-represented niches, no matter how loony or lazy they may appear (you may well find that this is a bonus, not a detraction.)

Politics makes for a great study in the dark arts of social engineering and human manipulation. Everything you want to learn about building a fanatical group of followers can be found here — if your not too busy buying in to the stories yourself.

A year and a half ago I warned web masters that the US Dollar would continue to slide. This year, the US Dollar weakened significantly against the Canadian Dollar.

The last time I wrote about this issue, in June, we were approaching parity with the Canadian dollar, at $1.05. Today, parity looks optimistic.

The paradox of this situation is that most Americans do not care — many of them are not even aware of it. Last time, someone thought I was an idiot for even taking the time to write about it!

Companies and entrepreneurs are shifting their focus from the United States to international markets. If you haven’t begun to look into this yet, you should. While international stock markets may be speculatively priced, international growth online represents a great value investment. Not only will it diversify you away from the dollar, you will also have the opportunity to dominate niches which are already mature in the United States.

Yeah, the dollar slide hurts. Non-US web developers feel it when they cash their checks, Americans feel it when they fill their cars up with gas. Use this as an opportunity to diversify internationally and make it a win-win scenario.

There once was a time that Myspace’s $600 million price tag was laughed at. That debate is dead. Now its not a question of a billion but how many billions. The number $15 billion was being tossed around over a year ago. Its no surprise now that Facebook now also likes that 11-digit number, Microsoft agrees.

Its the tail end of 2007 and Myspace’s traffic has peaked. But who cares? Social networking is here to stay.

Social networking sites are very powerful tools if you know how to use them. Web entrepreneurs have raked in countless millions of dollars simply by providing third party graphics and layouts. Others have used social sites to funnel growth into their own start up sites, with phenomenal success.

Its simple, social networking sites are a destination. Snuggling up to that source and you end up with a stream of visitors. How important is Google to your site? In the right markets, social networking sites can be just as powerful.

How To Do It

Unlike Google, social networking sites are not search engines. If you want to throttle their power, legally, you need to use permission marketing and viral marketing (think of it as link bait.)

Over two years ago I placed a simple Myspace button on one of my community sites — much like the RSS buttons on blogs. Visitors added our site’s profile to their friends list and it spread. Our site’s profile had plenty of graphics and links, every single one went to our site. It was a free, fast, and easy way to build a forum userbase ; It was also a passive, soft sell approach that didn’t piss anyone off.

Social networking promotion can be that simple. If your content engages your audience then a little work will take you a very long way.

Lets take this one step further. You don’t even have to try to get social networking traffic. If users are sharing your site’s links with their friends, a good percentage are going to do it through a social networking site. For a quickly growing core, social networking has replaced e-mail and instant messaging as the internet communication medium of choice.

Facebook is the next leader, catch this train now

Facebook provides a complex API you can use to build applications that interact with the site. Facebook’s owners are enthusiastic about bringing new features aboard. And yes, they are very open and accepting of commercial goals. This has opened the floodgates for aggressive Facebook API tactics. This same traffic, Facebook could sell for tens of millions of dollars. Your cost? Give people what they want.

I was a bit skeptical of Facebook at first. Their closed system means there is no graphics & layouts after market. Rumors of a non-converting audience made things look even worse. But Facebook isn’t just a bunch of bored college freshmen. The site has gone mainstream; Facebook’s astounding compounding growth rate is making Myspace look very small. And the traffic does convert.

Where you tempted to give Second Life a try? Forget it. Why build an island 10 nerds a day will see when the same effort will put you in front of 1 million? Whether you are a Fortune 500 company, Web 2.0 start up, brand marketer, or just a plain old web publisher, leave the skepticism behind: you need to be paying attention this.

Holidays present a huge opportunity for internet publisher and marketers. Consumers are online, looking for specific things, and their wallets are open. Even better, their search patterns are very predictable and reliable, year after year.

Thinking about Christmas? Go live in September. Halloween? If you are just getting your Halloween promotions live for Monday, you’ve missed half the audience.

I had a good laugh when I heard that attorney generals are calling for an extension in Microsoft’s antitrust settlement.

Right now things look grim for Microsoft on all fronts. Long ago Linux proved it ran better than Windows, now it looks better too. Internet developers prefer Linux as their web server of choice, again for performance, but also for cheap scaling.

Future growth compounds Microsoft’s problems. The developing markets, when told to stop using pirated versions of Windows instead will choose free alternatives.

Then there is the Google. Google is chasing after Microsoft’s core desktop applications with AJAX-powered web apps. Microsoft has failed miserably (so far) to enter the online advertising market. They are giving away billions attempting to catch up.

The New York group’s filing centers largely on what it calls the “indisputably resilient” monopoly that Microsoft holds in the operating system realm. The attorneys general said they were “mindful” that Windows’ approximately 90 percent market share in client operating systems is not the only test for how successful the antitrust agreement has been. But they added, “the absence of meaningful erosion in Windows’ market share is still problematic for the public interest.”

What is the public interest anyways? I build my sites on Windows, my servers run Linux. Others developers code in Ubuntu, power up OS X on their Mac to Photoshop, and then put everything together on Windows (XP, given how problematic Vista is, sticking with the trend that begin with Windows 95.) Thats not a monopoly.

If you were to have a long term illness would you be in big trouble? Or, could your employees continue to maintain & grow your business? On the more positive side, can you take a very lengthy vacation with no business contact?

I find it interesting that a company which profits from legal system exploitation (at the cost of thousands of small-time webmasters) would send unsolicited commercial e-mail spam.

I never opted in to any Getty Images e-mail list. I do not know where they got my address. That does not even matter because the email alone broke several CAN-SPAM requirements listed by the FTC, such as “commercial email be identified as an advertisement and include the sender’s valid physical postal address.”

For proof, here is the full e-mail below. Getty Images should be careful next time as well as fire whoever was responsible for a) assembling their email list and b) ensuring CAN-SPAM compliance.

Wipe the drool from your mouth. Now you can license even
rights-managed quality images for a flat rate of $49 each*.

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