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Hot market for domain names
Domainers have known this for quite a while but now, the mainstream business world is now taking a second look at the hot market for domain names.
CNN recently published an article about the current state of the domaining business and by all means, it’s on a roll.
The article describes how two domainers, Larry Fisher and his financial backer, Ari Goldberger, battle for the highest bid to land prestigious domains, like “megayachts.com” for a cool 150,000$. During the online bid, Larry and Ari are on the phone discussing ways to land the names they value most. Larry does the bidding from his laptop and Ari runs some background research on the coveted names.
This dynamic “Larry & Ari” duo is the only team of tech-savvy netrepreneurs looking to bank on the rush to buy up quality “type in” domain names.
The better the domain, the more chances web surfers will directly navigate to it, entirely bypassing the search engines while providing a healthy (pay-per-click) revenue stream for the domainers owning the name.
Services such as DomainSponsor, DotzUp and Parked help domainers monetize their domain name portfolio. Their services are especially useful when a domainer owns many domains and can’t optimize them all — external help then makes perfect sense.
The industry is estimated to be generating 2 billion dollars, just related to the buying and selling of domain names. That number is expected to explode to a whopping 4 billion dollars, by 2010. Not too bad for an industry that’s not even a decade old. Needless to point out how exciting this is for domainers, especially those who happen to already own quality web names.
Since domain names are inherently unique, domainvestors see them as a stake in the online world, a virtual real estate lot, if you will. The “.com” names stand to win the most from this growth but different names can have regional (such as “job.ca“) or vanity value (like “greatest.name“) as well.
If a name is bound to be naturally typed in by users, it has value. In a web 2.0 era, perhaps a name like “staffr.com” will someday rise up to become an online brand. Invented words fare well with millions of users looking to explore new business concepts and ways to connect with one another. Domain names are often the foundation for entire business concepts. A name like “flickr.com” proves that point quite well.
If you’re looking to join the millions of domain name owners who are participating in this massive “virtual land grab”, it costs a mere about 8$ per year (everything included) to have a “.com” name. Once you’ve purchased all those you like (which happened to be available), you can sign-up (for free) with DomainSponsor, DotzUp or Parked so they can help you monetize your domain name portfolio — until you figure out what kind of web destinations you’d like to turn you names into.
Happy domaining, everyone!
Tags: domain names, domains, domainers, domaining, monetize, pay-per-click
Higher PPC revenues with Dotzup
Owning domain names is one thing. Lots of individuals and corporations do it. Intelligently generating pay-per-click (PPC) revenue through them, however, is a whole different story.
Some more advanced web developers prefer to create valuable web destinations to encourage repeat visits which are more often exposed to their advertising (PPC or otherwise).
Now, lots of domainers don’t have the time or resources to create this much value associated with every single one of the domain names in their portfolio so they purchase outside help.
Dotzup offers such “domain name portfolio management” landing page services, setting-up for you a highly relevant landing page that direct type-in visitors will likely appreciate — and click through.
More “pay-per-click revenue” generated through well-thought landing page design is obviously very be good news for any domain name owner so Dotzup’s continued partnership with Yahoo’s popular (and lucrative) PPC advertising network makes for an enviable sustained revenue stream.
Established in 1997, in Spokane, WA Dotzup is a leading Direct Navigation Technology Development and High Profile Domain Name Asset Management Corporation.
One of their goals, probably the most important one dor domainers, is to both produce higher PPC revenues -and- grow the domain names’ value (even in a “landing page” context). This is quite important for domainers looking to maintain the high “desirability factor” associated with their domain names.
If you want to see what some Dotzup “niche optimized” landing pages look like, you can check out MiamiJob.com, DetroitJob.com or DenverJob.com.
If your domains have to do with American or Canadian web visitors (naturally typing-in the names), Dotzup’s Yahoo Advertising Network back-end might yield surprisingly high revenues.
If you’re serious about growning your landing page pay-per-click revenues, make sure to give Dotzup a spin and see for yourself how high your monthly revenues can go.
Tags: dotzup, ypn, yahoo, domain names, ppc, pay-per-click, landing pages
Turcotte’s CIRA answer to ICANN
Those who know Bernard Turcotte, President and CEO of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA), can fully appreciate his undeniable wit, intelligence and integrity.
The ICANN, on the other hand, isn’t so reliable.
Accountability, transparency and a general inability to properly conduct consultations continue to be documented weak spots, among others.
It so happens that the ICANN invited the CIRA to answer its Request for Public Comments regading the ICANN’s performance. That was on May 8th, 2007. Three days later, Turcotte answered that… he wasn’t going to answer!
Turcotte hits all the nails on the head, in his carefully crafted answer to the ICANN. On every account, Turcotte is right on the money. The ICANN needs to clean up their act before bothering every domain name authority into providing them with valuable feedback they’re likely to entirely disregard.
Here’s part of Turcotte’s letter to the ICANN:
“In the past we have raised concerns over the transparency and accountability of governance at ICANN including how it conducts its public consultations. More recently, we have been encouraged by the steps ICANN has undertaken to increase transparency, and have stated this opinion publicly at the ICANN Lisbon meeting.
Although improvements have been made, ICANN’s recent Request for Public Comments represents a clear step backwards in ICANN’s journey towards becoming a truly transparent and accountable organization.
That’s exactly how many Canadian domain name owners feel about the way the ICANN is currently handling its business. Furthermore, Turcotte adds:
“Due to the poor design and implementation of this Request for Public Comments we, as most serious stakeholders should, see few – if any – advantages to contributing to this effort which cannot produce any usable results while potentially further alienating constituents.”
Everybody wants the ICANN to improve but the way things are going nowadays, it’s better for the CIRA and other country-level domain name authorities to focus on helping the ICANN get back on track than sending out recommendations that aren’t likely to be properly handled.
The domain name business, worldwide, needs more professional administrators like Bernard Turcotte to bring back absolute accountability and transparency to the way domain name matters are dealt with.
Tags: domain names, cira, icann, bernard turcotte, accountability, public comments
Landing your domains at Parked
Anyone owning many domain names knows the importance of intelligently monetizing them. Landing your domains with the right domain monetizer can greatly influence the monthly payout.
Parked.com, based in Tampa, FL helps domain name owners land their valuable monikers on pages which lead to lucrative pay-per-click links. These paid links are continuously optimized to both properly answer the visitors’ requests and deliver significant payouts to the publisher (in this case, the domain name owner).
Facing stiff competition from market leaders like DomainSponsor and DotzUp, Parked.com makes extensive use of contextual images to convince the visitors that they’re on their way to relevant content. It’s still unclear if adding such images really improves the click-through rate, though.
Parked.com‘s proprietary statistics program is updated hourly and provides the publishers with a detailed view of how each domain name is performing, namely based on the following statistics: (1) number of visitors, (2) total clicks, (3) revenue per thousand visits, (4) click through rate, (5) revenue per click and (6) total revenue.
Publishers can view their own statistics online within their account. They can also be conveniently downloaded as reports in either .csv, .xml or RSS formats.
Moneywise, Parked.com claims to be offering the highest commissions possible and publishers will surely appreciate the fact that accrued revenues are paid every two weeks instead of only once a month.
Overall, there’s nothing complicated about Parked.com. The publisher interface is kept clean and simple so newbies and pros alike can get going quickly.
Click here to see an example of an optimized landing page!
Tags: parked domain names, parked.com, domains, landing pages
Make money as a domain reseller
Countless local web consulting firms still buy their (.com) domain names over 20$ each in order to resell them to their customers, for a profit. Imagine doing the same thing but with domain name buy rate under 8$, that would instantly become more profitable.
Now, imagine you could immediately resell over 50 popular products and cash in the lion’s share of the profits, that’s what the MBNX Basic Reseller packages offers for as low as 90$ per year. Once purchased, all you need to do is install your own custom header and footer banners, tweak the colors a bit and voil?†! You’re ready to resell thousands or even millions of domain names to the whole world or at the very least, to your current customer base.
If you own many domain names, you may want to become a reseller too. From the moment your domain names are transfered to your new reseller account, whoever does a WHOIS lookup on those names will see your name (or your company’s, whichever) as the reseller… this is free publicity but it’s also a strong statement that “you mean business”, when it comes to domain names.
As a free gift for becoming a reseller for 90$, you get 100$ in Google AdWords credits to help you convert new customers. Everything is taken care of for you. 24h customer support answers with your name and all the billing matters are handled for you, until you receive your commission check, in the mail (or electronically).
MBNX’s Basic Reseller offering is exactly what you need to push your web revenues up, way up, for every sale of domain names, hosting, secure certificates, SEO services, online filing, e-mail and many more popular web services.
You set your prices and then let your reseller storefront do the heavy lifting. Becoming a domain name reseller has never been this easy… or this affordable.
Tags: domain names, domain name reseller, reselling, mbnx, profit
Traffic 2007 in Las Vegas
Savvy domainers already know their domain names need to be continuously optimized to yield the highest possible revenues, especially when they’re configured to display a pay-per-click lander.
The T.R.A.F.F.I.C. 2007 domain conference and exposition, held from March 5th to the 8th, at The Venitian Hotel, in Las Vegas, intends to shed even more light on how to fully monetize domain names. If you can’t attend this conference, two more are scheduled, in Miami and in New York. Indeed, it’s a busy conferencing year for domainers!
Conferencewise, Traffic 2007 has quite a lineup, featuring Adam Dicker from High Impact Sites, Ammar Kubba from TrafficZ.com, Dan Warner from Fabulous, Jordan Rohan from RBC Capital Markets, Mathew Bentley from SEDO, Monte Cahn from Moniker, Ron Jackson from DNJournal and Robert Hoult from InterSearch, to name just a few.
You can also browse the event’s full list of sponsors and participants (which includes the rapidly growing Parked.com landing pages provider) to get an idea of who will move and shake when the show floor opens up!
After all, this event is about bringing the most active and serious domainers to meet, discuss and do some domaining business, in a comfortable setting.
Tags: traffic, domain name conference, domain expo, domainers, domaining, las vegas
New designs for DomainSponsor landing pages
If you own a few (or a few thousand) domain names, you may be wondering how to make money off them, every day, from the “natural visitors” directly “typing them in” their browser.
Well, you’re not alone and DomainSponsor offers all domainers the opportunity to rake in impressive daily revenues from most (if not all) of their domain names by simply pointing them to DomainSponsor’s specially designed landing pages which morph to reflect the most popular (and profitable) keywords that “landers” might be searching for (also referred to as “auto-optimizing”).
As of October 23rd, 2006, DomainSponsor is offering four new lander designs that rotate dynamically within the whole portfolio of domains you’ve pointed their way. For existing publishers (that is, the domain name owners), the change is automatic.
That’s right, DomainSponsor takes the pain out of monetizing your domain names and now provides you with even more attractive landing pages in which visitors may feel even more compelled to “click” for the information they (most probably) need.
If you’re not a publisher yet, now’s the time to get registered (for free) and test a few domains with DomainSponsor’s new designs which were hand-picked among hundreds, mainly because the payout they “produce” is above all others.
Tags: domainsponsor, landing pages, domain monetization, pay-per-click, ppc, web publishers
The ICANN looks to introduce tiered pricing for .biz, info and .org gTLD domain names
All domain name owners, in the world, count on the fact that every year, the domain name renewal price should be stable between 6$US and 12$US, depending on the related services.
The ICANN is currently looking to enact a tiered pricing policy that would allow registrars to charge whatever they decide to renew a .biz, .info or .org domain name.
Here’s the way this nightmarish scenario plays out.
You buy a given domain name and you build it up. Visitors come in larger numbers and you’re finally on the first page of the search engine results. You’re quite happy with the way things are going. Life is good.
Then, one morning, you get a message from your registrar requesting that you renew your domain name for another year, based on the ICANN’s newly approved tiered pricing and this means instead of paying, let’s say 10$US a year, you’ll be charged 75,000$US because your domain name is now associated with a web site that is getting more attention (all based on the sole registrar’s appreciation).
Is that the worst nightmare ever, or what?
The simple fact the ICANN is looking to go forward with this terribly bad piece of legislation shows it has little or no respect for 99.999% of us, loyal domain name registrants.
If you don’t act now and tell the ICANN it’s proposed plan makes no sense and threatens to litterally stiffle, freeze and kill any kind of innovation online, next Monday, it might be too late… so act now!
Here’s how, write a message to any of these Public Comment Forums using the corresponding email addresses. For instance, I wrote to the biz-tld-agreement@icann.org forum because I own excellent .biz names.
Don’t take any chances, the ICANN has a troubled history of lacking good judgement and unilaterally favoring “registrar” friends, in their previous decisions — act now or risk seeing the end of the internet, as we know it.
Tags: icann, domain names, domains, legislation, registrars, .biz, .info, .org
EURid suspends 74,000 .eu domain names
EURid has gained quite a reputation in the domain name business for establishing the European-centric .eu domain name suffix.
Now, this non-profit organization, operating the .eu top level domain, has decided to take legal action against what it sees as abusive behaviors from a syndicate of registrars who have systematically acquired .eu domains with the obvious intent of selling them. This activity is generally refered to as warehousing and it’s not permitted.
In this sweeping move, EURid has suspended 74,000 .eu domain names while suing 400 registrars for breach of contract.
Herman Sobrie, Legal Manager of EURid was even more specifici about the issue: “In this case we are convinced that the domain name holders of the 74 000 .eu names (Ovidio Ltd, Fausto Ltd and Gabino Ltd) are acting as a front for a number of registrars. The domain name holders and the registrars can be regarded as one and the same. Since registrars should only register domain names for existing customers and not warehouse the names in order to resell them at a higher price, this is clearly in breach of the registrar contract”.
Within the limits of the EC regulations (733/2002 & 874/2004), EURid is said to “strive to maintain .eu as an attractive top level domain for Europeans who want to convey a European Identity on the Internet”.
When the system is found to be abused, to such an alarming extent, there is a risk that the perceived value of the .eu domain name will decrease, not only for the almost two million legitimate holders of .eu domain names but also for all fair registrars.
That’s the main motivation behing EURid’s decision to act firmly against any improper behavior regarding .eu domain names.
In order to control quality, EURid consistently monitors the registrations of .eu domain names in order to make sure all holders of .eu domain names are based in the EU zone, as required by to the Public Policy Rules for .eu. In a similar fashion, EURid verifies that all accredited registrars are acting in the best interest of the end user in accordance with their contract with EURid.
A mere handful of .eu domain names have already been suspended as their holders have not been able to show that they are based within the EU.
The outcome of the suspended domain names now awaits a court decision while EURid would later like to make those names available for registration again.
Tags: eurid, domain names, domains, europe, european, legal, .eu
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