Last year, Yahoo rejected a whopping $44 billion offer from Microsoft to purchase their search business. It seemed like a pretty dumb idea for Yahoo to reject that offer even at the time (I criticized it pretty heavily when TheDomains broke the news).  Yahoo was one of the stocks heavily speculated (even by tech stock standards back then) during the Dotcom Boom and never fully recovered when the bubble burst. The last time Yahoo shares were trading above $44 was back in 2000, so this offer was more than fair. 

This new deal reached between Microsoft and Yahoo guarantees Yahoo nothing. Yahoo will receive an 88% share of revenue derived from traffic originating from Yahoo-owned websites for the first 5 years of the agreement.

My thoughts? Brilliant move by Microsoft, another dumb move by Yahoo. Microsoft will be in a position to offer Yahoo an even lower revenue share in the future and there’s not much of an alternative for Yahoo — the U.S. Justice Department already concluded a Google-Yahoo search partnership won’t be happening (at least no time soon).

This is all still pending regulatory approval, however I think it’ll go through. With the monopoly Google currently has on search, what we really needs is a powerful competitor — not a bunch of smaller competitors like Ask.com or Dogpile which realistically haven’t a chance in hell of overtaking Google.

What this will mean in the future for domainers and webmasters remains to be seen — I reported on July 26th that Bing users are much more engaged by advertising. It remains to be seen what the reason for this is and whether the television advertising and other promotions Microsoft is offering to promote Bing are skewing results. As Mike noted over on TheDomains (see first link), this will mean 12% lower paying clicks for those currently monetizing their domains through Yahoo, however, assuming the click-through rate for those monetizing their websites through Yahoo goes up anywhere near what Bing is currently reporting, they should end up earning more money resultant of this search partnership.

It would sure be nice to  see Microsoft force Google to be more competitive and perhaps stop or scale back its bullying of website owners. Don’t know about you but I’m getting a little tired of reading”Matt Cutts said this” and “Matt Cutts said that” on every SEO website.

I’m not sure if this is the first lawsuit resulting from a tweet on Twitter, however it’s the first tweet lawsuit I’ve heard of. The tweet certainly was offensive but did it cause anywhere near the $50,000 being asked for? The person sending the tweet (whose Twitter account is now deleted — not sure if by Twitter or the person’s choice) apparently only had around 20 followers at the time of the tweet.

This is something I think a lot of people aren’t aware of when using social networks — if you’re not employing the features they offer to protect the messages you write from being read by the public, you do stand a chance of offending someone and a lawsuit possibly resulting from that. Tweets such as “Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it’s okay”, are both pointless and asking for trouble. While this may be the first lawsuit resultant from an inappropriate tweet, I’m sure it won’t be the last. Ironically enough, the massive media exposure this story received has likely done far more damage than the initial tweet did.

edit: Just to update… AT&T has reversed their decision to censor their subscribers Internet — good move, however I’m sure plenty of damage has already been done. 4Chan looks like the big winner here — their site is now working for AT&T subscribers and they got a whole lot of free publicity.

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If you’re one of the 15.5% of Americans who subscribe to AT & T wired Internet, know that AT & T is censoring what you see online. No, this wasn’t requested by government like my recent post on Australia Internet censorship — this was something AT & T decided to do all on their own. If you use any of the popular social media sites like Digg or Reddit, you may have come across the article — it has 5600+ diggs and 3300+ upvotes on Reddit at the time of this writing.

The website being blocked is certain sections of 4chan.org, an extremely popular website currently ranked #684 on Alexa. 4Chan is a controversial website (due to some of the content it hosts), however so are thousands of other websites online — should they be blocked as well? There’s really no way to know if there aren’t a whole lot more blocked websites — it came to light so quickly that 4Chan had website sections that were being blocked by AT & T due to the staggering number of people who visit 4Chan, so we might very well hear of other websites being blocked in coming days if AT & T doesn’t wake-up and reverse this decision which is causing rage all over the blogosphere and social media websites.

AT&T is as Un-American as companies come, having invented programs for mass surveillance of US citizens, allowed warrantless wiretapping of AT&T subscribers, are being investigated for price collusion on text message pricing, is being investigated for antitrust violations, and cancelled people’s Internet for saying things online they find “objectionable” (don’t leave a negative comment about AT&T if they’re your ISP!). I could go on — see their Wikipedia article if you’re interested in learning more about AT&T and the way they do business.

A study by Chitika, a search-advertising network, was reported on by Tech Crunch on July 24th. Chitika’s report found that Bing users clicking an organic search result were 55% more likely to click an ad on the website they subsequently visited than Google users. Chitika has over 50,000 websites on their network which based their data on over 32 million ad impressions.

If you take the time to read the Tech Crunch entry, be sure to discount the part about the Law of Large Numbers — a probability theory concept which has zero applicability here because there’s no way to determine an expected value when we don’t know the reasons some users choose to use Bing and others Google.

As pointed out in one of the comments, Bing has spent a large sum on advertising — it would seem plausible to suggest that these users may be more open to advertising, granted many of them probably found out about Bing through advertisements.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the possibility of Bing powering Yahoo search — something which would give Microsoft’s search engine an approximately 28% search market share and position it as a much stronger competitor to Google than Bing or Yahoo currently are.

Click Forensics released a press release on July 23rd reporting that click fraud rate was 12.7% in Q2 2009, down from 16.2% in Q2 2008. As domain and website monetization companies become better at detecting click fraud, the “skill” required to get away with click fraud has been increasing. Click Forensics also reported that publisher collusion fraud on ad networds has been on the rise. 

Another interesting click fraud report came from Anchor Intelligence, reporting that attempted click fraud has increased from 21.7% in Q1 2009 to 22.9% in Q2 2009. 

With attempted click fraud on the rise and actual click fraud declining, it’s good to see that domain and website monetization companies are winning the click fraud battle.

I found an interesting article on Cnet about how some churches are embracing 21st century technology with open arms. This article profiles an American church — the New Life Church, and discusses some of the technologies they use to communicate their message which include Facebook, Twitter and podcasting (audio and video). We have a church here in Winnipeg — Spring’s Church, which engages in similar activities.

Religion aside, many businesses and non-profit organizations could learn a thing or two from some of these megachurches. Having a serious message doesn’t mean you can’t have a little fun and make use of the latest technologies to stay in contact with existing members and reach out to new members. It makes no sense in this day and age to not make use of social networking — especially if you’re trying to reach a younger audience.

The American Jewish Committee isn’t very happy to see Amazon-Germany supporting authors of Holocaust denial books. The AJC is disgusted enough actually that WebProNews reported that they’ve filed a lawsuit against Amazon-Germany.

Holocaust denial is not only morally reprehensible but also a crime in Germany — a crime punishable by up to 5 years in prison. What’s perhaps even more shocking is to read on people’s blogs some of the comments left suggesting this is free speech and that Amazon should be allowed to sell books like this. If someone killed your mother, father, brother, sister, … Would you appreciate a book being written about it, pretending it didn’t happen and/or glorifying it?

Amazon could learn a thing or two from eBay and the negative press they received up until 2001 when they banned the selling on Nazi memorabilia and Holocaust denial books. I’m not sure what the current situation is with Facebook (I don’t use it), however last I heard, Holocaust denial was A-okay so long as it wasn’t illegal in the countries of members taking part in it. 

I’m not sure what’s wrong with Amazon lately, however they’ve sure been making a lot of bad choices Earlier this week, Amazon deleted what they claimed were unauthorized copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm books without the  permission of Kindle owners who had downloaded them.

I can’t understand how companies can be so unaware of the consequences of their actions. If you did a cost-benefit analysis on what little money you make from fringe users versus how costly damage control when a situation like this comes to light may be, it doesn’t make any sense economically even if you have no moral compass whatsoever like these corporations.

It might be harder to get top dollar for your internet advertising, with advertising of all types having taken a hit along with the rest of the economy. There is one good thing about this recession however —  those that are making a living online will be happy to know that many businesses faced with advertising budget cuts are exploring and expanding internet advertising campaigns. Internet advertising is dirt cheap — so cheap that many newspapers offering access to their content online for free can’t cover their costs by doing such.

I’ve never understood the reason for online advertising being so cheap — if given the choice between online and offline advertising with the same ad budget, I’d choose online advertising 10 times out of 10. When advertising offline for an online business (eg. like Microsoft is doing with Bing), there’s no way to accurately measure your return on investment. With online advertising, I can see exactly how many people are coming to my site via a link or text/banner ad. I can see how long people are staying on my website, what they’re doing on my website, etc. I can even compare advertising campaigns I have running on different websites to see which websites are converting best and cut those which aren’t performing. 

 Reuters reported that despite internet ad spending being down 5% in the the first quarter of 2009, online advertising is becoming a larger share of the ad budget of many companies. If you’re trying to reach the younger generation, don’t even think about advertising offline. Internet advertising has come a long way in recent years, with more companies advertising online than in print media today. According to the latest LinkedIn Research Network / Harris Poll, a whopping 92% of companies with ad budgets spend part of their ad budget online — more than any other form of advertising. Since 2008, 74% of advertisers polled said they were spending more on online advertising than they were last year. We’ve seen mobile Internet advertising really start to take off over the past year as well — 69% of advertisers polled said they were spending more on mobile advertising today than in  2008. See the LinkIn Research Network / Harris Poll link for a complete breakdown of findings by WebProNews.

Word has been going around for some time now that Australia may implement an Internet filter which would choose what content Australians would be allowed to view online. With results from the latest Internet filtering trial indicating filters have had little effect on the speed of the Internet, many ISPs seem quite content to start serving filtered content.

An Australia-wide Internet filter could be implemented in a way most users would likely find reasonable - eg. by only blocking access to content that would be illegal to consume anyway (such as child pornography or websites facilitating illegal downloading). Unfortunately, not only does the slippery slope argument apply but Australia’s Internet filter may go far beyond that if content is filtered by ISPs in accordance with ACMA Internet regulation. Australian content is already heavily regulated, however it could get a whole lot worse with content from anywhere possibly being blacklisted in Australia. 

Not residing in Australia myself, I only know what I’ve come across on the Internet — if anyone from Australia wants to fill us in on what’s going down, that would be most appreciated. To see ISPs volunteering to take part in this trial is worrisome — Australia is a democratic country and if it can happen there, who’s to say it can’t happen in Canada or the USA? 

Like I said earlier, it’s a slippery slope and once we start filtering content, where do we stop? Reading over the comments to the article I linked to in the first link, it’s obvious that most Australians do not want their Internet filtered.

If you’re new to Twitter or want to learn more about how companies are successfully using Twitter, you’ll want to read Twitter 101, a free guide to using Twitter conveniently written by the people who brought you Twitter. Twitter 101 covers everything from getting started on Twitter to Twitter best practices and case studies on companies which have successfully incorporated Twitter into their marketing strategy. The guide finishes by providing you with a list of quality Twitter resources. I’m a bit surprised to didn’t include Joel Comm’s Twitter Power book in the list of resources — ito my knowledge, it’s the most bought Twitter book out there ($16.47 currently on Amazon). If you type “Twitter” into the Amazon search bar, you’ll get a pretty extensive list of books from which I’m fairly certain you’ll be able to find whatever you were looking for.

If you still don’t see how Twitter can help your business, you might want to look into how you can profit from helping other people’s businesses. If you’re too lazy or don’t have time to put in the work to get followers, there are services available to help — do a Google search on “Twitter followers” or “Buy Twitter followers” and you’ll find plenty of websites offering everything from tips on how to get more followers to people willing to microblog for you.

If you know what the people want and how to deliver it, designing an app for Apple’s iPhone might very well be one of the quickest ways to make money online. Not owning as iPhone, I haven’t paid much attention to Apple’s iPhone apps myself until I came across a blog post by Owen Frager talking about how some people are making $10,000 per day from applications such as “Fart a Friend” (whose purpose is apparently exactly what it’s name suggests).

Today, Owen wrote a post about how a new iPhone app has made $1 Million in 6 weeks (about $24,000/day). The great thing about making money online through Apple is that there are no make money online ebooks (aka make money online scams) to buy.

It may be quick money and possibly even easy money if you have a great idea, however there is a lot of competition out there and for every person making the kind of money from their apps that I’ve mentioned in this article, there are a thousand others making squat. Still, your odds are a whole lot better than playing the lotto. I don’t know anything about iPhone application design, however I’m going to look into it — I could sure use an extra $24,000 per day

Virtual credit cards are alternate credit card numbers that can be created for you created specifically with online purchases in mind. With virtual credit cards, you may be able to customize both expiration dates and credit limits. Because of the control virtual credit cards offer consumers over expiration dates and credit card limits, virtual credit cards are a powerful force in fighting identity theft and countering credit card fraud. Virtual credit cards first came out to protect consumers when making online purchases, however they now have other uses such as when making telephone purchases or purchases through the mail.

Be sure to ask your credit card issuer how their virtual credit cards (if they offer them) can be used. By using a virtual credit card instead of your real credit card, any would-be fraudsters will be limited to stealing at a maximum whatever your limit on your virtual credit card is, something which your credit card issuer should end up refunding anyway (Canada/USA) if you report it within a certain period of time which should be listed in your cardholder agreement.

Some credit card issuers have virtual credit cards which are limited to (or have the option of being) single use credit cards, something which severely limits credit card fraud. Even legitimate online retailers have been known to sell data that is made available to them when you make purchases with a credit card — virtual credit cards can protect from this as well. Despite the fact that you may not be liable for unauthorized charges, the hassle and potential damage (eg. to your credit score) which may arise make a virtual credit card well worth considering.

Another alternative to consider for increased safety would be prepaid credit cards. The disadvantage (some may see this as an advantage) with a prepaid credit card is that you’ll need to put money on the credit card to make any purchases.

Whenever given the option, it’s always best to pay via credit card through PayPal, it giving you 2 ways to try and get your money back in the event a fraudulent transaction occurs (credit card chargeback, PayPal  payment reversal).

Whatever you do, don’t ever pay with a bank wire transfer (or debit card for that matter) online unless you completely trust who you’re dealing with and understand the risks — wire transfers are irreversible and offer no fraud protection. I have quite a funny story about wire transfers.. I purchased 2 domains last year for $9000 each and instead of sending a $9000 wire transfer twice, my bank accidentally sent 3 wire transfers of $9000 each (paying for one of the domains twice). This obviously wasn’t my fault and my bank would have been on the hook for the money had they not been able to recover it but to make a long story short, my bank had to literally beg Escrow.com to send them the money back. If my bank had sent the money to someone less honest, it’s quite possible they would have just kept the money. Even a bank is at the mercy of the other party when it comes to wire transfers.

Network Solutions discovered malicious code which somehow found it’s way onto the servers hosting many of their e-commerce clients. According to The Tech Herald, the malicious code has been discovered on at least 4343 websites hosted with Network Solutions. These kind of things can happen to any company and it’s good to see Network Solutions doing what it can to help it’s customers. Network Solutions will be sending notices to affected clients by both email and snail mail. 

As bad as this may already sound, the real bad news is for customers of these websites hosted Network Solutions — it’s believed that transaction data on up to 573,928 credit cardholders may have been obtained from purchases made at compromised websites between March 12, 2009 and June 8, 2009. If you’ve made any only purchases within that time-frame, it may be a good idea to do a do a whois lookup to see where the websites you made purchases from are hosted. If they’re hosted with Network Solutions, make sure you check your credit card statements for unauthorized transactions. It’s also worth mentioning that not all Network Solutions e-commerce websites were affected.

This kind of stuff unfortunately happens all too often, Network Solutions being the latest victim of it. If you make a lot of online transactions, it may be worth getting a separate credit card strictly for online transactions — this will make it much easier to spot fraudulent transactions and minimize the damage that can be done from any undetected ones (so long as you set a low credit limit). Virtual credit cards are something else to look into — I’ll get a post up later today discussing what virtual credit cards are and their advantages over regular credit cards for online purchases. 

Renown web usability expert Jakob Nielsen has released a mobile web usability report which says exactly what many .mobi investors have been saying for a long time — mobile web users have different needs and while a walled garden approach is both unnecessary and far from ideal, the mobile web experience still suffers when websites are not designed with cell phones and smartphones in mind. Unsurprisingly, mobile web usability is reported to suffer most on cell phones with smaller screens and/or lower resolutions, agreeing with the conclusion many domainers have already reached that the iPhone and a few other premium smartphones provide a good mobile web experience, whereas mid-range and entry level cell phones provide a mediocre web browsing experience at best.

For a list of mobile web best practices, visit Mobiforge. While some content on Mobiforge (and elsewhere) discuss using .mobi domains for mobile web development, you can of course make a mobile compatible website out of any domain. I’m not going to get into the debate about whether you should choose m-dot, .wap, /mobile, .mobi — there’s enough reading on Namepros in the Dotmobi forum to keep anyone interested busy for many weeks. The short answer is what I said above — you can develop any domain into a mobile compatible website and you can identify your website as being mobile compatible however you want. 

The mobile web is still in it’s infancy — it’s big winners will be those with sites which go beyond being just mobile compatible and actually are mobile-friendly. Like I said at the start of this article, mobile web users are generally looking for different things online than those browsing the web on desktops or laptops/netbooks. Websites which are merely resized to fit the devices used by mobile web users are missing the whole point of why content was resized in the first place — it’s all about mobile web usability and aside from physical size limitations, one must also consider that most people don’t plan to spend hours browsing websites on a cell phone as they may on a desktop. What this means is that your 3000 word thesis of a blog post best be summarized, site navigation simplified allowing access  to each page on your website in the least amount of clicks possible, graphics and/or other bandwidth intensive media should be reduced in size, quality, or removed entirely, etc — I provided the Mobiforge link above for those who’d like to learn more about Best Practices when developing mobile compatible websites.

Is there a domainer out there who doesn’t wish he had more end user sales? The value of most domains is largely based on their probability of finding an end user and the expected payoff from that end user. Pay per click revenue is great and can certainly be used as a lower bound for the value of a domain making money (or even a good estimate of value for a domain that is unlikely to find an end user, such as typo domains), however pay per click revenue (and what a domainer will pay based on a domain’s monthly revenue) doesn’t tell us much about what an end user might be prepared to pay. It’s not easy (or even possible in some cases) to predict with accuracy what an end user might be prepared to pay for a domain.

Today while browsing Namepros, I came across a thread asking members where they drew the line when it came to end user domain sales. At one extreme, we have domainers sending out thousands of unsolicited, highly untargeted emails. These domainers harvest email addresses of end users or even other domainers and then bombard them with emails advertising that their domains are for sale or that they’re looking to purchase certain domains.

At the other extreme is the domainer who takes the time to carefully research the market and the companies which take part in it. This domainer then takes the time to send out personalized emails to a handful of companies whom he believes the domain would best fit.

Judging by the emails I’ve received in the past asking to both buy and sell domains, I’d imagine most domainers fall somewhere between those 2 extremes — one extreme which I’d certainly classify as spam, the other which despite being unsolicited I don’t think many people would regard as spam. 

One type of spam I never appreciate is an unannounced telephone call. I have nothing against someone wanting to discuss domains over the telephone, however if I’ve never spoken to you, at the very least have the decency to send me a courtesy email and obtain my permission before phoning me (I won’t pick up the phone otherwise). 

For whatever reason, many domainers seem to think the more emails they send or phone calls they make, the more responses they’ll get. Domainers might think end users are stupid — they’re not and don’t think for a second most people can’t tell the difference between a bulk email (which will most likely be perceived as spam, if not a scam) and a personalized email. Rather than looking at your 1000 domain portfolio and setting a timeline on when you’ll have end users contacted on all one thousand, why not pick out what you believe to be your 10 or 20 most promising and give them a genuine effort before moving on to more domains?

CNN reported yesterday that the SEACOM cable is now live, providing East Africa with 17,000 kilometers of high speed Internet. I knew Internet penetration was quite low in Africa and there were some obvious reasons for it — for example, the widespread poverty many African nations are afflicted with. Another unsurprising fact is the lack of affordable Internet access in much of Africa — large scale cable Internet investments (such as with SEACOM) have been prohibitively expensive in the past which has resulted in much of Africa being served only by costly satellite Internet.

With netbooks getting cheaper and cheaper, the SEACOM cable now live, and wireless Internet technologies continuing to evolve, we can only expect Internet penetration to rise in Africa in the years ahead. For African nations struggling with widespread poverty and corruption, this could give people the opportunity to share their story with the rest of the world (eg. what Twitter microblogging did in Iran) and it will undoubtedly in the future lead to a better education for millions of children who will now have access to the world’s knowledge. The future impact this may have is hard to say, however one can hope it may alleviate  some of the problems currently being experienced.

We’ve heard about newspapers planning on getting tougher on people using their content and many newspapers contemplating charging for access to their online content, however what I read today on The New York Times website goes above and beyond that… Reality check Associated Press and newspapers of the world: You need Google, not the other way around. And if you’re going to come after me for linking to your article, guess what — I’m going to paraphrase your article just the same if I find it interesting and not give you a link for your effort. One blog doing this certainly won’t mean anything to them, however if online publishers expect people to pay them for linking, quoting, or paraphrasing their work, they’re in for a real shock.

The currency respectable publishers have always used when quoting, paraphrasing, or otherwise making use of the work of others has been to provide a link back to their source, just like I did above, linking back to the New York Times. If the link above sends them 500 visitors (remember, search engine traffic will mean the occasional click for months and months (if not years) to come so long as the post stays on the website) and they’re making a hypothetical $20 per 1000 impressions (some websites make much more, others much less) on their website, then I essentially gave them $20, if not more (assuming the average visitor browses just 2 pages and that no visitors to this blog who didn’t previously read the New York Times will now start reading it at least occasionally due to my article), for the use of their content. For websites which offer premium subscriptions, a link on my website could very well be worth hundreds of dollars, depending on the conversion rate and the cost of subscriptions.

I have no problem giving people links — if they deserve a link, they’ll get a link, however I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay $20, $50, $100, etc for the privilege of using that content. At an average of 2 posts per day, it could cost me up to $3000/month if I needed to pay $100 per post for the right to  use their content — enough to make pretty much any small-medium sized blog unprofitable if content is largely focused on discussing news. Just imagine how costly a well-researched post could be if it ends up using content from multiple news sources… Costly enough that I probably wouldn’t be able to afford to make them — at least not very many of them. 

One thing many 20th century publishers don’t realize is the long tail of web publishing. This blog might only have 10,000 monthly readers compared to 15 million monthly readers for The New York Times, however in aggregate, smaller publishers pack a powerful punch. According to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008, Universal McCann, eMarketer, and comScore all estimated the number of monthly blog readers in the United States alone was between 60.3 Million and 94.1 Million. Numbers are no doubt up since then, however for comparison using Compete.com, that’s more blog readers than The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and Fox News combined. 

How many of those blogs have linked to or talked about an article written on one of the above-mentioned websites before? How many will be doing so if changes were made to make monetary compensation mandatory for linking, paraphrasing, or otherwise discussing content written by the aforementioned websites? Before I go on, please note that I am just using the above online news sources as examples — everything at this point is still very much conjecture and these news sources may or may not attempt to implement said changes some point down the road. I say attempt because I’m not sure how exactly some of this will hold up legally — especially for websites not hosted in the U.S. and whose domain names are not registered with USA-based domain name registrars (eg. GoDaddy) or registries (eg. VeriSign). 

I can completely understand monetary compensation being demanded for the outright copying of articles (like many newspapers already do with the Associated Press), however when monetary compensation is being demanded for something as something so trivial as a link (and for the record, there has already been a handful of lawsuits for “unauthorized hyperlinking”), small quote, or paraphrasing (aka giving one’s opinion), I really start to question whether democracy still exists or at the very least, whether democracy still exists on the Internet.

I find it hard to believe such a valuable resource is so underappreciated by the domain name community. Perhaps the Compete.com and Alexa stats are way off the mark — I can’t see how so few domainers would be taking advantage of it as a free resource and Alexa and Compete suggesting more people visit domain name blogs than DomainState doesn’t make any sense to me.

I do most of my posts over at Namepros, however I very frequently visit both DN Forum and DomainState to read up on what’s going on in the domain name community and what the thoughts of other domainers are on issues that matter to us all. I try and visit all 3 major domain forums at least weekly — many of the topics discussed on them vary, so reading only 1 or 2 domain forums means you’re missing out on topics discussed only elsewhere.

From what I’ve observed, most of the domainers on DomainState have been in the domain business longer than your average Namepros or DNF member — many of the domainers on DomainState (including its founders) were in fact among the first DNF members.

Having more talk about policies and issues pertinent to Internet governance,  discussions about the financial health of important players in the domain name business, and other topics a domain newbie may have trouble wrapping his head around, I can understand that DomainState may not be the most “newbie-friendly” domain forum out there. DomainState does have a “Getting Started” domain newbie section which would however certainly complement the domainer education to be had on Namepros and DN Forum. As a new domainer, why wouldn’t you make use of all available free resources? As much as domain name blogs are fun to read and informative, I have yet to come across one which compares to any of these 3 domain forums in terms of the knowledge available for a new domainer to make use of.

Domain forums can be a bit annoying, seeing as their massive amount of content can often make finding what you’re looking for difficult and time-consuming, however it’s well worth the effort.

DN Journal reported on a long time domainer having several domains stolen from him earlier this week, there was a huge theft earlier this year involving hundreds of domains including many premium .coms, and members on Namepros and DN Forum probably remember the large domain theft that occurred last year and involved many prominent domainers, among many other high profile domain name thefts which have occurred in recent years.

There are some ways domains are stolen that we don’t have much control over (eg. RegisterFly), however many other ways domains are stolen are completely preventable. Tech Crunch recently reported on confidential Twitter files being discovered and released to certain websites (including Tech Crunch). How did the cracker do it? Twitter was dumb enough to use “password” as their password, something which, by the way, any experienced cracker knows to try because it’s the most commonly used password in existence. A long, alpha-numeric password with a few symbols tossed in is nearly impossible to crack without computational resources far above the means of ordinary crackers.

Secret answers — here’s a place where many websites (including domain registrars) do their clientele a great disservice. Yes, we certainly need a way to recover our password in the event we forget it, however many websites suggest that people use secret questions such as “Where were you born” or “What was your mother’s maiden name”. Often, it’s not very difficult to find this information on the Internet and if it can’t be found, a little bit of social engineering is highly effective.

Email addresses — if you’re using a web based email provider, make sure they’re secure, trustworthy, and reliable. Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and other free web based email offerings I’m aware of have all had dangerous security flaws uncovered in the past which could have made compromising your email address much easier than it otherwise would have been. Many domain registrars make it very easy for domain thieves — enter your email address and we’ll email you a link to change your domain account’s password… While there’s no guarantee that any email address couldn’t be compromised at some time (eg. an “internal” job performed by an employee or a new security vulnerability discovered that people were not previously aware of), lessening the damage that a compromised email account will do is rather easy. For one thing, don’t choose a domain registrar who allows a very easy password recovery (eg. a domain registrar needing only access to the domain registrant’s email address to reset the password). Secondly, you may want to shop around for a secure domain name registrar and consider purchasing or utilizing additional domain security measures provided at the domain registrar you decide to go with. Having your domains always “locked” except when absolutely necessary that they be unlocked is a no-brainer.

Keyloggers are one of the biggest causes of domain name theft. Keyloggers are capable of recording the keystrokes entered on your keyboard, meaning that if you enter your password by making keystrokes, your password will be recorded and your domain account may be compromised. The easiest way around this would be to not enter keystrokes — something which many domain registrars have failed to make standard (eg. by “clicking” to enter your password instead of keying in letters and numbers). The best way of all however is what a friend of mine (Samir) suggested to me a few months back — enter your password in an encrypted file, preferably stored on removable media. Instead of entering your password, you copy your password and paste it into the password boxes. Something else I haven’t mentioned but which should be obvious — don’t use the same password for multiple websites. If this strategy of avoiding keyloggers seems like too much work for you, I would recommend looking into sandboxing. Sandboxing allows you to create what is essentially a virtual environment on your computer — an environment whose changes can be easily reversed. If you’re using a sandboxing application and you download a keylogger, the keylogger will be deleted automatically when you close the sandboxing application — due note that sandboxing will not protect you if you acquire the keylogger and then go on to login to websites prior to closing the sandboxing application. Sandboxing or not, it’s a good idea to have software on your computer to protect you from spyware, viruses, and other malware. For additional tips on protecting your domains, see my article on domain name security.

I’ve written about domain name security in the past and what to look for in a domain name registrar. Despite the security precautions many domainers know to take, many people (including domainers) let their guard down when hiring people to help them and/or solve business problems. Sky News released an article yesterday about computer repair shops illegally accessing the personal data of their customers. In some cases, attempts to hack bank accounts were even made.

Many domainers make the mistake of having their email provider automatically receive their mail and grant them access to the email account based solely on cookie data. Domainers often forget to delete sensitive emails — if you may need the emails for a later date, copy them to some form of removable media and delete them from your email account. The same goes for your contact list — there are better places to keep it than right out in the open where any hacker can gain access.

If you’re sending your computer away for upgrades or repairs, remove the hard drive unless it’s necessary that it be included — the hard drive is of course where all your information is stored. If you’re purchasing a new computer, don’t be so naive as to merely discard your old computer thinking no harm will come of it… Open the computer up and destroy the hard drive. Deleting all information from the hard drive isn’t sufficient to prevent someone from recovering the data previously contained upon it. Giving a hard drive a beating with a hammer is a surprisingly effective stress management technique — at least for me!

Whether it be with outsourced computer repairs as in the example I provided above or whether it’s disgruntled employees stealing data, there’s no reason to trust anyone with more confidential information (or access to confidential information) than is necessary.

Last year, a prominent DN Forum member had his name registered as a .com domain by a domainer who, for reasons unknown to me, decided he wanted to once again cause a problem on DN Forum. Shortly after hearing about this, I decided that it was well worth spending $8 to secure my name in .com. I list my full name on forums I participate in, so it’s not uncommon for a few people each month to search my name on Google for example. Knowing how well exact match domains index in Google, I’d sure hate for the first result to be something along the lines of “Don’t sell anything to Reece. He’s a racist scammer who will reverse payment and then blog about it!”

For someone who doesn’t know me or doesn’t know me very well, something as simple as that might be enough to make them hesitant or even unwilling to do business with me. I do a thorough investigation (which does include Googling the person’s name) into a person’s background before doing large transactions with people I don’t know or whose credibility I cannot ascertain — seeing something along the lines of what I’ve italicized above wouldn’t break a deal but would certainly encourage me to do more digging before agreeing to anything.

There’s no guarantee that someone out there isn’t already planning on trying to destroy your reputation. It could have been as simple as an argument on a forum or an unhappy customer – there might not seem to be anything you did to deserve this (eg. if you’re involved in politics). It doesn’t really matter what the reason is, what matters is the damage that could be done. Most of us ordinary folk aren’t going to have to worry about a substantial amount of type-in traffic flowing to the .com, so settling for the .net, .info, etc likely wouldn’t be a problem. In the near future, I plan on creating a small minisite for my name just to get something indexed in Google before anything negative starts getting indexed in Google.

If someone is writing libelous statements about you online, there are many different ways you can go about getting them removed. Easiest would be to send them a Cease and Desist letter. If that doesn’t work, you can go after their web host and request that their hosting be terminated. Neither one of these are very good solutions — most of us aren’t going to legally go after someone living on the other side of the world and if their web host terminates their account, they can always create a new account at another web host. You can file a UDRP but even if you win, what’s stopping them from registering another domain with your name in it? Instead of ReeceBerg.com, they can register Reece-Berg.com or even Reece-Berg-Is-A-Scammer.com. One of the best ways to “clean” search engine results might very well be to do a little bowling — Google Bowling, that is.

We all know that certain things you do on your website can get your site penalized by search engines — some examples include paid links and too many links from bad neighbourhoods (eg. thousands of links in unrelated directories and/or websites). This is playing dirty but so are they — and this does work. Sure, they can just make another website once again ( just as they could in all the other examples), however this is one way that will pretty much always work, so long as the person bad mouthing you isn’t doing so on an authority website. Knowing that almost all search engine traffic comes from first page results, all we need to do is get them off the first page. An alternative strategy we could use would be to build websites (or use existing websites) and optimize pages on them for our name(s) [in the case this is also being done maliciously to businesses you own]. As an example, I could use this website to optimize a page for “Reece Berg” and because it’s has a fair bit of trust in Google’s eyes, I could probably get a page linked to on the homepage ranked well on Google fairly quickly. If you’re not up against much competition, you might even be able to knock results off the first page by posting on other blogs — as an example, DotWTF.com frequently leaves comments on my blog and if you Google “DotWTF.com”, you should see links to a couple posts on this blog where he’s left comments. Submitting articles to article directories, such as EzineArticles can also help push your name up to the top. It’s obviously more desirable that the top search results link to websites owned by you, however this is certainly preferable to having top search results maliciously attacking you.

Listed below are all short domain name sales greater than $449 in .com, .net and .org reported in DN Journal, DN Sale Price, and on Namepros. A few sales from May 2009 may have accidentally slipped in. These are only reported short domain sales that I’ve come across — like all domain market segments, only a small portion of sales are reported.

70.com $87000
63.com $75000
Ego.com $75000
434.com $18500
JABA.COM $18000
UIX.com $12900
4AD.com $10200
IVOW.COM $10215
ILED.com $10000
XS8.com $9999
XGR.com $9995
HJZ.com $9850
FABO.com $9600
BUNK.com $9300
DCW.com $6500
Spao.com $6300
aceb.com $6115
STTI.COM $5556
YCI.com $5094
Yiss.com $5012
Nubi.com $5000
YLA.com $5000
XTT.com $5000
07X.net $4794
YPSO.COM $3800
KRAR.COM $3788
EDWY.COM $3750
OPZ.com $3703
WXA.com $3669
QXZ.com $3620
ALVS.com $3570
DNAP.com $3500
Aydo.com $3500
GS1.net $3500
YCCS.com $3500
TIEL.COM $3500
Koç.net $3493 (IDN)
KRCH.COM $3440
1836.com $3000
ITCA.com $3000
Toat.com $3000
OOTD.COM $3000
nafx.com $3000
BCMC.com $2900
KRFR.COM $2706
KRGO.COM $2553
FSTV.com $2500
vieo.com $2410
Vsys.com $2375
M8S.com $2300
J-W.com $2134
ATMJ.com $2088
wevu.com $2003
VKNA.COM $2000
U2O.com $2000
hofu $1800
001.org $1650
NHL.info $1551
Cinz.net $1511
evis.com $1466
BTB.info $1410
ABC.biz $1403
ommy.com $1315
SSF.info $1269
XOL.biz $1200
8581.com $1116
jiny.com $1111
kkei.com $1053
f-a-b.com $1000
Gooc.net $1000
YLA.org $1000
ddjj.com $861
Alvs.org $800
BHS.net $761
A3X.com $739
dyca $730
Alvs.net $700
nabl.com $700
aduo.com $679
RH7.com $650
WH0.com $572
C0W.com $549
lfff.com $511
8TW.com $510
0JJ.com $510
KOX.net $505
6LB.com $500
6AQ.com $460
U3P.com $460
43G.com $460
PA8.com $460
T9A.com $454
XPL.org $451
7IE.com $450

Dominik Mueller has compiled a list of nearly 80 high quality articles related to domaining that have been featured over the years in publications such as the New York Times, USA Today, CNN Money, Wired, BusinessWeek, Business 2.0, Washington Post, etc. Dominik has indicated that he will be updating this list as he comes across more high quality publications covering the domain industry and you’re more than welcome to send him links to any articles missing that you think would be worthy.

For full details, please see: http://www.dmueller.com/domains-in-the-news/

Another silly thread on Namepros about the new domain name extensions: http://www.namepros.com/domain-name-discussion/597878-com-will-lose-ground-xxxx-travel.html#post3517585 .

Predicting the future is often a coin toss for even the sharpest domainers… Why do new domainers so often think they know the answer? And why is the answer always the exact opposite of what the large majority of more senior domainers are saying? And why do they think senior domainers are always out to get them, that they’re jealous that they “missed the boat”, etc?

This question goes a bit beyond what I linked to above, however it’s something I’ve been wondering about for a long time. Any new domainers want to explain this or do any more experienced domainers have insight into why this phenomenon repeats itself every time there is something new?

It appears that may very well be the case. I’m not exactly sure how they ever planned on making this business legal… Sure, you could try and monetize the traffic but how valuable and loyal are people looking for illegal torrents going to be for a law-abiding business?

Press release available here: http://www.prweb.com/releases/domain/internet/prweb2662174.htm

.info deals can be viewed here: http://www.info.info/deals . You can even get a .info deals widget for Facebook or iGoogle.

Is it just me or do you not think this is pure genius? Seeing as Afilias, VeriSign, etc make money on every single domain registration for the registries they manage, would it not be in their best interest to encourage as many domain name registrations as possible by helping their customers obtain the best prices available at their favorite domain name registrars? It makes so much sense, you have to wonder why other registries aren’t doing it… Heck, why isn’t ICANN doing it — they’re making money off all our domains too!

I apologize for this post being a bit late — I was away yesterday and came back to negative comments regarding what I said about Domainers.org and cybersquatting.

Just to clarify my position:

1 - I was not paid for this post or any post ever made on this blog. Furthermore, I have no interest in ever accepting money for posts made on this blog — If I don’t support something, it won’t be posted on or at least not in a positive light. No amount of money will change that stance. If I decide I want to make money off this blog at some point, there are many ways to do so without selling out my credibility (eg. banner ads). I have ran this blog since November 2008 and my previous blog on 4 letter .coms at 4letternoob.wordpress.com and BQB.com before then, beginning in November 2007. I have not made 1 cent up to date off of anything other than domain purchases/sales and domain broker offers that came my way courtesy of this blog. Even the ads I put on this blog in the past were merely to support people in this industry I respect. I tried one affiliate ad for Parked.com for a week — didn’t get me any referrals and I haven’t bothered looking for a way to monetize this blog since.

 2 - Nothing I wrote in that post was my opinion or Francois’ opinion — I was quoting what someone said to him. If you still want to unsubscribe, go right ahead - less bandwidth for me to pay for. Like I said, I make nothing off of this blog so I couldn’t care less if being honest about what I think costs me some traffic.

3 - I agree with Jeff + Chef Patrick that posting a picture is best. I’m usually fairly sleep deprived, so posting a pic of me with purple bags under my eyes might make me look more like a junkie than a domainer.

4 - Kevin Ohashi, I don’t know what the hell your problem is. You come off as a real prick here and elsewhere I’ve read your posts.

I appreciate everyone taking time out of their day to comment on this post and others. Hopefully this cleared things up.

I received an email from Francois a couple days ago asking why I hadn’t yet gotten listed on Domainers.org.

I know some people like more privacy than others — Francois has made all information optional except an image. The image can be an avatar or a picture of you that is 48×48 pixels, although Francois’ site did a good job of reducing my larger image to 48×48 pixels. You can view my Domainers.org profile if you’d like to see what you’re getting — all the information you see there including the contact methods was strictly optional information that I chose to include. You can set up your Domainers.org profile from your Domaining.com account.

This service is completely free exposure — there’s no reason only 2% of Domaining.com subscribers should be using it. Francois told me he had someone tell him that the reason only 2% of members were listed was that 98% were cybersquatters that want to stay hidden. Care to help prove that wrong?  It’s the little things like this which will help set us apart. Like I said – it’s completely free and won’t take more than 2 minutes to fill out, so what do you have to lose?

Kevin Leto reported on DN Forum that IAC has acquired over 25 dating domains and websites for $57 Million in cash. Kevin reports in his post on DNF that People Media has 255,000 paying subscribers to it’s dating websites, so that explains the price. Looking over at the domain names, you can see there’s nothing special about them. It will be easier to build something great on a domain receiving loads of type-in traffic, however it can be done on ordinary domains just the same.

Ian from Scotia Domains was kind to let me share his analysis of eBay LLLL.com market trends. Ian’s market analysis follows below.

—————–

This isn’t exactly breaking news, but in case you don’t already know, average sale prices on eBay during June were pretty disastrous. Here’s an analysis of trends over the past eight months. I’ve excluded domains selling for more than $100 as I consider them outliers on eBay. All averages below are based on trendlines calculated from weekly figures, so smoothing out irregularities.

Mean prices have fallen over the last 8 months at an average rate of about $1.79 a month, a total of $14.33 over the period. The trend was a drop from $24.39 to $10.06, which is a drop of 83% based on the midpoint.

The average drop over the last 3 months was about $3.25 a month.

The best week of the period was November week 2 with a mean price of $28.47, and the worst week was June week 3 with a mean price of just $6.53.

Monthly means were -

November $23.25
December $20.14
January $21.41
February $20.13
March $17.47
April $14.83
May $13.39
June $8.57

So apart from a slight recovery in January, it’s been downhill all the way since November, and June was particularly bad.

Average remaining registration continued to fall. The overall November-March average was about 7.7 months, the overall May-june average was about 4.0 months. This fall accounts for about 51 cents of the monthly price drop, bringing the effective price drop down to about $1.28 a month.

Average domain quality also fell off during June, although it had remained fairly static over the preceding 7 months. The overall effect of this over the past 8 months accounts for about 15 cents of the monthly price drop, bringing the effective price drop down to about $1.13 a month.

Here are the percentile trends over the 8-month period -

The 5th percentile fell from $10.49 to $1.63, a fall of 146% based on the midpoint.

The 25th percentile fell from $13.90 to $4.31, a fall of 105% based on the midpoint.

The 50th percentile fell from $19.78 to $7.14, a fall of 94% based on the midpoint.

The 75th percentile fell from $29.46 to $12.42, a fall of 81% based on the midpoint.

The 95th percentile fell from $57.49 to $29.12, a fall of 66% based on the midpoint.

The 95th percentile figure shows that the price drops aren’t restricted to the lower quality domains, although these have certainly been falling a lot faster than the higher quality domains.

Larysa Mykhas, an associate of Brands-and-Jingles, tipped me off to a press release her company recently wrote about the .me domain name extension. Brands-and-Jingles is a domain name company which has successfully invested in .me domains. One notable sale I’m aware of that Brands-and-Jingles had earlier this year was LUV.me which they sold for 6200 EUR ($8600+ at the time of sale).

Even if you’re not a .me investor, the press release is well worth checking out. It’s very well put together — quality information presented aesthetically which is both comprehensive and easy to understand. Every domainer dealing in lesser known domain name extensions should take the time to put together something like this if they plan on targeting end users. Even if you’re dealing with an established domain name extension like .com, why not put together an information package for potential buyers? Another thing any domainer targeting end users should have is a website.

If you think that most end users will find you via whois, Namepros or DN Forum, you still have a lot to learn. When I had a contact link visible on this blog, I would get 1-2 end users and 4-5 domainers inquiring about purchasing LLLL.coms every month — even at times when I hadn’t made a mention in weeks that I was selling anything. I’ve had  people ask me to broker their short domains and partnership offers on website development projects. Almost every top SEO today recommends that most businesses have a corporate blog. You will not only increase traffic to your website by doing this but also establish yourself as a real person, someone people can trust, and someone who will do right by them.

According to theinvestor on DN Forum, at least 245 NNN.ca domains will be dropping next week (most/all on July 22nd). I didn’t count them myself however I did take a quick look and that number seems about right. With only 1000 NNN.ca domains in existence, that’s almost 25% of the NNN.ca market which is dropping next week. Might be worth keeping your eyes peeled if you’re a Canadian domainer.

There’s talk on Namepros today about how the Chrome OS encourages less type-in traffic — something which will no doubt continue in the future as both the Chrome OS becomes more popular (which should happen next year when the Google Operating System comes out) and more web browsers are designed with monetization in mind. Let’s face it — direct navigation doesn’t make anyone money except us and the search engines and the search engines would rather people go to them so they don’t have to share anything with us.

As it currently stands, search engines give a massive SEO boost for having the keyword in the domain. Plenty of research shows many visitors are hesitant about clicking links in “strange” extensions. Good domain names will always make for great domains to advertise - be it on television, magazine, online, etc. Good domains are more memorable and more trustworthy.

While I do agree that type-in traffic will likely decline over the next few years among current Internet users, suggesting that this will somehow affect the value of generic .coms (the suggestion a poster made on Namepros) is flawed. For one thing, more and more people are joining the Internet each day, meaning even if type-in traffic declines as a percentage, the amount of type-in traffic domains receive may actually go up. Second of all, generic .coms aren’t sold based on their revenue or type-in traffic. Sure, people might pay a bit less for a domain if it receives no type-in traffic, however most generic domains are sold based on potential, not based on a revenue multiple of what they make undeveloped.

The domains I see being most affected should we experience a large drop in type-in traffic in the future would be mediocre .com domains whose value lies in the revenue it derives from direct navigation traffic. Typo domains would be the biggest loser in my opinion, followed by long-tail domains which are great for development but would no longer be for domain parking.

Get a completely free .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz, or .us domain from Register.com. For instructions on how to get your free domain, see: http://www.mrrcentral.com/blog/free-1-year-domain-name-from-register-com/ . Limit of 1 free domain name.

There are 2 obvious ways to increase page views on your website:

• Reduce the bounce rate
• Optimize pages with a high exit rate

In plain English, the easiest way to increase your website’s page views is to encourage visitors to view more pages.

This blog currently has a 65% bounce rate — that is, 65% of people who land on this site courtesy of direct navigation, search engines, or a links, will leave this website without viewing another page.

On an average day, 850+ people will visit this blog and 65% of people will leave before visiting a second page. This means that 553/850 website visitors are only getting me 1 page view each, yet this blog averages 3300 page views per day which tells us that those who visit more than 1 page (the remaining 297 visitors) average about 9.25 page views.

If I could get those 553 website visitors to view 9.25 page views like my average other visitor is, this blog would receive 4562 more page views per day (7862 page views compared to 3300 page views today).

Reducing bounce rates and exit rates is easier said then done, however I hope this post has elucidated some of the benefits to be gained by doing it. In my case, even reducing my bounce rate by just 5% could be expected to yield up to 355 more page views per day — that’s over 10,000 more page views per month. Surely it’s worth tinkering around with your site a bit knowing what could possibly be gained. Let’s not forget that new visitors who only visit 1 page before leaving are also much more likely to never come back (because they didn’t find what they were looking for). The bounce rate and exit rate article I linked to above will give some suggestions on how to reduce your bounce rate. Depending on your website’s content, it might be extremely easy or difficult to achieve a 65% bounce rate, however chances are that whatever your bounce rate is, it can be improved upon if you haven’t yet done anything to reduce your bounce rate.

When I speak of the benefits of increasing page views in this post, I’m referring to the benefits of increased page views due to visitors being more interested in your website. Making your site less usable by making it take more clicks to access pages will increase page views, however it certainly won’t be appreciated by visitors and no benefit will be derived from doing such.

ICANN is inviting comments on a proposal to introduce a paperless, electronically filed Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (eUDRP).

Comments on the eUDRP proposal can be viewed here. If you’d like to leave a comment of your own, send an email to eudrp(at)icann.org before August 12th, 2009. There’s a discussion thread on Domain State open to discuss this proposal with other domainers.

As several of the comments left have said, a completely paperless UDRP is disadvantageous to domain name owners (who could miss the email notification). I have to agree that domain name owners should at the very least be given an initial hard copy notification in addition to electronic notification.

I’m in full agreement with George Kirikos that older domain names should be granted a longer period of time to prepare a response. If a domain name was registered 10 or 15 years ago without it’s registration ever being contested, it’s probably because there is nothing legitimate to contest. I would also like to see more time given for responses when the domain name being contested is developed. I understand the whole concept of a domain name being developed is rather subjective, however someone who has created a business around a domain name often has a lot more to lose and should be given ample time to prepare the best defense possible. Twenty days is an unreasonably short period of time to prepare a response for a domain name one has owned for many years, especially considering the fact mentioned by Mr. Kirikos that complainants have an unlimited amount of time to prepare their complaints.

I would also like to see large fines imposed for reverse domain name hijacking. The time and legal costs for domain owners to successfully defend UDRPs greatly exceeds the cost associated with filing baseless UDRPs which as Mr. Kirikos has mentioned, some companies abuse as if they were “lottery tickets”. With some panelists clearly slanted towards trademark owners and the large discrepancy between the percentage of decisions won by the Complainant when there is a sole panelist in contrast to when there is a 3-person panel, a domain owner is almost forced to request a 3-person panel for a domain name he can not afford to lose due to a questionable UDRP decision.

Another thing that worries me about the eUDRP proposal is that emphasis appears to be placed on speeding up the process, rather than on simplifying it and ensuring all parties receive fair treatment. I hope ICANN will listen to advice on the shortcomings of the UDRP in addition to advice on how best to implement the eUDRP.

The past 17 months haven’t been kind to LLLL.com investors… We saw the minimum wholesale on LLLL.coms fall from $55 to roughly 50 cents and while other LLLL.com segments haven’t seen such steep declines, most have performed miserably since February 2008, with quad premium rares (AAAB/BAAA, triple letters, AABB, ABBA, ABAB), highly pronounceable and CVCV LLLL.coms being the only ones to have performed “okay” in light of the declines we’ve seen across all domain segments, these LLLL.com segments having performed similarly to LLL.coms (down about 50-60% for the most part; a few exceptions occuring with the highest quality pronounceable LLLL.coms [mostly CVCVs] which appear to be down about 15-25%). 

I’ve written a few posts recently about how the number of dropping LLLL.coms not being backordered or registered using drop catching software has been on the rise, and today to the shock of many LLLL.com investors, 25 LLLL.coms were available for hand registration this morning. Matt has been one of the most reliable sources for free lists of available LLLL.coms — both before and after the LLLL.com buyout occured, so if you’re looking for a few LLLL.coms to handreg, you might want to bookmark that url.

As a few domainers have been saying for awhile now, it remains to be seen what will result from the buyout failing. It wouldn’t surprise me to see many LLLL.com investors lose faith in the market… If February 2008 taught us anything, it’s that nothing kills prices like reduced expectations. I think we’ll see the highest quality prounounceable LLLL.coms be fairly immune to any negative repercussions from the LLLL.com buyout failing — these LLLL.coms have found a reasonable number of end users and enjoy similar status to LLL.coms as domainer tokens. They might very well decline, however I do think LLLL.coms of slightly higher quality than buyout LLLL.coms (eg. the lowest LLLL.com market segments for which their buyout holds) will be the most affected — quad premium LLLL.coms and weaker pronounceable LLLL.coms (most CVVC, VCCV and weaker VCVC). This could very well have an impact on the prices of pronounceable LLLL.nets which might now find themselves competing against pronounceable LLLL.coms.

All speculation at this point, however the LLLL.com buyout is appearing more likely to fail with every passing day. I would recommend anyone investing in this market at this point exercise caution. “Don’t invest more than you can afford to lose” is an understatement at this point. If you have reason to believe things will turn around X years down the road, go ahead and put a few bucks in LLLL.coms, however be aware of the holding costs — especially if investing in cheaper LLLL.coms. Like any domain name market segment, there exists the possibility to purchase an LLLL.com for under market value and resell it for more, however this is no longer the safe bet it once was.

There are plenty of websites suggesting you write reviews, how-to guides, answer questions, ask your readers questions, expand, update, or otherwise reuse previously released content, etc. 

It’s all great advice, however you do unfortunately need a topic to write about before you can apply any of these techniques. Writing content is the easy part — coming up with that idea of what to write about is a lot harder for most people. Many people haven’t done themselves any favors when blogging..

Take me for example — I started blogging about 4 letter .com domain names way back in November 2007. It’s an interesting topic for those invested in that domain name market, however there’s only so much material out there and after about 6 months of blogging, I really couldn’t come up with much in the way of advice on investing in 4 letter .coms besides reporting on new sales and analyzing reported sales data. Since then, I’ve diversified my blogging to contain anything related to domain names — be it tips on buying and selling domains or on developing and monetizing domains. I still write about 4 letter .coms when there’s something newsworthy to mention, however I now no longer have to stress about coming up with content. The broader the topic you choose to build your website around, the easier it will be to come up with content for it. As I’ve discussed in the past however, going with broad topics for your website means you’ll be up against some stiff competition and probably isn’t the right way to go if you plan on monetizing your website or building it up into an authority on it’s subject matter. With a broader range of topics, most advertisers will experience a lower conversion rate, unless they sell a broad range of products (eg. GoDaddy).

My favorite sources of inspiration for future posts include:

• About.com
• Alltop
• Blog Catalog
• Business Wire
• Cnet
• Delicious
• Digg
• DN Journal
• Domaining.com
• EzineArticles
• Forums (for this site: Namepros, DN Forum, and Domain State)
• Google AdWords Keyword Tool
• Google Alerts
• Google Blog Search
• Google Groups
• Google News
• Keyword Discovery
• Mashable
• Other blogs in different but still related niches (eg. for this site: JohnChow.com or ShoeMoney)
• popurls
• PR Newswire
• PR Web
• Reddit
• Techmeme
• Technorati
• StumbleUpon
• Tweetmeme
• Twitter Search
• Twitter tweets
• Wall Street Journal
• Wikipedia
• Wordtracker
• Yahoo Answers
• Yahoo Buzz
• Yahoo News
• ZDNet

We all have our good days and our bad days — knowing that, it’s wise to keep a few pages of content written for those days when you’re struggling to come up with content. Breaking your post frequency every once in awhile isn’t a big deal. My page views on this blog often go up when I occasionally don’t post for a day or two – visitors are reading content they didn’t have time to read previously.

A great guest post was written on Tech Crunch yesterday asking whether search engines should be regulated.

Do you think Google has too much power? Many websites receive 25-50% of their unique visitors from Google, something which can disappear overnight with an algorithm change or be manually changed at any time for any reason Google sees fit. Generic .com domains can help a bit here, however the impact from even a small change in search engine position can be devastating for most businesses. Google reserves the right to close your publisher account for any reason or no reason, leaving you unable to purchase paid listings. There’s no set of guidelines on quality scores or traffic quality and how do we even know Google isn’t intentionally scoring people lower to keep more revenue for themselves? Why can’t domain owners know what percentage of Google’s revenue they’re getting from clicks their parked domains generate? Are you worried about how much Google knows about you?

After hearing all that, care to change your mind? I have to agree with the guest poster on Tech Crunch. Almost everyone relies on search engines nowadays to find what they’re looking for. Is it wise to let one company determine what 75% of Internet users find when they do a search? Is there even an incentive for Google to return reliable results — wouldn’t it be better for their bottom line if people had to look around for what they wanted and hopefully end up clicking the sponsored ads more often? Google’s frequent algorithm changes and ever-increasing algorithm complexity have made top SEOs a valuable commodity. The people who need search engines most (small businesses and individuals) don’t have the money to hire top SEOs which can run anywhere from $300-$1000 per hour. Google is now ranking big brands higher in the search results solely because they’re big brands (and maybe because they provide Google with the large majority of it’s revenue through paid search).

Thoughts?

There are many ways to profit from internet traffic, however this post will largely focus on profiting from other people’s internet traffic. What’s better than making a profit from the work of others? I trust that most readers are familiar with domain parking and it has therefore not been discussed in this article. I’ll write a future post on domain parking for those new to domaining. 

AdSense Arbitrage

For starters, despite what Google may like to have you believe, AdSense Arbitrage is still alive, profitable, and also liable to get your AdSense account disabled, so use this at your own risk if you have websites which depend on AdSense as a revenue source. If you depend on AdSense revenue, it might be wise to incorporate a separate business for your arbitraging and have the account registered to someone other than yourself — preferably with a different IP address to protect your main AdSense account. The concept of Adsense arbitrage is simple — you buy cheap traffic and convert the traffic into expensive clicks which more than cover your costs in acquiring the traffic necessary to create these clicks.

As an example, suppose I was monetizing this blog through AdSense. I could for example acquire very cheap clicks through Google Adwords for the keyword “LLLL.com” because there’s little competition for the keyword and send the traffic to a page I’ve optimized to show AdSense advertisements related to “domain parking”. Because there’s no competition (at least at the time of this writing) for “LLLL.com”, I’ll be able to acquire traffic for very cheap, yet LLLL.com is a very descriptive term used to my knowledge only in the domain industry, meaning the clicks I purchase will result in highly targeted traffic which would need only a very small conversion rate for me to profit. Domainers aren’t known to often click on AdSense ads, however I think giving a domaining example has made it this a bit easier to understand.

Converting Traffic

If I’m paying 5 cents per click and have a 3% conversion rate (that is, 3% of people clicking on a domain parking AdSense ad on my site) then it’s costing me $0.05/0.03 = $1.67 per click. If the average click yields more than $1.67, I’m making a profit. What’s important to remember when deciding what to pay for clicks is what you expect the desired action to yield and the likelihood of that action occurring. While extremely low bids won’t normally yield maximum profit, they will minimize losses if you’ve overestimated the value of the desired action or the likelihood of it occurring. You can always increase bids later.

When writing ads for Adwords, it’s important to consider the fact that Google uses Smart Pricing. This means that intentionally writing your ad to discourage anyone unlikely to convert could end up driving up your required bid substantially — I’ve had $12.00 minimum required bids on keywords I had a max bid of less than $1.00 on in the past because I tried to discourage untargeted visitors from clicking too aggressively — it would have been better to have gotten a few of them visiting at $0.10-$1.00 per click. At the same time, making your ad too inviting or targeting keywords too broad could become enormously expensive and unprofitable (eg. advertising this blog on Adwords for ”domain names”).

When I refer to AdSense arbitrage in this article, I’m referring to purchased traffic sent to Made For Adsense minisites which were designed to profit from the discrepancy between what it costs to acquire traffic and what that traffic can be monetized for. While Google frowns upon purchasing Adwords ads solely to redirect them to Made For AdSense minisites, it’s perfectly acceptable to purchase Adwords ads for a developed website which runs AdSense as a monetization method. Developed websites usually have a much lower click-through rate than Made For Adsense minisites, so you’ll need a lower cost per click to break-even.

AdSense arbitrage isn’t much different from many other types of traffic monetization. As an example, Amazon.com’s Kindle eBook reader costs $299 and Amazon offers  10% ($29.90) on any Kindle sales you send them. Affiliate programs often pay far more per conversion than you’ll ever make getting a visitor to click an AdSense ad, however they’re also much harder achieve — it’s much easier to convince a visitor to click an ad to view the Amazon Kindle eBook reader than it is to get that visitor to make a $299 purchase.

Pay Per Click or Pay Per Action ?

It doesn’t matter whether you’re monetizing parked domains or websites, this question will inevitably arise. Both domain parking and website monetization are still very much an inexact science — trial and error is often the best way to go about finding an ideal way to monetize your traffic and/or traffic you’ve purchased. Monetizing traffic through pay per click advertising tends to be a much more stable income source than monetizing traffic through a pay per action model. Call to action domains usually perform best under a well-chosen pay per action affiliate program.

Social Media Traffic Monetization

I rarely use Twitter, yet I get 1000+ uniques to this blog each month from Twitter and a couple Twitter-related websites from using TwitterFeed which automatically shares links to my blog posts with Twitter followers. I can only imagine how many users Twitter would send my way if I used it much more frequently… Twitter isn’t alone in this regard of course — Facebook, Myspace, Digg, etc can all help increase traffic to your websites. You can even look into arbitrage.

Conclusion

This article discussed how traffic can be monetized through pay per click and pay per action ad campaigns, along with an explanation of what arbitrage is and how it can be done. While I discussed Adsense arbitrage in this article, this can of course be done with any search engine or other website. I shied away from suggesting any particular pay per action program, mainly because experiences will vary based on your domain, content, and visitors. The best way to find pay per action programs that will likely work well for you would be to look at what popular websites in your niche are using. In many niches, popular websites will perform best with flat monthly rate advertising or cost per thousand impressions advertising.

Purchasing traffic and redirecting it to a parked domain is not allowed at most domain parking companies. Some domain parking companies do not let parked domains be promoted in any way, including through hyperlinks. Clicking on ads or paying people (or asking friends/family) to click advertisements on your parked domains or developed websites is click fraud and is taken very seriously. Under no circumstances should you ever sell a domain parking account or other traffic monetization account.

Time for another GreatDomains auction.. I’m disappointed there aren’t more short domains this time around — it’s been a nice treat having large amounts of LLL.coms in the past few GreatDomains auctions, allowing LLL.com investors to better guage where the market was at. Anyway, here are my favorites that are up for auction:

Libel.com — reserve between $1000-$4999. If the domain gets a law firm even just 1 client, it’s paid for itself many times over. Need I say more?

Evidence.net — no reserve. I’m always a fan of no reserve domains and this one is no exception. Massive development potential (type “evidence” into Wordtracker for ideas).

eChannel.com — no reserve. Many potential end users, great domain for anything Internet TV related.

Beddings.com — no reserve. Obvious use which needs no explanation.

5B.com — reserve $5000-$9999. A nice 2 character .com that someone just might get a great deal. The lowest an NL.com has sold for this year was $8988 for 1J.com.

Other short domains being auctioned also include:

MBQ.net — no reserve

UVE.net — no reserve

MZW.com $1000-$4999

ZWM.com $1000-$4999

A couple nice ones for end user / development potential to be included in the auction are:

ExtraIncome.com $10,000-$24,999
Neptune.com — reserve $100,000-$249,999

We now know that NBC paid a whopping $250,000 for SYFY.com. Full story available on The Domains.

As much as you all know I’m a fan of pronounceable LLLL.coms, I can’t see the logic in replacing SciFi.com (a domain NBC already owned) with SYFY.com. I know some people will use this as justification for why they should quote their domains at 100 times what a domainer would pay… Do keep in mind that we only hear the success stories — I haven’t come across many domainers happy to tell the world how they blew a potential sale by asking far too much. This sale was quite different from Rick’s sale of iReport.com in that CNN had already began iReport before acquiring the domain, whereas NBC didn’t give any hint that they would be interested in the domain SYFY.com and were smart enough to approach the seller without even making it known that NBC was the buyer. Pure chance that it worked out for the seller — I’m happy it did and hope he won’t beat himself up too much about “only getting $250,000″ for it.

We all know about the struggle old media is having finding viewers for their crap content. In this Internet age, we’re no longer restricted like we once were in the news we have available to us. Old media doesn’t get how the Internet works — if you want to charge money for your newspaper, it sure as hell better be better than free alternatives. And often, it isn’t. Find a popular story on the web and watch how many people write an article about it. That’s what old media “journalism” has become — copying what other people have already written. That’s all fine and dandy and back in the days when someone only had access to a handful of papers, they actually thought this was news…

Between Digg, Technorati, Delicious, Google News, Google Blog Search, and Twitter, I can find out just about anything the media ever reports on and often a full day or two before they cover the story. I honestly don’t know why old media even tries to compete with these websites — why not try and deliver more local news or other areas which are underserved? What’s laughable is that the old media thinks we need them — wake up. The sad reality is that the mediocre content journalists provide isn’t something most people are prepared to pay for on the Internet. People nowadays want the facts — not some bonehead that has a degree in journalism (aka a degree in nothing).

What exactly is a journalist? Slate recently published an article on the new domain name extensions soon coming out and on cybersquatting that was plagued with errors in every paragraph. The article read very well and if you weren’t a domainer, you’d probably think Slate did a great job covering the subject — the fact is, they didn’t. I’ll take an expert 100 times out of 100 over a journalist. What we need in this Internet age are more experts, not parrots. Why can someone like Aaron Wall (SEO Book) successfully charge large subscription subscriptions fees online while most newspapers can’t manage to get even $5 per month? Aaron happens to be much more knowledgeable about the topic of SEO than most people out there, while journalists have no marketable skills in the online world — that’s all it really comes down to.

Take a look at how many people wrote about Wordpress releasing version 2.8.1… Now why would I pay to have access to content like that when 200 other people have linked to it and likely written the exact same thing — and for free.? The NY Times has recently been talking about everything from subscriptions to charging you a small fee to access any article. Who the heck is going to pay money to access an article written by a journalist? There’s rarely anything unique there. Do something creative — survey 100,000 people about what they feel is currently underserved online and mark my words, people will pay for that. Writing an article about the person who did such a survey and giving your thoughts on it doesn’t add enough value to command a price. What’s wrong with free? Tech Crunch makes $100,000+ per month from advertising on their free website. If all you’re doing is putting your offline stories online, you can’t possibly have much in the way of additional expenses by choosing to go online.

Old media has work tirelessly and spent enormous amounts of money to build their brands — why would they throw all that hard work away for nothing? Is charging $5 per month for access worth having most of your visitors defecting to a free solution? And now for something even more ridiculous — would you ever link to someone’s website if they charged you money for the privilege of providing them with a link? How about requiring people to pay money for as little as quoting 5 words from your article? Isn’t that a great way to guarantee you get few links and search engine referrals?

Daniel on Namepros posted a real shocker of a sale. Looking over the 26 LLLL.coms in this lot, we find 6 regular quad premiums, 1 quad premium VVVV.com (EOEI.com), 1 CVCV, a dictionary word (EKED.com) and a 2 rare LLLL.coms (FHFF.com, SQQQ.com). The other 14 LLLL.coms in the lot are of negligible value — let’s just consider them worth $0 for simplicity.

Since April 1st, 2009, there has only been 1 quad premium LLLL.com sale below $100 (OTRF.com sold for $85 on April 7th). There have only been 11 reported quad premium LLLL.com sales below $110 this year out of 768 documented LLLL.com sales on LLLL Sales. It would seem fairly safe to assume a minimum wholesale of at least $110 on each of these 6 quad premium LLLL.coms. That puts us at $660 so far.

Looking at quad premium VVVV.com sales data, we see that all 21 sales since January 2007 (over 9 months before the LLLL.com buyout) have been for $210+ and 19/21 being for $300+. Knowing this, it’d be fairly safe to assume EOEI.com is worth at least $250. That puts us at $910 so far.

The lowest double premium or higher quality CVCV.com sale this year was QOXO.com which sold for $206 in February, however it was resold in April for $600.  No other CVCV.com sale with 2+ premium letters (and there’s been 98 of them) has been below $261, so let’s be conservative and call this a $260 CVCV. We’re now at $1210.

SQQQ.com is a triple repeat LLLL.com following a BAAA letter pattern. The lowest recorded triple repeat BAAA-LLLL.com sale this year was LQQQ.com which sold for $103.50 on April 30th (second lowest was BQQQ.com at $125 in March). Seems fair enough to suggest a minimum wholesale of $100. So we’re at $1310.

FHFF.com — a quad premium triple letter LLLL.com, this time following a BABB letter pattern. There have been 12 quad premium triple letter LLLL.com sales this year, all of which were for $140+. Let’s just assume FHFF.com is worth at least $140, bringing us to $1450.

Now, how about EKED.com — a dictionary word, a highly pronounceable triple premium VCVC.com… This lot on eBay sold for $1365, so we’re well over that even if we assume EKED.com is worth $0 which it obviously isn’t. Very little effort was put into coming to these prices — I tried to put myself in the shoes of a potential buyer and what I would do if I were interested in them — look at what similar LLLL.coms have sold for recently and intentionally priced everything out as if it was near the minimum wholesale in it’s market segment, saving me the effort of googling the domains, checking for acronyms, search queries per month, traffic, etc.

If you’ve read up to this post, I probably don’t have to tell you the lesson to be learnt from this post — bulk LLLL.coms sell poorly, bulk LLLL.coms of varying quality sell far worse. I made a post on putting good and bad LLLL.coms in the same bulk lot a few months ago, however after seeing this recent sale, I thought it’d be best to post about it again for anyone who may have missed it the first time. Short domains are no different in this respect than keyword domains — would you put a domain such as Laptops.com for sale in the same bulk lot as Laptops-4-U.com? It really makes no sense to do so — the people interested in Laptops.com aren’t going to be interested in a such a domain and most people interested in such domains don’t see the value in or can’t afford premium domains.  One of the things I hate most as a domainer is having to buy domains I don’t want. If I’m interested in a particular LLLL.com, however it comes accompanied by 10 or 20 other LLLL.coms I’m not interested in, chances are I’ll pass unless the lot is selling for so much under it’s reseller value that it’ll more than be worth my time to buy the lot and resell the LLLL.coms I don’t want.

Microsoft’s Bing continues to gain search market share – largely at Google’s expense. As can be seen from the StatCounter graph, Google’s market share dropped quite noticeably in early June when Bing had just come out, while Yahoo’s search market share was largely unfazed. It’s a bit hard to see on the graph, however if you copy the graph into an image editing program and drawing a straight horizontal line under the lowest point on June 8th, you can see that Bing has gained significant search market share since the initial hype surrounding it’s release faded, and once again, it seems that Google has been the one from whom most of the search market share has been leeched. Bing has displaced Yahoo to become #2 in search market share — at least temporarily. Most of us domainers, developers, and webmasters would love to see this continue — the lower Google’s market share, the less they’ll be able to monopolize the market. There is quite clearly a very strong negative correlation between Google and Bing search market share — I haven’t researched why this may be, however looking at the graph, Yahoo’s traffic seems to not matter whatsoever how Google and Bing are doing yet Bing and Google almost always perform opposite each other.

We hear a lot of talk about real-time search and how real-time search is going to play a bigger role in the future.. What we don’t hear much about however is that real-time search is already here. To begin this article, let’s go over what exactly real-time search is. I’ll focus on discussing real-time search engines earlier on in this article and will conclude the article with a piece on search engine algorithm history to present the past and present challenges that search engines face and the problems a real-time search engine will be faced with.

Relevant Search Results

When you use a search engine, what you’re viewing is content that has been previously indexed by the search engine. This content might have been indexed yesterday or it may have been indexed 10 years ago and been unchanged since then. Many parts of search engine algorithms currently favor older pages — an older page is likely to have accrued more relevant and trusted links for example than a newer page. Some search engines (eg. Google) even assign significant weight as a ranking factor to the age of a website, putting newer websites at a significant disadvantage for ranking well in the search engine results pages (SERPs). When we speak of a real-time search engine, we’re talking about a search engine that could not only deliver relevant results but also up-to-the-minute results for time sensitive topics. If someone typed something along the lines of “Yankees Red Sox score” (without quotes), they’re most likely interested in the score of the most recent baseball game between these 2 teams — I highly doubt they were looking for the history of the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox rivalry article from Wikipedia which currently ranks #3 in Google. They’re most likely interested in knowing the final score of the game and perhaps the game’s highlights.

The challenge for search engines will be to determine which searches should return real-time results and which searches should return what are considered the best results according to their existing algorithms. If I do a search for “GoDaddy” on Google, it’s highly probable that I want to get to the GoDaddy.com website (I might have just seen their commercial on TV for example), and so news from GoDaddy or from other companies about GoDaddy probably isn’t what I’m interested in. On the other hand, if I do a search for “GoDaddy coupons”, I’m definitely looking for GoDaddy coupons that currently apply — not GoDaddy coupons that might have once been popular but are now expired. How do we find the balance between a search engine which includes little in the way of real-time results (eg. Google at present) and a search engine that contains only real-time results? Whoever can figure that out is sure to make a lot of money. An inconvenient solution in the meantime is to use real-time search engines for results you’d like the latest information on and traditional search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing for results where results are unlikely to be time-sensitive.

Twitter has real-time search functionality, however it’s currently only from tweets on their microblogging platform — not exactly a real-time search engine at this time, however Twitter is working on that. There are some more complete real-time search engines:

• Collecta
• CrowdEye
• OneRiot
• Scoopler
• Yauba

There’s unfortunately nothing on the market yet that’s comprehensive like Google yet returns results in real-time when necessary. The big problem with real-time search is that it would take an insane amount of computational power to keep visiting every website in the index every few minutes to keep everything up-to-date while still comprehensively analyzing the results to attempt to return the most relevant results. For now, it seems OneRiot seems like the best bet for real-time news. It’s unfortunate that it only covers pages linked to on social networks, thus missing out on topics which aren’t frequently discussed on social networks.

Search Engine Algorithm History

There are pros and cons to using a search engine algorithm with has on-page, link, trust, and age components. The obvious advantage is that it’s done a reasonably good job of keeping most spam blogs (splogs) from ranking high in the SERPs for competitive keyphrases (eg. the searches most people make when using a search engine). The disadvantage is that it’s led many people to try and game the system and as search engines increasingly clamp down on such behavior, it only makes it all the more profitable for those able to still manipulate search engine rankings, granted they now have less competition. Back when search engines were in their infancy, ranking well in the search engines was as easy as using the word many times on a page — this is where the whole notion of keyword density comes from. Search engines thought that a page which used a certain word 100 times on a page must be more related to that topic than pages which used it say, 10 times. This would likely be true if people weren’t trying to alter search engine rankings in their favor — it’s pretty hard to use most words 100 times on a page unless your topic is obviously related to that word or you’re willing to sacrifice human usability of your website by using the word over and over again in a nonsensical fashion. Obviously most people don’t want their website spam to come across as being website spam — what do you do when you come across a spam website? Most people hit the back button immediately and no money is made by the website owner who is often monetizing these websites through Adsense. So what came next were increasingly more creative ways of disguising spam in ways that detracted minimally from human usability. People would place keywords in the footer of their websites, hide additional keywords in a color which matched the background of the page so they couldn’t be seen (eg. if I wrote words in a white font, you wouldn’t see them on a white background), and then came the genius idea of serving humans and search engine robots different pages depending on which we identified them as being (also known as cloaking).

These are all highly frowned upon by search engines today and I wouldn’t recommend using any of these techniques unless you really don’t care about search engine traffic. There are plenty of other ways of spamming (such as title and h1 spamming, meta tag keyword stuffing, content scraping) however I really didn’t write this intending to provide a lesson on black hat SEO that works today and black hat SEO which worked in the past, so lets now move on to links and how they’ve been manipulated.

Search engines which don’t return results that visitors are looking for aren’t likely to stay popular for long — that’s the whole reason search engines are constantly changing their algorithms to make it increasingly difficult to unfairly gain a competitive advantage. Once search engines started cracking down on what I mentioned above, the next thing to be manipulated was links. Google’s PageRank algorithm used to play a very important role in the ranking of search engine results. The problem with PageRank is that the whole algorithm was based on links. Assuming a website is more important because it has more links or more links from authority websites is just as flawed as believing a page is more important because it stuffed a keyword 100 times into it’s 300 word page. Link farms were common even before Google gained popularity (most free directories are essentially link farms) due to Inktomi (a search engine which used to feed Yahoo search engine results) being heavily link-based and many observant webmasters exploited this. Many website owners would link up all their sites to each other so a brand new website could hypothetically have hundreds of backlinks from day 1. It was also common for website owners to hide links (using the same method I described above for keyword stuffing) or to stuff the footer with links. People would buy expiring or existing domains for their  PageRank and add links to their new website back to their website (still works with non-expired domains to a certain extent. AOL for example has 1800+ DMOZ links). There was guestbook spam, blog comment spam, wiki spam — all largely done to manipulate search engine rankings. Anchor text was another particularly bad one — Google used to weigh anchor text enormously in their algorithm (it’s still one of the elements with the most weight despite it’s abuse). As would be imagined, once people found out the importance of anchor text, they started making all links with keywords they wanted to rank for.

Imagine I wanted to rank for “SEO” in example — back in the past, a strategy that worked surprisingly well would be to include this word in all my links — for example over in my category section, I could add the word SEO to all the categories (even better if done in white so it doesn’t detract from human usability). Don’t try that today.. We have a similar problem today with anchor text and paid links. I’m surprised Google still puts so much weight on anchor text granted it’s so easily to manipulate. How often do you come across links in a site-wide links that contain keywords instead of the website’s name? That should be a dead giveaway that someone’s bought links. The best way to manipulate the rankings today (and it’s white hat!) really is to just get a domain name which has the keywords you plan on targeting in it. It took zero work to get this blog ranked #1 for “LLLL.com” and very little work to get ranked for “LLLL” — sending me about 1000 search engine referrals monthly between these 2 terms and derivatives of them such as LLLL.com prices, LLLL.com sales, LLLL.com price guide, etc. Obviously much more work will be required if you want to rank first for something with much more competition.

Trust is a more difficult algorithm element to manipulate, however people have even found a way around that by buying paid links on trusted websites — either with money or through other methods such as donations to charities, educational institutions, etc. Age in the index is in my opinion one of the dumbest algorithm elements ever. If we want relevant, accurate information, why would an older site necessarily be better than a newer site? I can understand the sandbox and am not saying 1 day old websites should  be ranked high in the SERPs for competitive keyphrases, however why is a 2 year old website not ranked as well as a 5 year old website? This has been the real failure of modern search engines — a site which is old and has lots of trusted links will outrank websites that are far better (take Wikipedia as an example)

That’s what the U.S. government is spending to develop Recovery.gov. I’m not going to say much about it — I’m as disgusted by it as 90% of comments I’ve come across about the project so far… Ironic isn’t it that a project that’s supposed to make the government accountable and spending transparent would turn around and spend $18 Million on the development and maintenance of 1 (one) website. If you’re curious about what other domainers are saying about this, I’ll include links to a few other domain blogs below:
The Domains
Rick’s Blog
The Frager Factor
XF.com

If your blog (even if it’s not domain related) has covered the topic or if you’d like to share some great discussions on the topic you found elsewhere online, please feel free to post a link in your comment.

There are definitely more LLLL.coms which are being available for handreg lately and many backordered LLLL.coms which quite possibly could have otherwise been handregged. Those running LLLL.com domainers running automated scripts have been far less active lately and it hasn’t been uncommon lately to see an LLLL.com remain available for several hours.

How this impacts you and your LLLL.com investments largely depends on what you’ve invested in. If you’ve invested in the weakest LLLL.coms, having LLLL.coms available for regfee won’t likely impact their value much — the large majority of the time, these LLLL.coms are already selling for well below regfee. Where I do see a larger impact however is with higher quality LLLL.coms — in particular, quad premium, rare, and weaker pronounceable LLLL.coms. I could see the weaker CVCVs taking a hit as well, however the stronger CVCVs and other pronounceable LLLL.coms often tend to sell more on their own merit than because they have anything in common with regular LLLL.coms. There does seem to be a certain premium with pronounceable LLLL.coms that is placed on them due to the fact that they’re 4 letters long and pronounceable LLLL.com prices did rise in the months leading up to and shortly after buyout, however their performance since that point has been very different from that of weaker LLLL.coms.

It’s time to get a bit pickier with what you buy in the LLLL.com market and like a few LLLL.com investors have mentioned, a much wiser strategy would be to look for deals rather than buying domains off other domainers for full or near-full reseller value, in which case all you can hope for is that prices go up. Just because LLLL.coms are available for registration — something which hasn’t happened until very recently in a long time, does not mean they’re worth registering. LLLL.coms with 12 months until renewal usually aren’t going for more than $8 already, so paying $8 to register an LLLL.com that nobody wanted to backorder and even those running automated scripts passed on isn’t likely end up being a good investment unless you expect the value of your LLLL.com to outpace renewal fees — something which if it were to happen, would be most likely to happen on domains where the renewal fee is a very insignificant portion of the LLLL.com’s price. On a $800 LLLL.com, an $8 renewal fee accounts for just 1% of the LLLL.com’s value — if you have reason to believe the LLLL.com is a better investment for you than other alternatives available and makes sufficiently more to cover renewal fees, then by all means invest in LLLL.coms if you want. If you can find some LLLL.com deals, you’re obviously much safer paying $800 for an LLLL.com you currently estimate as being worth $1500 — even if the LLLL.com were to fall a full 50% in value, you’d have only lost $50 + the renewal fee = $58 over the course of a year of your initial investment, compared to $408 had you paid $800 for an $800 LLLL.com.

This update fixes a few security holes and glitches. For full details, see the Wordpress.org blog.

I was just thinking about buying 500 or so iStockPhoto credits last week when I noticed their prices have gone up substantially over the last year. Getty Images is monopolizing the business and it’s nice to see they may have just met their match. They just lost most of my future business anyway, now that Google has released an option to use their image search feature to easily find free images — images that are allowed to be reproduced at no cost. There are a few other free image websites out there, however I feel a lot more comfortable using Google — not to mention having far more selection! I needed to get some more images on my blog — yeah, I’m cheap and don’t feel like paying $2 for images knowing 80% of the money isn’t going to the people who deserve it — the photographers, designers, artists.

If you’re interested in some tips and tools for domaining, keyword research, purchasing keyword domains, and purchasing expired domains, you should find this post useful. Before any veteran domainer spends 20 minutes reading it, I’ll tell you already that you probably know everything already written in this post — this post was written to help people new to domaining and/or domain development

There is no 100% guaranteed accurate way to measure domain traffic — even if you turn the domain into a one empty page website just so you can use a web analytics program such as AW Stats, there’s no guarantee the number of uniques it’s reporting is exactly the amount you actually received and even if hypothetically it was, there’s no guarantee that the domain will get the same amount of traffic in the future (eg. You don’t hear much about HDVD these days now that Blu-Ray has become the standard).  The same goes for domain parking stats — all the different analytics programs have their own strengths and weaknesses, however when Sedo tells you that your undeveloped LLLL.mobi is getting 100 uniques per day, chances are it’s 99-100% bot traffic.

A few domainer favorites (when you don’t own the domain) for estimating domain traffic include:

• Google Adwords: Keyword Tool
• Spyfu
• Wordtracker
• Keyword Discovery
• Alexa.com, Compete.com, Quantcast.com — these are much more valuable when looking at developed domains, however they can still help provide evidence that a domain does receive type-in traffic. A word of caution: Alexa.com is highly skewed towards technology/domain names/seo websites — if you’re going to use it, be aware that it serves no value unless you’re comparing similar websites and even then, it’s hard to say much unless the Alexa rank of one of the websites is much higher than the other. Compete.com only tracks USA traffic, so if your website’s traffic is largely international, Compete.com will be highly inaccurate. Compete.com has been within 200% of my actual traffic every month since I started this blog — not exactly stellar, however it’s much better than Alexa for comparing tech websites to websites targeting non-tech markets, so long as they have a similar percentage of traffic coming from the USA. Quantcast’s main limitation is that it struggles incredibly to predict traffic unless a website has been “quantified”. I don’t have a lot of experience with Quantcast, however it does appear to be a better metric than Alexa for comparing quantified websites.
• ** It’s always best to use more than one keyword research tool.With highly competitive terms where ranking high in the SERPs would be very valuable, it’s not uncommon for people to run automated scripts to intentionally drive up the reported search numbers – check what keyphrases the people ranking high in the SERPs for your desired keyphrases are targeting. I highly recommend downloading Aaron Wall’s Keyword Research Tool and SEO for Firefox (they’re both free for non-members on SeoBook.com). Last but not least, if the price sounds too good to be true, proceed with caution — this is especially true on domain name auction platforms which frequently report domain name traffic as being much higher than it actually is. With longer domains — call to action domains for example, it’s not uncommon for keyword research tools to mix up the order of the words. Search the call to action phrase on Google in quotes — eg. “This is my call to action domain”. If you buy domains because of their obvious applications – their end user potential and development potential (being completely realistic and honest with yourself here), you’ll probably find yourself making better purchases than if you buy domains solely because they receive XXXX visitors per month. Many domainers still don’t understand the difference between traffic and targeted traffic. If you plan on developing this domain, what can you expect per click (with adsense) or per action? Quoting Rick Schwartz here:  “What is the value of a click if I sell a $20 million plane?” That’s my favorite domaining quote right there — at the end of the day, it’s not about traffic – it’s about conversions.

Caution must always be used when using a keyword research tool to estimate domain traffic and you should always ask the domain owner for proof of traffic stats and revenue. Using an example of why this important with a domain of mine, let’s take a look at what Google Insights says about Epicatechin.com. As can be seen, epicatechin was a very popular topic for a very small period of time following a study by a professor at Harvard suggesting this antioxidant may be able to substantially reduce the likelihood of developing cancer, heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. Now if you researched the domain before and after the event marked on graph as “A”, you’d obtain very different results. I don’t support cybersquatting, however I’ll use Michael Jackson as a second example to illustrate how large of a difference there can be within a short period of time on certain search terms. Now it’s pretty obvious why the search volume for “Michael Jackson” went up, however it’s not always immediately obvious why a domain may be searched more or less at different points in time.

A few things to watch out for:

• Search terms that have received substantial media attention which hasn’t happened in the past and is unlikely to continue in the future. An example of something overhyped today and unlikely to be hyped as much in the future would be the “acai berry” for example. Higher antioxidant superfruits keep on being found every year or two and regardless of one’s opinion on whether the types of antioxidants these fruits contain are more beneficial than other fruits to human health or not, they do receive substantial media attention — the acai berry for example has even been mentioned on Oprah as a superfood.
• Search terms that are time-sensitive. An extreme example would be dates which don’t have significant meaning – “2007″ for example will get searched far more in the year 2007 than it will in 2008, 2009, etc. A date which does have significant meaning — 1776 for example, will be much more stable as the years go by. Time-sensitive need not only mean dates — technology domains are often very time-sensitive as well. Investing in technology domains requires knowledge beyond domaining and about the technology domain segment you’ll be investing in, so that you can make a reasonable estimate of how future proof the domain is. Much like with date domains, there are relatively safe technology domains and there are risky technology domains. A domain such as Laptops.com has a high probability of being meaningful 10 years from now. On the other hand, a domain such as PlasmaTV.com will most likely be far less valuable 10 years from now than it is today, as sales and type-in traffic get cannibalized by other display technologies such as LCD, LED, and OLED.  If you plan on building a website around a domain, do your best to make sure it’s future-proof. Blu-RayMovies.com might be a great domain today, however how stupid is it going to sound when people are no longer using Blu-Ray? Rumor has it that it’s successor is already in development. Something more generic such as GreatMovies.com on the other hand will make sense so long as movies are called movies — something which will most likely far outlast Blu-Ray. If on the other hand we had bought this domain for PPC revenue - “hypothetically speaking, seeing as it’s already a developed website and we know it’s definitely not a domain that would be sold based on a revenue multiple”, we’d be much better off with it than GreatMovies.com because Blu-RayMovies.com is much more descriptive of what a visitor is looking for — it’s clearly blu-ray movies, so we’d enjoy a very nice click-through rate on targeted advertising, whereas with GreatMovies.com, it’s hard to say what they’re looking for — VHS movies, DVDs movies, Blu-Ray movies, suggestions on what movies they should buy or rent this weekend, etc. 
• Fake traffic/revenue stats — everyone thinks it won’t happen to them, however it does happen and I’d hate to hear that someone it happened to was you. If the domain name (without extension) reports a very low number of searches, chances are it gets a very low or no type-in traffic unless it’s an expired domain – not always the case but it often is. The best method I’m aware of is one that’s been around forever — try before you buy. Get the seller to change the nameservers and give the domain a test drive yourself. Looking at the web analytics will also help you determine where the traffic is coming from — search engines, direct navigation, or link traffic. If the majority of the traffic is coming from search engines or links (probably not the case unless we’re talking about a recently expired domain or a website purchase), make sure everything is there haven’t been any blackhat techniques that might be employed which would substantially reduce your traffic. Search engine traffic is a nice bonus, however I wouldn’t buy a domain strictly based on that unless it was one hell of a deal — Google’s just too unpredictable and you could be only an algorithm update away from losing 50%, 75%, or more of your search engine traffic. Link traffic is great and usually long lasting so long as the links were mostly genuine votes for your domain and not paid for (or at the very least, links not paid for in a very obvious way such as under the “Sponsors” section of your website — sitewide links in particular are a big no-no and doing such is asking for a ban) or from link spamming. Lastly, try and find some sales comps and see how the domain you’ve been offered compares to domains which have sold in the past (easier said than done, especially for new domainers). For this reason, I would recommend NOT spending big money on aftermarket domains or splurging on a large number of cheaper domains. Take the time to learn about the business and afterwards, find yourself something that works for you and repeat it.

Note: Google Insights has been used above to make it visible how trends have developed over time. That is the only purpose I’ve suggested using Google Insights for in this post.

That’s about double the broadband users we had in 2007 according to Park’s Associates. The Obama Administration is pledging billions of dollars to see that more Americans have access to high speed internet, yet the Asia Pacific currently has and is predicted to continue to have the largest share of broadband internet users — expected to reach 160 million users by 2013. Akamai released a State of the Internet report (which requires free registration to download) which discusses internet security, network and website usability, internet penetration, internet connectivity, and internet speed.

Q1 2009 global unique IP addresses detected by Akamai are up 27.51% year over year from Q1 2008, with the largest gains recorded by China and Brazil for 37.37% and 40.51% respectively. There were 141 countries which recorded under 100,000 unqiue IP addresses, indicating that internet penetration still has a long ways to go. For comparison, the USA had just over 116 million unique IP addresses. Do keep in mind that multiple users may share the same IP address (for example, a husband and wife using the same home computer) or have multiple IP addresses (such as someone who has a desktop and a laptop), so these numbers aren’t reflective of total online uniques but are best evaluated comparing one country to another. Unique IPs per capita was highest in Norway at 0.46, with a global average of 0.08 unique IPs per capita (USA had 0.38).

Globally, average connection speeds are up 29% year over year since Q1 2008 to 1.7Mbps. South Korea took the top spot with connection speeds averaging 11mpbs, with Sweden and Romania experiencing 42% and 51%  year over year internet speed increases (USA up 15%). Internet speeds above 5Mbps increased 29% globally, with increases of 199% in Switzerland, 148% in Denmark, 144% in the Czech Republic, and 101% in Romania leading the way (USA up 31%). Speeds between 5-10Mbps increased 21% in the USA.

For further information, be sure to download the report. If this all sounded like gibberish, it basically means that global internet speeds are going up and more people are gaining access to the internet all over the world. It’s fairly well documented that websites that take too long to load experience both a higher bounce rate and visitors which browse fewer pages — these increases (and those that will undoubtedly come in the future) will make graphic-intensive, video, music, and other bandwidth heavy websites provide visitors a more enjoyable user experience and with the ever increasing Internet penetration, likely more customers as well.

Namepros is hosting it’s 4th auction from a series of domain name auctions which will continue through July, August, and September.  Today’s auction is a general domain auction – any domain may be submitted to the auction with no restrictions on TLDs, prices, or domain quality. At the time of this post, the auction queue is still open, so you’re welcome to submit a few domains if you haven’t done so already. Please be aware that if you decide to place a reserve on your domain, it’s possible it won’t make the live auction. In order to sell as many domains as possible, Namepros gives precedence to domains which have met their reserve price in the event that time begins to run short and not all domains are able to be auctioned.  The last auction I attended was on July 2nd — the Namepros short domain live auction. The cutoff used that day when time started to run short was to auction off only domains which had received pre-bids for at least 40% of the domain’s reserve price.

Once again, today’s domain auction starts at 6 PM EST. If you need help figuring out what time the auction will be at in your timezone, please see: Time.gov.

Even if you’re not planning on buying any domains, you’re welcome to stop by pre-auction or post-auction and chat. After missing the last auction, I’ll try and make time to attend this one. Nothing has caught my eye so far, however people have been known to add domains to the queue right up to the very last moment, so be sure to check back again later on in the day if nothing interests you at present.

Guy Kawasaki and Andy Sernovitz will be hosting a free viral marketing success webinar tomorrow. To sign up, follow the instructions in this tweet.

The full report explaining how Forrestor Research arrived at these numbers costs $1999, so you’ll have to forgive me for not providing anything to substantiate these figures. Social media marketing is currently worth just over $700MM today, so if this holds true, Web 2.0 companies may finally be in a position to earn positive returns on their investments. Another interesting one — mobile marketing is expected to grow from $391MM today to almost $1.3B in 2014. As most of you probably know, I’m a big fan of mobile and have been for quite some time — with cell phones greatly outnumbering computers and wireless Internet plans becoming cheaper every year, Internet penetration stands to increase substantially in coming years and those who find out ways to best monetize that traffic stand to gain enormously. Ad spending on search marketing is expected to increase to $31.5B, up from about $15.4B today. Display advertising is expected to grow from $7.8B today to $16.9B in 2014 — Unsurprisingly, the slowest growing (percentage-wise) online spending will be with email marketing — predicted to increase by just 11% per year to arrive at $2.08B in 2014. I must admit — I don’t follow email marketing trends at all, however I’m surprised to see it’s growing at all — just doesn’t seem as effective as the other options we have available today. All told, online ad spending is expected to rise between 12% and 21% annually over the next 5 years which is a pretty healthy sign that while offline advertising struggles, online advertising is still chugging along just fine.

“Soon you’ll be able to buy any top-level domain you want: .yourname, .america, .whatever. Don’t do it.”

I disagree with some of their statements, such that domain names don’t matter much anymore, that domain name length doesn’t matter, that people will find you on search engines no matter what your domain, or that cybersquatting is no longer a problem, however that having been said, they also bring up some good points about  why we don’t need more TLDs. The media still clearly fails to understand the power of a good domain, however it’s nice to see they understand the insanity of bringing out more TLDs.

See Sahar’s blog for full details. A summary of updates follows below:

• Submit up to 100 domains for consideration (up from 10)
• You can comment on what the experts say
• Experts can vote on submitted domains
• Chat feature for each item and a Global channel chat for all to participate.
• Multiple auctions per day, prebid periods of up to 30 days (at your discretion), auctions still 1 hour long
• Reserve auctions now possible

Sahar says there’s more to come. Why not check out the new Bido?

Google just announced late last night that they plan on entering the computer operating system market. The Google Chrome Operating System will be open source and initially focus on the netbook market — the fastest growing computer market segment. The operating system will apparently be available on netbooks in the second half of 2010, with the open source code being released later this year.

One thing that’s kept me using a pda rather than a netbook has been the excruciatingly long startup times — the Google Chrome OS will apparently fix that, providing a quick startup similar to the “Instant On” functionality us pda users are used to. Since it’s not running Windows, it’ll (at least early on) be less susceptible to viruses and malware and possibly the greatest feature — all applications will be web-based, meaning anything you do on your Google OS powered netbook will be easily transferable to your Mac or PC.

I think Google may be on to something here.. And I couldn’t agree more with what Google says: “People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don’t want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates.”

I’m not all that good at designing logos, so I usually hire someone to design logos for me. I still have one problem however – I usually have no clue what kind of logo I’d like when asked. Fortunately, there’s a rather simple solution — look at a whole bunch of logos other businesses are using, single out the ones you like, and present them to the logo designers as examples of the logo design style you’d be interested in. A great website for finding logo designs is LogoPond. Another solution would be to create a logo contest over at a website like 99designs.com. If you want the best of both worlds, find yourself some logos you like and then make a logo contest specifying you’d like something incorporating elements similar to what are found in those logos. If you need a cheap logo, try webmaster forums like Digital Point or even Namepros — the quality isn’t usually as good but the price is much lower.

Whether it’s a domain name, advertising, job listing, or a price quote on getting a job done, I usually skip over anything along the lines of “Make Offer”, “Salary commensurate with experience”, “Please send an email to email @ domain.com for a rate quote”. What could be more important than knowing the price?

When someone lists their domain as “Make Offer”, I usually think one of 3 things:

a) this domainer is too lazy to price his domains (which I can understand if you have thousands of domains but not for people trying to sell one).

b) this domainer doesn’t know what his domains are worth, so he’s going to let people make offers on his domains to get a better idea of what they’re worth (nothing wrong with that and certainly smarter than pulling an iREIT and selling LLL.coms for $500 because you don’t know better).

c) this domainer is targeting end users with his domains and doesn’t want to sell himself short.

Domain sale statistics show that domains with prices listed significantly outsell domains without prices listed. I can’t remember if it was Sedo or Afternic who said this — either way, the message was that domains with prices listed outsold domains without prices listed roughly 4 to 1. If someone has their domain listed as “Make Offer”, I have no way to know whether they want $100 or $100,000 — this might be a good idea with generic domains or domains you’re trying to sell to end users, however you’re not doing yourself any favors by not listing a price when you’re trying to sell your domains to other domainers. You can always (and should) price your domains higher than your sale price expectations to make room for negotiations, however leaving out a price entirely makes little sense unless you’re targeting end users — domainers aren’t going to pay you an end user price, so you might as well just list a price to increase the likelihood of a domainer buying your domain if that’s the market you’re targeting.

As Dave (Randomo) on Namepros once famously said: “The sales I most regret are the ones I don’t make.” If you don’t have a domain that’s screaming “Find me an end user”, you might want to reconsider listing it as Make Offer.

As for advertising and web development, I’m a busy guy — don’t waste my time. If you want a certain price for advertising or web development, list it. If you’re waiting around for the advertiser or web development equivalent of an end user, will you be able to likely draw in these companies to your site and/or services? Is it really that hard to do what Andrew over at Domain Name Wire has done, listing what advertisements in particular sections of the website at certain sizes will cost? How hard is it to give a typical range of prices paid for certain web development services? There’s certainly nothing wrong with having a few things asking that an email be sent for more information, however having everything asking to email for price quotes is a good way to lose a potential customer’s business — especially a small business owner who’s likely to think they can’t afford the services.

I’m not looking for a job, however another thing I can’t understand is the logic behind employers not listing any hint of what monetary compensation you can expect when applying for a job. Asking salary expectations during an interview might be a clever way to get a worker for cheap (and royally piss him off when he finds out that other new employees with less experience are making more than him because they asked for more), however I wonder how many workers worth their salt are going to even apply for a job that gives no indication of what monetary compensation a prospective employee can expect.

Since July 1st, 2009:

ILED.com $10,000
TFPT.com $5000
YLA.com $5000
ADGE.com $1130
KKEI.com $1053
WBBC.com $1000
YLA.org $1000

Some other big recent short domain sales since June 22nd include:

TALK.com $500,000
SIKH.com $40,101
TVOL $14,100
IVOW.com $10,225
4AD.com $10,200
BUNK.com $9300
UXUA.com $8460
NSL.co.uk $8250
DENO.com $7700
ANNI.com $7500
USAR.com $6000
SILQ.com $5188
DNK.de $4988
BUBO.com $4935
PAYG.com $4346
QXZ.com $3620
RADD.com $3201
PENG.de $3150
MENZ.com $3100
WEWU.com $3032
MORC.com $3000
INDG.com $3000
XX.cc $2870
CET.de $2632
MOFY.com $2500
MADG.com $2500
CALE.fr $2450
SAZZ.com $2350
PWID.com $2150
1in3.com $2000
LJM.de $1960
TKC.eu $1820
USV.eu $1750
TOAT.com $1700
LUYE.com $1640
XIAA.com $1515
MAVY.com $1515
BLOG.vn $1400
RUV.at $1119

Sourced from auction marketplaces, DN Journal, and LLLL Sales. This sales data is provided for informational purposes only. Do not make purchases based on what short domains listed above have sold for.

It’s somewhat amusing to hear people get all worked up when they hear reports about the government spying on them — don’t they realize corporations have been spying on them for a long time? From Google’s personalized search, to Twitter’s advanced search feature. When I type Google.com, Google already knows that I’m from Canada and automatically redirects me to Google.ca instead. Familiar with Google Earth? How about Google Street View? As for Facebook, I can’t read your profile if you’ve decided to make it private, however I can snoop around and get a pretty good idea of who your friends are and if they don’t have private profiles, I’ll have access to all their information, from which I might be able to scrape together quite a bit about you. Looking at my traffic logs, I can see exactly how long people spent on this site, I can see your IP address, and from that IP address, I can often get a pretty good idea of where you live. Cookies on the Internet are even better than the ones you eat — at least for spying on people.  If I can find one of your domain names, say, one that you’re using for your email address, I can then do a WhoIs lookup and if you didn’t privately register your domain, I’ll have access to your name, address, email, and telephone number. I can use DomainTools to find out what other domains you own or even spy on nameserver activity. If you bought your domain off someone in the past, I can find out who that was and using DN Sale Price, I’ll probably know exactly what you paid for it if you bought it at a domain marketplace/auction. I can put a keylogger on someone’s computer and monitor their every word or I can put an internet filter on a computer accessed by minors to make it harder for them to access websites I don’t want them accessing.

How about I develop a software engine that “crawls through blogs, forums and instant messages to eavesdrop on teen conversations online, providing marketers, movie studios and even politicians with detailed, instant insight into the buzz about their products and competitors” or Echometrix with 132 million recorded teen conversations? (See Pulse article on Canada.com). How about an even better way to spy on blog comments? Or how about we just cut to the chase and read your thoughts already?

There’s nowhere to hide

Most domainers are both worried and angry about the Uniform Rapid Suspension System and the dangers it poses to all domain owners. But it could still get a whole lot worse in the future… UDRP, ACPA, URS — it’s not hard to see who ICANN’s in bed with and I’ll give you a hint — it’s not domain owners. If you think for one second that your .coms are safe from the URS, think again. But even the URS in itself might only be a small win along the path to what trademark interests really want…

Read up on eminent domain law — if the government can justify stealing people’s private property to further corporate interests, surely they can find some way to justify stealing people’s domains (eg. Kentucky’s attempted theft of 141 gambling domains) or blocking people’s domains (eg. Minnesota’s failed attempt to get ISP’s to block access to gambling websites) for corporate interests.

They’ve failed to do so up until now, however will that continue to be the case in the future? In all fairness, blaming large corporations really is only half the story — cybersquatters certainly do share in part of the blame and I’m afraid extensions such as .co, .cm, and all these new extensions soon heading our way will give corporate interests exactly what they want – a reason to justify lobbying for more restricted domain ownership and registration regulation.

Mark Cuban wrote a great article yesterday about the perils of free content and though I don’t agree with some of the points he makes, he certainly does make a lot of good ones. I read the article yesterday and meant to write a post about it but got caught up in some other business-related matters I had going on, so I have to thank Mike over at The Domains for writing up on it which reminded me that I wanted to say me 2 cents on the article as well. This post might not make sense to you unless you read Mark’s article first to put it in context — just a heads up.

When evaluating free business models, companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc should be classified differently than say, Google, Microsoft, Bing, etc. When people go to a search engine, they’re looking for information and often those PPC ads provide them with what they were looking for (which is of course making the search engine money), however many people using social networks don’t want to be bombarded with ads and usability studies suggest many, if not most discount their presence entirely. Without even getting into the massive click fraud issue plaguing Facebook (and probably not just Facebook), social network traffic just doesn’t convert the way PPC traffic on search engines does (assuming the person running the Adwords campaign isn’t a retard).

Freemium (eg. some domain forums, online games, software) can definitely work, especially with Web 1.0, however a completely free model in the Web 2.0 space seems to usually be a company that makes money for noone but the owners and early investors when they sell out. Youtube, Facebook, Twitter — there’s pretty long list of Web 2.0 companies that can’t manage to turn a profit despite being massively popular and free to use.

Some might call MillionPixelTwitterPage.com a Million Dollar Homepage knock-off, however I think it’s the first original pixel selling website I’ve seen in awhile.. True to it’s name, people buy pixels to link to their Twitter profiles, each pixel costing 10 cents with a minimum purchase of 100 pixels ($10). I’m not sure when this project was started, however the domain was only registered 2 months ago, so it’s a pretty new project which has already sold over 15,000 pixels netting David, a 20 year old college student, a cool $1500.

MillionDollarWiki.com, another similar concept started in 2007 with the goal of generating $1MM from the sale of ten thousand $100 wiki pages, has so far sold 1239 wiki pages for a total of $123,900.

What can we learn from these? You don’t have to reinvent the wheel to make money online.

The Wall Street Journal came out with an article earlier today about ICANN — it really is well worth reading. Some domainers have already left comments on the article — there probably isn’t a better place to have your voice heard.

Microsoft just recently announced that they have started indexing tweets from popular Twitter users in their Bing search engine. Google and Yahoo have been indexing Twitter profiles, however I’m not aware of them yet indexing tweets. All 3 major search engines are looking for a way to integrate social media into their search engines, however it remains to be seen how it can be done while still maintaining the integrity of the search results. Personally, I see Twitter as being most problematic — if you start ranking tweets high in the SERPs, people are going to exploit this and try to make money off of it. With the large majority of search engine referrals resulting from first page search engine results, is there an alternative to ranking tweets high in the SERPs? If you don’t rank them high in the SERPs, you might as well not rank them at all, as is quite clear from usability studies on the behaviour of search engine users. It’s not uncommon for news to break on Twitter well before anyone has time to write an article on the subject, so there’s clearly value in being able to deliver this fresh news to search engine visitors if they’re able to get around the spam problem.

Honestly, I think Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft will need to radically change their search engine algorithms before this can be done effectively. All three of them can’t seem to find a way to rank results without looking at links — they’ve gotten better than they were in the past and now discount unrelated links, however have links ever been the best indicator of what’s a good website? Wikipedia dominates the SERPs on pretty much every keyword worth ranking for, including many which it’s highly unlikely people are looking for when they enter a particular keyphrase (eg. Wikipedia has 2 results on the first page of Google for “sex”).

What about tweets, diggs, stumbles, etc – shouldn’t these count as a vote just as a link does? How should they be weighted? Clearly they shouldn’t be weighted as much as a link, however I think 5000 retweets is a better indicator of website quality than a handful of links from mediocre websites  More and more people are choosing to tweet valuable information to their Twitter followers rather than link to it on websites — this alone will ruin the accuracy of any link-based algorithm. Google really hasn’t helped things in this regard, changing the way nofollow is handled which has further encouraged people to not link out to other websites. If social media votes continue to increase while linking decreases, it will eventually be nearly impossible to displace top rankings for competitive keywords.

How often do you Google your name, the name of your company, the names of your competitors? What better way is there to gain a competitive advantage than by finding out what your competitors are doing wrong and making sure you don’t make the same mistakes? Similarly, if your competitors are doing something right, wouldn’t you want to look into that?

One thing I’ve never understood about many companies in the domain industry is why they don’t take a more active role in domain name forums. If you’re a domain parking company, there’s no excuse for not having a discussion thread in the domain monetization section of domain forums about what domainers like and dislike about how things are going. Some companies in this industry spend 5 figures monthly on advertising in an effort to recruit new clients, but what are they doing for their existing clients? Word of mouth really is both the best and cheapest advertising there is — just look at social media websites such as Twitter as examples of satisfied customers doing free advertising for you. 

Word of mouth advertising of course works both ways and there are no guarantees it’ll be positive things being written by your customers — especially if you don’t bother taking the time to read and consider what they’ve been saying.

When it comes to online reputation management, there are some shady ways to do damage control (eg. Google bombing, Google bowling), however if you screw up as bad as Sarah Palin has, I’m afraid I can’t offer any constructive advice. Oops.. Probably shouldn’t talk politics if I don’t want to piss off half my readers.  :-)

I read about the Domaining.com acquisition of DN Gator both over on Theo’s blog (creator of DN Gator) and on DN Forum and I really can’t understand what some people are all worked up about… Did you own a stake in the business? Did you pay to use the service? Did you contribute any money to the day to day operations of DN Gator?

I find it pretty incredible that Theo runs a free service for months and then gets people calling him a “sell-out”, implying that he’s a liar, etc because he makes a business decision to sell DN Gator to Francois from Domaining.com. Another thing I can’t understand is the hatred some domainers seem to have for Francois and Domaining.com.. What exactly has he done to you? He’s fixed everything most domainers were complaining about and he’s provided us all with a free service which you can choose to use or choose not to use.

Criticism is one thing, however going out and attacking someone’s character isn’t necessary or appreciated — especially after people such as Theo and Francois have been generous enough with their time and money to provide the domaining community with a service free of charge.

If you don’t shop around, you might not end up getting the best bang for your buck in a minisite developer. It’s tempting to go with one of the big name minisite developers, however you’d be surprised how much you can save by visiting domain, webmaster, and freelancer forums and websites. As an example, I was browsing through  the Namepros Developers for Hire section and noticed one minisite developer (username: www.DONT.net on Namepros) who was doing a surprisingly good job for $20-$35 per minisite, whereas others have charged $200+ for minisites of comparable quality.

The cheapest minisites would of course be made using a free service like Whypark and you writing your own content. Another option would be to hire a copywriter to create the content for your Whypark minisites — there are some pretty good copywriters out there for just 2-3 cents per word.

The .me extension marks it’s one year anniversary since the initial landrush on July 17th and I have to say, I think most domainer’s expectations on how long the love affair with .me would last have been exceeded. Beyond the attraction some find of .me domain hacks, there are a few other things I see different with this extension that many of the other domain name extensions which have come out over the past decade have failed to accomplish:

1) Affiliated with a big domain name registrar — Having the biggest domain name registrar on your team never hurts. Many of the new domain name extensions over the past decade (eg. travel, .biz, .mobi) have failed to gain ground outside the domainer community because they haven’t had any luck reaching out to the rest of the world. GoDaddy was visited by over 4 million people in the U.S. in June 2009 according to Compete.com. Knowing the small size of our industry, we can predict with certainty that at least 99% of Godaddy’s visitors are non-domainers, which is exactly the audience which needs to be reached if an extension is to go from pure domainer speculation to having demand outside the domainer community. 

2) They’re not trying to compete with .com — .me is going after it’s own little market, as is apparent with it’s marketing, and is something which stands a much higher probability of success than positioning yourself as being better than .com, as .cc has attempted to do.

3) They’ve used multiple venues to sell premium .me domains — GoDaddy could sell all their premium .me domains on GoDaddy Auctions and avoid paying any commission to Sedo, NameJet, T.R.A.F.F.I.C. or DOMAINfest,  however they’re not going to reach potential new buyers and raise awareness by auctioning the domains on their own domain auction platform.

I’m in no way affiliated with the seller — just thought I’d point out that there’s a huge no reserve .mobi firesale in case anyone wanted to pick up some cheap domains for development. For those who think LLL.mobi are going to make a comeback, there’s a 50x LLLmobi lot currently at $81 ($1.62 per). See: http://shop.ebay.com/merchant/welcometotheinternet_W0QQ_nkwZQQ_armrsZ1QQ_fromZQQ_ipgZ . So many .mobi investors have fought for so long with those who said the extension was going nowhere. I’ve been telling .mobi investors on Namepros for some time now that they ought to spend all that time developing them instead of arguing on Namepros about the merits of .mobi… I liked the extension early on – it caught my interest back in 2004, well before the .mobi groupies got interested when Rick Schwartz bought Flowers.mobi for $200k. A lot of the ideas which could have made the extension different flopped miserably — RFPs, witholding the premium .mobis, unenforced development and mobile compatibility requirements, etc. Anyway, that’s all in the past…

I know there are a few web developers bidding on these lots — .mobis are fine for minisites which would be getting most of their traffic from search engines (eg. no TLD confusion) and with these lots currently under $2.00 per .mobi and many of the .mobis expiring in 2010, it’s quite a bit cheaper than registering new domains. For minisites whose goal is to rank well in the SERPs, you might very well be better off with domains in a weaker extension but with stronger keywords.

I’ve been noticing more frequently lately that LLLL.coms are available for handreg — that is, some LLLL.coms are not receiving bids at expired domain auctions and are not being registered by those running automated scripts which normally would catch any LLLL.coms which slipped through the cracks within seconds…

This is a scary thought for LLLL.com investors.. If LLLL.coms are available for regfee with 12 full months until renewal, it’s hard to see why a comparable LLLL.com about to expire would have any value. There have been a few of us who have been saying for some time now that we were deeply worried about what may happen in the LLLL.com space should exactly this happen. As we saw in the months leading up to and shortly after the LLLL.com buyout, it wasn’t only buyout LLLL.coms that appreciated considerably in price, but almost all LLLL.coms. The higher quality LLLL.coms haven’t exactly performed great over the past year, however their performance has been much better than low end LLLL.coms which have lost approximately 98-100% of their value since February 2008. Can we expect higher quality LLLL.coms to be in trouble should buyout LLLL.coms become readily available for regfee?

There are a few reasons I wouldn’t discount the possibility of that happening. First of all, as mentioned above, higher quality LLLL.coms did rise in price considerably in the months leading up to and shortly after the LLLL.com buyout. Second of all, almost the entire LLLL.com market has been in a slump since February 2008, so there must be some correlation between the performance of bad LLLL.coms and that of higher quality LLLL.coms. One might also consider the psychology behind there being an LLLL.com buyout versus there not being an LLLL.com buyout. Psychology is very much a part of short domains — we saw this very clearly over the past year as domainers largely went from thinking LLL.coms could never fall in price, to some domainers thinking LLL.coms would continue to fall in price, and most domainers losing at least some of the confidence they had in the LLL.com market before they started to decrease in price.

The first reaction by most is always denial. When the first few LLL.com sales were below the minimum reported by 3Character.com, most domainers regarded these sales as an anomaly — suggesting the LLL.com market was declining was treasonous according to many domainers it seemed… But the LLL.com market did fall and continued to fall month after month until it stabilized in March around the $3000 minimum wholesale level and has fluctuated between $3000-$3500 in the months since.

I expect we’ll see the same denial in the LLLL.com market. LLLL.coms are sometimes available for handreg for hours — something that never would have been imagined at the peaks of the LLLL.com buyout, yet LLLL.com investors have largely ignored this fact. I’m not going to try and predict what the end result will be, however I will say that increasing availability of handreg LLLL.coms is worrisome.

We domainers like to distance ourselves from cybersquatters, however how on Earth would anyone see us in a different light when most of the big players in our industry are profiting from cybersquatting in one way or another?

I was just browsing Sedo this morning and see that ToyotaHybrid.com is at $20,000. Over on NameJet, chuckiecheeses.com (Chuck E Cheese’s) is proudly displayed on their homepage as a pre-release domain, with bidding already at $325 and pre-release backorder bids still being taken until July 4th. Nothing on the SnapNames homepage strikes me as TM-infringing, however I didn’t need to look far through their pre-release lists to find plenty of them. GoDaddy currently has Michael-Phelps.com and PresedentHillaryClinton.com listed on their GoDaddy Auctions homepage, I see Pool has JamieFoxx.net listed on their homepage, and DomainTools has a typo generator which has no doubt helped countless domainers in their cybersquatting efforts…

These are supposed to be leaders in our industry? Be sure to send them a thank you note for all they’ve done for the industry when the URS gets passed…

I’ve mentioned this a few times in the past, however the disparity between GoDaddy Auctions LLLL.com prices and LLLL.com prices elsewhere is rising. Looking at all the expiring LLLL.coms on GoDaddy, none of them with under 6 days to go haven’t received a bid of at least $10. Keep in mind that all of these LLLL.coms need to be renewed, so a $10 LLLL.com purchase on GoDaddy is essentially an $18 LLLL.com purchase. Compare this to other venues such as eBay or Namepros where an expiring LLLL.com of minimum wholesale quality is now expected to fetchapproximately $0.50 - $1.00 and a renewed LLLL.com approximately $6.00 - $8.00… I’m not sure why, however renewal fees do not seem to be fully valued when people purchase LLLL.coms. It really makes no sense to me why someone would pay $1 for LLLL.coms expiring tomorrow and often not be willing to pay $8 for an LLLL.com expiring one year from now — as of tomorrow, that $1 LLLL.com will have cost you at least $8.

The minimum wholesale LLLL.coms aren’t the only ones performing well on GoDaddy.. Quad premiums on GoDaddy have historically outperformed the market average and that certainly still appears to be the case, with only 1 quad premium LLLL.com on GoDaddy currently under $130 (and they’re all 1+ days from ending). OHBE.com is at $1505, MNAC.com is at $805, TTRD.com and NBHD.com are at $555 each, NBIF.com is at $505, IBPD.com is at $455, and FDRA.com is at $355.

I haven’t put any effort into evaluating these domains, however the prices are far above what LLLL.coms of comparable letter quality would normally go for.

Yesterday’s short domain auction on Namepros was a blast. Read on for the list of the sales…

3i.org $850
Veyu.com $600
3RV.com $225
7OH.com $210
Yarz.com $210
ZXZZ.com $136
Axak.com $100
nm.bz + vt.bz $91
ELPW.com / IWNU.com / UODP.com / PIBW.com / EFMU.com $88
hex.in $56
AUWF.com/ CUWM.com / OAVU.com / PFMU.com $50
PEHO.NET $50
FYBM.com & YCNB.com $40
R-PG.com $40
Pogic.com $40
FVP.info $38
Blery.com $35
3-5-0.com 3-4-0.com 7-1-0.com 8-5-4.com 8-5-9.com 7-9-2.com 8-2-9.com 9-2-4.com 9-6-4.com 2-8-4.com $20
7-8.org $17
HFNG.ORG VTSN.ORG ETVN.ORG TVAK.ORG WBML.ORG LAYP.ORG PLIP.ORG MDHR.NET AMNP.NET ANNL.NET $16

It was a pretty good sale for short domains — it being a specialized event exclusively for short domains brought out a lot of bidders who might not otherwise have came had it been a more general event. A total of $2912 worth of short domains were sold by me, Jennifer, and Rachel at the Namepros Live Auction yesterday in just 2.5 hours — not bad! Congrats to all the buyers and sellers and a big thanks to everyone who came out and participated

If you have a hard time making changes to your website, perhaps not understanding or having taken the time to learn the programming code behind it, you need to get Firebug. Firebug is a Firefox addon that lets you see what code changes would do to your blog without actually happening to your blog. It really is a great way to learn through trial and error, all the while causing no harm to your website because what you’re seeing is only a preview of what would happen if you made the changes you did. If you do decide to do this, please make a backup copy of your website and save copies of the css/html/php, etc files into a text editor such as Notepad — always better to be safe than sorry.

Think of Firebug as an upgrade to the “old school” trial and error which revolved around having a Notepad text file copy of the HTML source code and making changes to the actual website’s code. That was okay back in the day, however it’s a lot harder to see exactly where you made a mistake when elements from markup, scripting, and programming languages are present on the same website as they are today.

I was recently asked if I could write a post on IDN domains. I don’t know a whole lot about IDNs, so I thought it’d be better to write about what resources exist out there for IDNs. I’m not sure how many IDN investors visit this blog, however please feel free to leave links in the comments to any other good IDN resources you’re aware of. My spam filter is set up to require comments with multiple links to be manually approved, as well as the first comment from any visitor, so it may take a few hours to get comments approved.

1) IDN Forums — As far as I know, this is the largest English language forum dedicated exclusively to IDN domains.
2) IDN News– Excellent blog for IDN investors. Some posts would be difficult for domainers unacquainted with the IDN world to grasp.
3) IDN Tools– Website providing many tools to assist IDN domainers. Also, see: http://www.idntools.net/links.php
4) Wikipedia: Internationalized Domain Names– Provides a list of domain name extensions allowing the registration of IDNs.
5) ICANN: Internationalized Domain Names – Provides a timeline for many past (and current) events in IDN history, among many other important IDN-related matters.

“To use the feature, just login to your GoDaddy account and click on any of your domain names to access the manager (where you also go to do things like update name servers). There’s now a Twitter option under “Domain Enhancements” from which you can check your username availability.”

Source: Mashable

I received an email from Francois this morning letting me know that he’s launched a first mockup of what will be a domainer yellow pages site at Domainers.org. As an example, you can see Francois’ profile here: http://www.domainers.org/search/?q=Francois+Carrillo. Any information you’d like to add to Domainers.org can be done from your Domaining.com account under the “edit account” setting. I look forward to seeing how Domainers.org progresses and having another valuable resource like Domaining.com has been in helping domainers stay better connected.

I’ve visited many domain name websites over the years, however I’ve never seen something as aesthetically pleasing as BrandBucket.com. Every domain of theirs has a logo created for it, along with the reasoning behind the domain. The thing I find most interesting about BrandBucket is that the large majority of the domains they sell are brandables. If you’ve ever tried selling 6 letter brandables on a domain forum, you’ve probably found there’s not usually many takers above $20 and rarely any above $100.. BrandBucket has clearly positioned themselves to sell domains to the much more lucrative end user market — one which has a whole lot more money than most domainers and doesn’t place values on short domains solely based on trivial factors, most of which have little impact in the real world.

BrandBucket also offers tools and suggestions to help visitors evaluate domains, no doubt building trust in their visitors that this is a company that cares about them and wants to help them find the domain that’s right for their business.

Okay, so you’re an IDN believer — good for you. But can someone explain to me why someone would register (nevermind bid!) on a domain like credìtcard.com? I speak French myself, so I can understand why some people see value in domains which use different character sets if they have meaning. If I had to assign a value to a domain such as the one I mentioned above, it’d honestly be a negative value — not only does the domain have no value, however it’s going to send one hell of a lot of typo traffic to creditcards.com and confuse the heck out of any saavy computer users who notices the difference but hasn’t a clue how to enter said character on a keyboard.

Am I wrong? You can go place a bid on Sedo if you think I am — it’s at 60 pounds with 3+ days to go. Two bidders… I really hope we don’t end up with a bidding war. I could understand this back in the days when Sedo didn’t announce such domains were IDNs and so a few domainers mistakenly took them for generics, however it has a big blue IDN button right by the listing and goes on to explain what you’re actually buying…

You always hear 98% this, 99% that, but what do the numbers really mean? Let’s start with a mathematical look at these server uptime numbers:

98% uptime = 28.8 minutes / day –> 3.4 hours / week –> 14.4 hours / month –> 7.3 days / year
99% uptime = 14.4 minutes /day –> 1.7 hours / week –> 7.2 hours / month –> 3.65 days / year
99.5% uptime = 7.2 minutes /day –> 0.84 hours / week –> 3.6 hours / month –> 1.83 days / year
99.9% uptime = 1.44 minutes / day –> 0.17 hours / week –> 0.72 hours / month –> 8.8 hours / year

Suppose your website makes $1000/month from Adsense, affiliate programs, or anything else which is dependant on your website being up (eg. not having advertisers that pay a fixed monthly rate). In such a case, you could expect to lose about $250 per year on a server with 98% uptime that you could otherwise have made on a server with 99.9% uptime. If your website was making $2000/month, the lost sales on a 98% uptime server would be about $500 per year. At $10,000/month, 98% uptime would cost you $2500 per year in lost sales.

This mean that if your website/websites collectively make $1000 per month, you should be willing to pay $20 more per month for 99.9 % uptime over 98% uptime. If you care about user experience, you might value the better uptime higher still. If your websites are making $2000/month, that superior uptime is worth at least $40/month more and at $10,000 per month, it should be worth $200/month more.

Obviously the more your website makes, the more expensive downtime is going to be. It’s not a big deal if this blog goes down — you can always read the story later today or tomorrow. On the other hand, if an online store goes down, people may decide to just buy the product elsewhere — likely from one of your competitors which might also result in you losing repeat business this customer might otherwise have given you in the future.

When looking at server uptime numbers, be sure to find out what exactly a company means by “server uptime”. You’ll find that not all companies have the same definition of what is and what is not considered. Most people only consider a few things when looking for a web host — the cost, the hardware, and sometimes the uptime. I would highly recommend you don’t forget to check out their customer support and read customer reviews before signing up. Low uptime is great, especially if your host’s definition of uptime is what you consider it to mean, but of what use is high uptime if there’s nobody to help when your website does go down?