Fabulous.com & DemandMedia.com connection?

Starting this month we noticed payments from Fabulous.com now come by way of DemandMedia.com who is shown as the sender by PayPal.

Any idea why they now use Demand Media instead of paypal payments from Fabulous as they always did in the past?

Death Threats via a DDOS Attack

Hi all, Some of you may or may not be aware that for the last 10 days my blog, Whizzbangsblog.com, has been down due to a consistent DDOS attack. The reason for the attack was directly due to my articles on people that are committing fraud in the domain industry by pumping bad traffic through domains, purchasing parking accounts and stealing good domain owner’s identities. This behaviour is rampant and is costing us all millions of dollars.

Initially the fraudsters struck at my blog and then moved the DDOS to my company (which is OK BTW), to michaelgilmour.com and now finally back to whizzbangsblog.com. They have been communicating to me via the referral URL which in the last instance was the following:

173.245.53.77 – - [06/Sep/2011:00:13:51 +1000] “GET / HTTP/1.0″ 200 316 “http://lastwarning-shutdown-yourblog-or-die-withyourparklogic.com/” “Mozilla/5.0(compatible;MSIE 8.0;Windows NT 6.0;InfoPath.1;.NET CLR 3.0.04506.648;.NET CLR 2.0.50727)”

It’s the first time in my life I received such a threat and upon speaking with the police they indicated that I should take it seriously. I have now contacted CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) in both the USA and Australia, Victorian Police, Federal Police, FBI (still trying to find the right person) and I have now been told by the police to contact the Secret Service Cyber-crime area in Washington.

In one of my blogs I posted an email that had been circulating that related to purchasing parking accounts and the response was incredible. Many domainers didn’t know about this activity and why it was bad for their reputation and the industry they operate in. My guess is that many of them stopped selling accounts and this has caused the fraudsters some problems…..hence the DDOS.

Our industry is under threat from unscrupulous scumbags and I have no intention in bowing down to threats like this. I do not negotiate with terrorists that hijack an industry that I love and steal from friends that I greatly respect. I would ask this of my fellow domainers. Please support me in exposing these people and feel free to publish this article – get it off my server ASAP. It will mean a brave stand and I will not feel any ill will for those of you who do not feel you are able to fight this fight.

I will keep posting here as long as possible in the meantime you can see me updating facebook.

Warmest Regards,

Michael Gilmour

Guest Article, written Seot 8, 2011

Nobody on The Road… Nobody on The Beach…

Written by Frank Schilling

There is something about the end of summer that feels so very similar every year. The end of summer, of fun and frivolity always comes at the same time and echoes, like the lyrics from a Don Henley song. Aptly named “Labor Day” is like a starter’s pistol at a collective social race that has been programmed to begin through years of grade-school, college and university. Everyone around the world does it. Fighting the urge to be productive in September is like swimming against an unstoppable tide of human behavior.

A different more fearful tide of behavior continues to play out before us. People have come to the realization that the economies of the World are poised to get worse before they get better. Apparently printing more money to paper-over problems doesn’t work! I certainly believe that to be the case. Much of our economy today is powered by the Ponzi-scheme of government dollars recycled to the private sector, then recycled back to government. We have America, Greece, Portugal, Spain and others on food stamps. There are 20 million people in the US working for the Government, basically paying no tax. A government employee’s tax bill is just a return of cash back to those productive members of society who gave it to them in the first place. We have millions more on government social security and Medicare – all draining the system – taking more than they contribute. This is playing out in Europe, in America… everywhere.

I believe the US is facing difficulties, orders of magnitude greater than its recent financial downgrade. I noticed it in Malibu of all places, where for the first time I saw not only a dead-head sticker on a Cadillac, but also men, holding signs, begging for cash, at Cross-Creek and PCH (a celebrity studded shopping district North of LA)! There were many more regular-looking people and even women standing on corners throughout Los Angeles (not just the usual corners) with “need-help” signs in hand. The usual corners near freeway ramps had many more people standing on them, begging. Storefronts were closed and some stores had downsized even on Rodeo Drive.

here is a strange inflation and parallel deflation occurring. Certain people are charging more for goods and services and chalking it up to inflation, while earnings fall or disappear for the industry in which they participate. Millions of people like you and I have not come to terms with the difficulty ahead, wrongly thinking things will soon get better. There is a great re-organization upon us where whole industries are going away. Cash is being printed by governments to prop up unsustainable routines which just shouldn’t exist anymore. The no-confidence vote of the world’s productive members of society is reflected in the price of gold which has soared since I suggested you buy some back in 2004. Those who followed my lead nearly quintupled their money.

Gold will be 3500 – 6000 an ounce in a few years – either that or it will stay at 2000 and the DOW will fall to 5000. You can diarize that remark as you did my last. Gold of course is just another human behavior which men fight at their peril. Just a shiny metal without an intrinsic use… just like the tide of back to school, back to work mindset… and just like the rush for .com names which work just as well as .nets .info’s and .whateveryouwant. To return things to a domain context, no amount of new TLD’s are going to diminish the value of the human behavior gold standard – .com .. used.cars will not knock 20k in value off usedcars.com. It will increase the value of usedcars.com and set a permanent floor to its value. Make those words as you did my gold remarks in 2004, fight them at your peril.

Millions will be made and lost in the New TLD casino, on both sides of the table. We are creating a machine to enrich strangers, with a nebulous and unknown outcome for the participant. Most at the table agree it’s better to have tried and lost than to never have tried at all. I am not 100% sure I have the right answer for you, but it could be that the biggest winners at the new TLD table are those who buy the best SLD’s in each space. One recurring theme of all namespaces is that a TLD is only as good as the best SLD’s in it. If you buy the best second level names in each space you can do better than the registry itself. The .COM space is a good example. The top 10 million generic domain names in .com are worth more than Verisign. Only 5-10% of all the names registered in .COM are generic or meaningful in any way whatsoever.

Newer spaces such as .INFO have seen even fewer good names with perhaps 1% of the .INFO space being worthwhile to anyone whatsoever. I could see just a few thousand good names per string in almost all new TLDs – a collective few million worth anything whatsoever to anyone.. and the demand fall-off being almost TOTAL after that.. Unlike .com which has “some” low dollar demand for $250 multiword strings, there will be ZERO demand for longer strings in new extensions. Better to be the registrant of the best SLDs than to embrace the clerical misery and competitive marketing-hell of running the registry itself. Only the deepest pocketed and most brave should walk down this college fraternity hazing gauntlet or roll the dice at this table of monsterous uncertainty.

The Internet Traffic business is at its annual low as I write these words. People are gone fishing and the economy’s ad dollars sit on the shelf in-wait, soon to be applied to dormant adwords accounts. The back to school rush will see millions of new, refurbished and toolbar-free laptops fire up in unison. Type-in traffic will spike. Ad dollars will spike. We will build to a crest through January, propelled higher by the Black-Friday shopping season. It all kicks off with Labor Day and we will be there soon enough.

My hope is that the upstream ad-marketplaces (Yahoo and Google) will redistribute those returning dollars, pari-pasu, to the “partners” in the syndication engine-room, who are helping to move the ship forward. If they decide to skim off the top to “make their quarter” at the expense of those assisting below, I see genuine discord for the ad-marketplaces and difficulty keeping traffic next year. Like an abused spouse, Tina is two blows from stepping out of the limo and walking away from Ike once and for all. If the upstreams reap all the returning autumn gains at the syndication channel’s expense, I see platform abandonment ahead. I’ve heard it from too many partners and in too many quarters for this not to be the case.

More than in previous years, this is a season to be the squirrel – to gather nuts for the cold winter ahead. It’s a great autumn to “take the deal” and build a cash cushion to see you through in case this winter and the economy are colder than in previous years. I am advocating that all our partners save more of their earnings and build as big a cushion as they can muster. Higher renewal fees for .com names in January will bring discontentment in February as registrant margins get squeezed. Upstream partners will need to recalibrate their payouts to those partners doing the lifting downstream to compensate for the name renewal price increases, or risk losing their partners to alternative and unorthodox monetization implementations promising more revenues.

I expect that “pressure to pay more” on upstream ad markets will intensify because of the new TLD process. That process will put negative pressure on existing SLD name sales, which have been a crutch for low PPC rates over the past 2 years. Early next year, name buyers will wrongly question the value of existing .com/.net names against a barrage of press extolling the virtues and vices of new TLDs. The trifecta of a more difficult economy, lower traffic revenues from the Verisign price increase and lower name-sales due to the sideshow of the new-tld process will cause pressure on re-sales. It would be an Orwellian Animal-Farm moment to see Google and Yahoo crushing the numbers this February as the domain-industry plays the role of the horse in the engine room, turning the wheel for less and less revenue. I just don’t see that working any longer. So the takeaway for you all is to sell more of everything NOW and save it, then have that cushion so you can buy some courage to change partners or try unorthodox methods if you need to next March.

Despite that gloomy prognostication of what could come I remain hopeful that we have seen the collective low for traffic payments in 2011. The market and fixed expense reality simply dictates that type-in-traffic is worth more, and it is not equitable that any middleman takes a majority of a product which is produced. There are flat-rate shops buying traffic at higher levels. Walmart is a buyer. Target is buying traffic directly during the Black-Friday period. It’s a short curve of logic for those monster retailers to buy that traffic all year long. Walmart buys everything from Sundried Cranberry snacks and Garden hose directly through their buying center in Bentonville. I have been there and have seen that process in-action when I sold Walmart video game joysticks and gamepads 15 years ago. It is illogical that domainers wouldn’t eventually line-up at this same location with blocks of tens or hundreds of millions of unique monthly visits, if the existing paid-search marketplaces get so greedy that the model of selling to those marketplaces becomes unsustainable.

In the end, the method which we use to implement domain name type-in traffic is not under our control. Upstream traffic marketplaces need to decide how much volatility they want to tolerate in their keyword marketplaces and how much value they ascribe to it. A healthy channel simply dictates that those who generate the traffic, need to ride along in the success, otherwise the market becomes volatile and ultimately, undone.

Suspended RSS Feeds are Welcome to Reapply

The Afternic.com blog and popular blog DomainGang.com were suspended for ongoing spamming of our non-commercial and advertising-free DomainingRoulette.com RSS News Feed.

They are welcome to contact us if they would like to be unsuspended.

RSS Feed Spam with Repetitive Duplicate Articles

We have noticed more and more RSS Feed spamming by publishing repetitive and duplicate articles. In fact, one well known blog appears to have published at least 17 RSS articles today to our feed, of which 16 appear to be duplicates of earlier published articles from his feed. In addition, that blog has been spamming DomainingRoulette.com domain headline news aggregator for many days and even more frequently recently.

Domaining Roulette will not allow more spamming and will not hesitate banning any RSS-feed who does that regardless of who they are. For example, the RSS Feed of Afternic.com was recently suspended for ongoing spam.

How is Local News Related to Your Success?

Watching the local news, that’s a great use of your time, presented in a one hundred percent problem format.

No one watching the news cares your sale numbers are up, or that Wendy got a promotion, or that Jordan got straight A’s on his report card. Good news does not sell; therefore it’s omitted.

Rather, what you get is distorted, negative information about two or three percent of the people affecting those who view it in the worst way. If you watch an hour a day of problems, everyday for years, you become problem oriented.

Do you think local news adds or detracts from your sales skills? How about your business skills? How about your life skills? The news is popular because most people that watch it lack focus or direction, or are miserable and looking for something or someone more miserable than they are – I guess to make them feel better.

Still think the local news is important, How many of you can look in the mirror and say “I’m successful today, I am where I am today , because of the local news.”

Here’s a wakeup call: Let’s say you have been watching the news for half hour a day for the past year. That’s 7.5 full 24 hour days you spent watching problems. In five years that’s 38 full 24 hour days . In terms of a 40 hour work week, that’s 23 weeks every five years.

Now imagine the possibilities if you diverted that energy in a positive direction. Imagine what you could do with that time, and accomplish in that time, if you put it to productive use.

As a quick example, if you instead spent just 15-minutes a day reading and learning about a topic of interest, in one-year you could be an expert in that topic and help your business, or family.

Which do you think is a more powerful use of your time: Watching other people’s problems or investing in yourself and creating plans and solutions for you or your business.

The next time you say “I don’t have enough time” substitute the phrase with “I don’t choose to spend my time in that manner.” It’s closer to the truth. The real truth is you’re not investing your time in the most important people in the world – You and your family or your own business.

Take your hour a day and convert it into a positive action or learning for yourself, your job, your business and your family. At the end of the year, you will have captured more than 15 full 24-hour days building your future.

Reprinted with permission of Adam Dicker

News Served On Your Plate, 24X7

Some Domain Industry Players are Not Doing Well

Well known and veteran domainer Sahar Sarid’s Conceptualist.com website looks like it’s gone. The Conceptualist.com website owned by “Sahar Sarid” for a long tme recently became a simple DomainSponsor.com parking page but as of today it no longer resolves at all. That’s not too surprising overall since there seems to be a somewhat significant down-sizing or shakeout taking place in the industry.

Various industry firms, forums, domain meeting venues, auctions and individual domainers have left the business, are not doing well, or have domain-name related websites which are less successful and active vs a few years ago.

It’s probably mostly the result of large declines in pay-per-click advertising revenues, reduced market liquidity, the economy, combined with market saturation and too many participants (including lots of new players) competing and trying to grab their own piece of the pie.

Here is a link to an interesting 2007 article about Sahar Sarid, a DNJurnal.com Cover-Story.

A Recently Discovered Quality Domaining Site

Just finished listening to the new DomainSherpa.com interview with well-known domainer Justin Godfrey. Just in case you are not familiar with DomainSherpa.com it’s a relatively new site operated by Michael Cyger. I have spoken to Michael and listened to his informative and educational series of interviews.

By the way, Michael has excellent interviewing skills. His interviews also benefit nicely from their length since they are 1-hour or longer which time allows Michael and his guest to cover a lot of information in that time (compared to much shorter Youtube videos).

It’s also quite interesting how the video interviews are of such good video quality from a basic service which most of us probably already have on our computers. After seeing how good the split-screen videos are I asked Michael about the technology thinking he must be using a top-quality video production system and was surprised the video quality is from Skype.

The most interesting part of the latest one-hour plus interview was how Justin Godrey purchased the domain name Snowmobilers.com for just $500. The name had an equally surprising low asking price of only $900 which Justin received in reply to his email. I doubt I would even bother try to get a better price as he did with that amazingly low initial asking price.

How is that possible when the name is likely worth so much (I would estimate at mid-5 figures or more). Justin was certainly lucky with that one. Why does that kind of luck never happen to me?