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.

Kids Are Searching for Surprising Things

Kids search for surprising things online. A report from Symantec and its Norton OnlineFamily service, which allows parents to monitor and manage their kids’ online activities, including Internet searches. The Norton service tracks and reports the children’s Internet activities in real-time so parents can learn about online-content their kids should not be reading or seeing on the-web.

Here are the top-10 search-terms from kids over a recent 6-month period:

P.S. No, search-terms 4, 6, 28 and 89 are not April Fool’s jokes as you may be thinking!

1. YouTube
2. Google
3. Facebook
4. Sex
5. MySpace
6. Porn
7. Yahoo
8. Michael Jackson
9. Fred
10. eBay

Other search-terms making the top-100 search-terms include Wikipedia (14), Webkinz (16), games (17), Boobs (28), the Jonas Brothers (47), Playboy (89), iTunes (89b) and and swine flu (93). Who is Fred? He is a made-up character whose YouTube channel has become big with kids.

Many Websurfers & Users Are Not Internet Savvy

An actual example of how many people are not very internet savvy occurred a few days ago when I asked someone (in-person) to go to a website named Example-Example.com but she typed-in ExampleHyphenExample.com and then announced the website did not work.

Quite surprisingly, she actually spelled and typed the word hyphen instead of using a (-) dash character. Even after I explained that a ‘hyphen’ was a ‘dash’ she seemed a bit confused and still did not understand it.

At another time and involving a different person (on phone) I used the word ‘dash’ meaning Example-Example.com but he typed in ExampleDashExample.com, typing-in the word ‘dash’ instead of the keyboard (-) character.

On a somewhat different subject, it’s also true even today there are lots of people who don’t really know the difference between a browser address box and a search-engine box, especially as far as actual use is concered.

I have several family members who always type the website URL including its domain extension in the Google search box, and do not use the Internet Explorer or Safari browser address window (which is of course where the URL should go). When I told them about it they were not aware they should (or even could for that matter) use the browser window.

On a side-note to our readers who run their own websites and study site visitor data, we believe URL’s typed-in the search box do not count as valuable so called Direct Navigation (a.k.a. typeins) but are considered to be (less valuable) search visitors.

We suspect most website owners (even including some experienced domainers) do not understand or realize their actual direct navigation (typein) numbers are a better percentage than their stats program indicates, something many site owners are overlooking that positive aspect with their website stats software data analysis.

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