Long Term Declines are Likely in Domain Traffic

It appears the great success of Smart Phones combined with the strong impact and heavy usage of Apps has already done considerable damage to typein traffic along with browser-based search traffic too. Things will no doubt get worse as the mobile market expands even more.

In addition, once the new unlimted .tld’s start resolving that too in all likelihood will have a negative impact on traffic going to .com and other extensions since so many large websites will have their own tld and people will start simply typing-in that new tld instead of doing a search or typing in dot-com, etc. A random example is websurfers who will go to LasVegas rather than Lasvegas.com or bother to do a search for other las vegas websites.

This is all very distressing and disturbing news for domainers in general and especially for typein traffic domains and websites (including sites which rely heavily on search-engine traffic). Unfortunately these new development look like generating domain/website traffic from typeins and search is well past its peak of a few years ago and is quickly becoming a long-term bear market.

All of that negativity to traffic/revenue potential combined with ever increasing renewal fess (i.e. just discovered my Moniker account .com renewals went up to a high $8.99 today) makes it quite likely more and more domaine operators will let much of their portfolio expire or possibly even exit the business starting this year.

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.

Traffic/Revenue Doesn’t Matter in High Value Sales

A question we have always wondered about is why at Flippa.com it seems buyers place great value on website traffic and revenue stats, with little if any intrinsic value for the domain-name itself?

However, with the just announced big sale by Rick Schwartz (DomainKing) for 4 million dollars plus stock for the two domains property.com and properties.com, their traffic and income was in all likelihood not a factor in the sale.

In fact, that issue was probably not even discussed, let alone a real consideration with the offer and purchase. Obviously, properties.com and property.com traffic/income was insignificant vs the very high sale price.

Sometimes Surprisingly Poor Results from Tweets

Based on my own Tweeting I have discovered we usually get from 5 to 15 visits going to the link in my Tweets, within 15-minutes of the Tweet time, based on having just a little over 1,000 followers.

However, sometimes after 15-min of third-party Tweets (who link to my site) from websites who have far more followers (ranging from about 5,000 all the way to 35,000), there are only 5 or 6 real visitors to the linked site.

That compares extremely poorly vs my own Tweets which typically have approximately double the visits to the link, but coming from far fewer followers.

This makes little sense to me. Anyone have some thoughts on how that scenario is possible?

Yahoo: All .US Country Code Names Poor Quality!

A very interesting subject on the-web is that ALL .US extension domains are banned by the Yahoo feed under the title of Quality Block. Several pay-per-click parking firms who use the Yahoo PPC feed have confirmed that to be correct, and said yes, Yahoo thinks every single .us domain must be poor quality and thus are banned. Isn’t that an incredible wide-ranging assumption to make!

It’s been an issue for at least 2 or 3 years from what we understand. It appears both Yahoo and some of the parking firms who have been given our .us domains to monetize using the Yahoo feed in-effect keep it a secret and allegedly simply assumed we would not notice the fact we always get zero income from our dot-us country code domains.

It’s amazing there has been basically no discussion we have seen about this serious issue. It would seem like a major internet player like Yahoo allegedly hating its own country-code domain extension to such a degree as to ban them all from pay-per-click revenue should be major news and discussed at length in the media. Instead, it appears to be stonewalled with nothing but silence from most everyone, including the media, other domain blogs and the forums.

Eric Borgos Interview by Michael Cyger

We can highly recommend this interesting and educational interview with Eric Borgos conducted by DomainSherpa.com and expert interviewer Michael Cyger: Eric Borgos interview

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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The Saga of Nonsensical Traffic Quality Scores

One of the causes of the big PPC revenue declines appears to be Bing.com with their nonsensical TQ scores, i.e, my Parked.com/Bing TQ score recently fell off the cliff going from an 8 to 1 in a week even though traffic and domains stayed basically the same. My TQ scores have most aways been much better than a very poor 1 and in fact for a while under Yahoo last year TQ hovered at the 9/10 level for some time but now (a few eeks ago) the names and traffic are basically the same but we are at an impossible TQ-1 score.

Support claims Bing looks closer at conversions vs Yahoo but that makes little sense since why would the same traffic from the same names convert so poorly, especially since there are lots of typeins from good keywords. Makes no sense. If these wild gyrations continue and we stay at a level-1 we may be moving my traffic names away from Parked/Bing, which I do not really want to do since the system is extremely good (IMO, the best) in other ways.

However, we really can’t take the TQ BS any longer and am ready to throw in the towel on it. If I did not know my TQ was in fact good it would be easier to accept but I know the truth and my traffic is not anywhere near a ridiculous 1 score.

Interestingly, I wrote the above several weeks ago when I was discussing with parked.com support the absurd claim by Bing that my website traffic quality was only at a level of one. I forgot to post it here at the time but my memory has been now jogged in that I see my TQ score has skyrocketed to the 7 level. That is somewhat reasonable but still a little low since I believe my true TQ should be roughly an 8 or 9, but still an amazing improvement in the TQ achieved by basically the same domains.

The first graph shows the TQ score published by parked.com on Dec 8 2010. The next chart is the TQ score reported by parked.com on Jan 3 2011. FYI, the last 3 date points on the first chart correspond to the first 3 date points on the next graph.

Keep in mind, the traffic and parked domains were basically the same during the entire time frame covered by both TQ charts so the obvious question is how could the TQ fluctuate so wildly? Obviously it can’t. It must be a screw-up by someone, possibly bing.com?

Phone Calls can be an Affiliate Program Negative

For some odd reason the potential phone call which in all likelihood can end-up losing your affiliate referral revenue has rarely been talked about in the past. Not sure why since it’s believed to be a big negative.

I believe a good percentage of potential buyers will pick up the phone and call the sellers toll-free number for more information and when they do that your chance of getting credit for the sale becomes very low. That is especially true with higher priced products and services, where the prospective buyer is much more inclined to call before spending significant money.

He or she may be wondering if it’s a legitimate business and curious to see if a live person answers the phone. Your potential buyer may also be thinking they can get a better deal by calling, and there are other reasons they are likely to pick up the phone instead of using the online contact form or order form (which contains a cookie and tracking ID), such as a desire to authenticate the company, product or service, including frequently wanting to ask questions about the product or offer before ordering it.

When potential buyers call the sellers number, orders are often taken right away over the phone. Or a little later the buyer may be sent an email with an ordering link (not related to you as the publisher), so credit to you as the referral source can easily be lost, thus preventing you from getting credit for the sale.

As a side note, some years ago we believed we had far more referrals than our reports indicated. Therefore, we called seller ourselves and asked how they handled phone calls as far as credit to us as the referral source is concerned. We were told “don’t worry, we always ask how they got our number – so you get credited for the sale.”

Not surprisingly, that turned-out to be false since the next day we called the 800 number on the sellers website and said we wanted to place an order. We actually placed the phone order and at no time during the entire process did anyone ask how we got the number, so receiving credit was impossible.

In fact, the phone call issue is a major reason we have always been somewhat negative about joining affiliate programs. Unless someone can figure out a way to get around this negative issue we will stay negative on affiliate programs (at least regarding higher priced products). I see no good way to avoid this issue beyond getting your own assigned phone number but seriously doubt the product/service provider will agree to assign a special phone number to a new affiliate to better track the referrals.

Product Authentication

DomainKing About Best & Worst Name Extension

Just read a really interesting interview with Domain King Rick Schwartz on the Frager Factor blog, in which Rick was very candid and offered great advice. as always. For example, in the interview, Rick said: “.net is the worst extension on the planet. It’s an orphan……. I think .org is the number 2 extension (behind .com) in the universe…….. and it has its own identity.”

We could not agree more with Rick’s remarks about .com (#1 of course by far in most categories) and .org (by far #2 overall), with .org sometimes as good or even better vs .com, at least in a few categories, i.e. health & wellness), with the normally poor choice .net domain name extension far behind.

Fairly recently we have noticed an obvious and strong trend with potential domain hand registrations in a few categories of interest to me that .com and .org domains are almost always already taken. However, the other popular domain name extensions, such as .net .info .biz and .us for example, are often unregistered and available for new registrations.

Dot-com is most always the #1 domain extension (with our personal second choice being dot-org) and there are other extensions including country-codes such as dot-us as alternatives to .com and .org in value and importance. It is important to note how frequently .com and .org are already taken (especially in several important categories).

Assuming the-domain is available for-sale or new registration, a domain which has a .com or .org extension usually will receive far-and-away the most natural and typein traffic and is typically the most valuable as a result of natural traffic going mostly to .org and .com. As an educated guess, we estimate dot-com and dot-org domain names and websites get at least 95% of all typein traffic vs all the other tld’s.

A big reason .com and .org are so valuable is the billions of dollars of marketing and branding money which has gone into the extensions over many years, including vast numbers of ongoing media and TV commercials.

There are also other major reasons dot-com and dot-org are by far the best possible top level domain extensions. For example, when a web-surfer goes online looking for a product, service, business or name they will typically be thinking about dot-com or dot-org as part of the keyword term and type the keyword name plus .com or .org into their internet-browser, but rarely other extensions (exceptions being certain popular country codes, like Germany and its popular dot-de for example).

With that said, search engines do not necessarily play favorites so any extension with a targeted keyword name and a keyword targeted site, with relevant content, incoming links and search optimization done can achieve a high search-engine ranking.

Nevertheless, .org and .com enjoy a huge advantage over the others in that they can easily get natural and typein traffic by virtue of having targeted keyword quality, plus the com/org tld extension and thus do not need to rely almost completely and exclusively on SEO work as the others do.

Any reviews or comments you have about domain names and their extensions would be most appreciated, which feedback we could also add to our site since we are looking for domaining personal feedback to expand the blog. You can visit our Internet Entrepreneur website by clicking-on the domain-king picture below. Thank you.

Your Own Advertising Network & Keep All Income

Of course, we badly need good alternatives to Google® and Yahoo!® with the best and possibly the only viable option at this time being selling ad space yourself via your our own in-house Advertising Network. A major benefit from running your own advertising network is you keep 100% of the revenue.

Frank Schilling had a very nice Advertising Network of his own running on his domain names but I believe it was deactivated last year for some odd reason. I can only guess as to why.

We would like to install an ad network almost exactly the way Frank’s network worked on all our sites but having lots of difficulty getting it programmed after considerable time and effort.

The problem is the programmers we were trying to hire for the work were simply not capable of doing the job. Therefore, we would really appreciate finding out who the programmer was who programmed Frank’s old advertising network? We have spent considerable time in search of Frank’s Ad Network programmer, including a number of posts about it on Twitter and Facebook but no success. Does anyone know the programmers name or contact information?

P.S. As an interesting side note to demonstrate the major players are trying to improve their own domains and traffic (as small site developers and domain owners are too) we just noticed Fabulous.com (who is a major player with the PPC firms) is both surprisingly and mysteriously using a competitors platform and ad feed on a domain (I imagine far more names than just the one we stumbled on today).

Fabulous is using WhyPark.com (at least with the domain name we noticed today) which is owned by an arch-rival of Fabulous named Parked.com. Isn’t it interesting that Fabulous would use a competitors program instead of their own system!

FYI, the Fabulous.com domain name we are reporting on (which as of today’s date was on the WhyPark.com platform) is registered to FABULOUS.COM PTY LTD.

Any comments you have about website advertising and ad serving networks will be appreciated. Thank you.

Comparative Value of Google Search Rankings

How likely is your URL to get a visitor click based on its keyword(s) search-terms Google ranking?

Click based on Google Rank #1: 42%
Click based on Google Rank #2: 12%
Click based on Google Rank #3: 9%
Click based on Google Rank #4: 7%
Click based on Google Rank #5: 5%
Click based on Google Rank #6: 4%
Click based on Google Rank #7: 4%
Click based on Google Rank #8: 3%
Click based on Google Rank #9: 3%
Click based on Google Rank #10: 3%

Your website url when found on Google’s 1st page of ten search-term rankings (as broken-down above):
Likelihood of a click: 90%

Your website url when found on Google’s 2nd page of ten search-term rankings:
Likelihood of a click: 10%

Note: Data is recently published and courtesy of a reliable source. All figures are rounded to the nearest percentage.

Are Yahoo Traffic Quality Scores Nonsensical?

Yahoo! is a major advertising feed provider for a few well known domain name parking firms. Domains which are not active websites are usually parked so the domain-name owner gets an opportunity to earn revenue from pay-per-click ads which appear on the pages which are parked.

One of the larger and best domain parking firms is Parked.com, who reports by way of a graphical line chart viewable on the clients dashboard page showing their web-page visitor traffic quality scoring.

Even since the Yahoo feed traffic scores were openly disclosed we have always thought the scores made little sense and seemed nonsensical since the scores fluctuate a lot even though the parked domains and their visitor traffic stays basically the same.

In the past (again with about the same quality traffic) our score has ranged from a very low 1 and all the way up to a consistent 9 or 10, with 10 being the highest possible score, and has held as a 9 or 10 for  long time periods. Here is our most recent quality score report according to Yahoo! which covers the last nine quality score iterations:

2.5 – 3.0 – 0 – 0 – 6.0 – 1.0 – 1.0 – 5.5 – 7.0

In our opinion, it appears to be virtually impossible for such wild fluctuations to take place. In fact, the visitor quality scores almost appear like random numbers, keeping in mind the parked domains and their combined traffic are basically the same for the entire reporting period. What do you think?

WSPN.COM is the Women’s Sports Network

One of our most visited websites is WSPN.COM where we are working on developing a Women’s Sports Network, which is the main acronym meaning of WSPN. In addition to the women’s sports network relevancy there are nine other usage categories you will see on the left side of the wspn.com web-page.

We are offering you an opportunity to get your name published on the Internet plus a link to your Facebook page or to your own website if you can contribute some relevant content for wspn.com (which we can re-publish on our site) about women’s sports, or the rapidly growing in popularity game of “Netball” or any other acronym definitions, including other popular women’s sports.

Netball is fast becoming one of the most popular women’s sports in the world. Netball is a new type of basketball type of sport which is being played by more than 20 million people (believed to be mostly by women and girls) thruout the world. Netball is similar to basketball although there is no ball dribbling, the netball and basket are slightly smaller, there is no backboard and players are assigned to pre-determined areas of the court.

The same and sport of Netball is fast and lots of fun, with some basic skill making it even better of course, and can be played by women and girls of all ages, sizes and skill levels. You do not necessarily need to be tall, athletic or quick to play Netball as is required in the case of regular basketball.

Netball gives a lot more women and girls a chance to participate in a relatively new but fast growing sport which relies more on teamwork than natural physical skills and height. More information about Netball and other women’s sports can be found on the wspn.com sports web site.

We would appreciate any comments you have about WSPN.COM which feedback we could also add to our web site as we are looking for sports, in particular popular womens sport feedback to expand the wspn.com site, which website you can visit by clicking-on the picture below to visit WSPN now.

Do Websites & Traffic Add Major Value to Prices?

There has been discussion on domain-name forums and blogs about developed websites adding significant value to domain names, and also making the domains easier to sell plus sell for a higher price. Agree to a degree, a developed web site with traffic is of high overall value. However, with that said, based on hands-on experience, I can say end-users rarely if ever care about the traffic your domain or its website gets, and in fact don’t ask for any statistics. Even if you offer them your stats, they don’t want to see it.

In view if the above I am unfortunately somewhat dubious about a developed website (with good traffic and typeins too) being more appealing to end-user buyers and the price they will pay for the domain, at least much beyond intrinsic value. Potential end-user buyers may actually be a bit negative about an existing web site and as a result its pre-branding.

Please note that my comments do not indicate I am negative about developed websites, or do not greatly value traffic. The exact opposite is true, since I have a number of developed sites which I am very happy with, most of which get good search-engine traffic, enjoy the benefits of high SEO rankings, plus receive natural typeins (from Internet users like President Barack Obama, pictured below, likely looking at a health website)…

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