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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Overstock.com is rebranding itself as O.CO

Found this on the Overstock.com website this morning. It’s also Super Bowl Sunday, so perhaps not just a coincidence since the .CO extension domain names will be strongly marketed in today’s Super Bowl commercials, making Overstock.com’s announcement real good timing in that regard.

“Shopping at Overstock.com internationally is about to get easier with the O.co domain. Since the company acquired the O.co domain name in July 2010, Overstock.com has been simpler to access by mobile Internet users. Now, to minimize confusion and hassle while translating the word “Overstock” into other languages, Overstock.com is rebranding internationally and will be known as O.co as of Jan. 2011. This guide will address any concerns you may have about Overstock.com’s new domain.

Q. Why will Overstock.com be known as O.co internationally?

A. In July 2010, .co domain names became available for general purchase, and Overstock.com acquired the O.co domain name in order to reinforce the “O” of the Overstock brand and capture customers’ attention with a short, memorable web address. The short .co domain will also solve translation issues and allow Overstock.com to create a universal logo, brand and web domain name that will be recognizable internationally…”

Click the Overtstock.com® woman on the couch picture below to visit the new O.co® website:

Will GoDaddy’s Super Bowl Ad be a Success?

Godaddy is spending a ton of money on their Super Bowl ad and other heavy .CO marketing but will it make the .CO extension (.CO is actually the South America Nation of Columbia country code) an Internet success?

In our opinion, it’s already apparent .CO will be a flop as far as long-term value goes, and actual use. There are very few .CO developed sites and it has a poor resale market, with rare sales (except for occasional sales of strong single word names).

With that said, .CO is already a big financial success as far as registry and registrars income is concerned, thanks to brilliant and costly marketing, defensive registrations and domainers who can’t get the .COM and think .CO is a good replacement for speculation purposes.

A big hope with .CO was the anticipation of .co getting substantial ‘typo’ or ‘spillover’ traffic intended for the .COM but I can tell you from good first-hand experience that is not happening now, and is also extremely unlikely to occur in the future.

Buy a domain name or order webhosting by clicking below:

A slightly modified version of this article was published today in Fortune Magazine & CNN Money

Importance of Owning Your Desired Domain

Domain names are extremely popular as far as owning a website with that name, and its potential use as a business presence, marketing venue, e-commerce site, blog, email address and for information and product marketing. Obviously, there is only one exact name which is truly your most desired domain name available or for-sale, making it unique.

You probably realize the high value of owning a good domain and you surely don’t want someone else using “your desired domain name” and getting visitors looking for the domain keywords, the exact search term, or its URL, which visitors could have gone to your website, right? Why in the world permit another potential buyer to acquire your most desired available domain-name of interest and allow competitors to get site visitors going to their site, which visits you could have received instead?

There are a number of businesses and people with interest in also buying and developing your most desired domain, with some potential domain name users being quite well known both on-the-web and in the offline world too, including individuals and small, mid-size and large business owners in various businesses.

For a real-time internet-search to see “your desired domain name” and its search-engine and web-page popularity of the exact search-term, please do a Google search and search on the keywords (wrapped in quotes for exact search-term results) of your desired domain name (using spaces between words), consisting of your desired domain name (but without entering the domain name extension, i.e. .com .org etc).

As a side-note, it’s sometimes interesting to view the Google results when you combine the words without any spaces between the keywords. The results will be much lower vs using spaces but nevertheless it may be informative, especially if the number of search returns for the words without spaces are considerable.

Read about your most desired domain name

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?

Website Links/Ads Don’t Give Court Jurisdiction

A recent decision by United States District Court in Missouri clarified an important distinction regarding jurisdictional issues within internet law about intrenet law jurisdictional issues. The Federal Court entered judgment in favor of the defendant, a Costa Rican software company, finding no personal jurisdiction.

The Federal Court decision hinged upon the nature of the software company’s hyperlinks on its website. The District Court held the defendants website, which was passive, but linked to inter-active sites, did not provide the requisite minimum contacts to satisfy personal jurisdiction because the company did not control the target sites.

In the USA, for a court to enter a legally valid judgment against a person, the court must first have personal jurisdiction over that person. An out of state defendant cannot be subject to personal jurisdiction if that defendant has not had a sufficient amount of “minimum contact” with the state where jurisdiction is claimed. A defendant must purposely “reach in,” to that state in order to be sued there legally.

In the context of the internet, the prevailing trend by courts is to rule that jurisdiction is proper when the defendant maintains a website that is interactive in nature, and/or a site which gives users an opportunity to conduct business or otherwise provide input to the website.

This means that a person operating an interactive website opens themselves to jurisdiction in any state from which the website receives visitors. Whereas maintaining a passive website, one which merely displays information for the user to peruse, i.e. a blog, is not sufficient to establish minimum contacts. However, the question in this case turned on what the determination should be when a passive website displays links/advertisements for interactive sites?

The court in this case answered that question by ruling that the third-party target sites were irrelevant to the minimum contacts analysis. Jurisdiction should turn on the company’s purposeful activities, rather than uncertain and immeasurable ties between the company and the third party’s online contacts with the state.

The court stated, “The activity of those hyperlinked websites supports jurisdiction only if defendants maintain some responsibility for or control over the activities and contents of the third-party sites.” While the legal debate surrounding the interactivity test continues, with many detractors arguing it’s web 1.0 specific, this ruling should be encouraging for many website operators, and especially encouraging to Sedo users.

If the district court would have ruled the other way, it would have meant domain name owners who use ppc ads and parking pages could be subject to almost universal personal jurisdiction depending on the interactive nature of the linked web site. Article courtesy of Sedo.com by ~Ryan Sadler, Legal Team.

Any comments you have about Internet intellectual property.com and website advertising would be appreciated, which feedback we are looking for to expand our website. You can visit our IP Law site by going to Internet Intellectual Property now, or clicking-on the picture below. Thank you.

Negativity by Paying Domain Broker Upfront Money

Sometimes domain name and website owners may wish to hire a domain brokerage to sell their names or websites. I can give you some good advice (gained via my personal hands-on experience) about that, including a warning about paying any upfront fees to the broker.

Keep in mind, once the domain-broker has your money a good degree of the incentive to work hard and sell your domain or website may be lost since the broker already has his/her money, regardless of the name selling or not selling.

One more potential negative occurrence is the once friendly relationship you had with the broker may quicky go away if there are any business or personal issues involved. That can easily happen as a result of the broker already having your paid in advance monies so he may decline to issue a refund if you are later unhappy with his work and perfomance.

More information about why you should never even think about paying a fee in advance to a broker (which we published over a year ago) as part of a post about the category defining premium domain names LiveApp.com plus LiveApps.com both being available for purchase, located here: About Domain Broker and Live App domains for sale .

A good article about domain brokers was recently published in Elliotsblog.com in which Elliot lists domain name brokers. I know several of the same domainers/brokers and can suggest the following domain brokers, which Elliot listed in his post:

• BigTicketDomains.com – Kevin Leto
• DifferentInvestments.com – Justin Godfrey
• DomainBroker.com – Rob Sequin
• DomainsForMedia.com – Eric Rice
• MediaOptions.com – Andrew Roesner
• NameConnect.com – John Daly

By the way, Webtrading also offers a domain brokerage service (mosty for our own websites but the brokerage service can also be used to buy domains belonging to other parties), which you can learn more about by clicking-on the image below. In addition, any comments you may have about selling domains and websites, or regarding domain brokers will be appreciated.

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.

High Priced Domain Name Pricing Model

The concept of asking a very high price for low or moderate value domain names is used by both Marchex and Frank Schilling’s Name Administration. In the past I tried to buy a few names (which if they were my names would be asking under 1k) but Frank wanted a minimum of 8k firm or even more, and would not budge a bit or negotiate the price.

Of course, that’s their business decision and a business model they apparently are following. With that said, in view of the fact they do want to sell domains, we do not see how Marchex Inc or Frank Schilling could possibly be selling many domains since I feel their prices are even more than end-user domain values.

In addition, they make you jump through a bunch of hoops, stumbling blocks and complexities before you can even make an inquiry, making buying from NameAdmin even more unlikely vs if their pricing was more realistic or flexible.

We will appreciate any comments you have about Money Matters, which feedback we could also add to our web site as we are looking for money matters and monetary ideas to expand the web site.

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.

Domain Inquiry Sounds Better vs Domain For Sale

There has been talk on the forum boards about the best way to place a notice on your website that your domain name is for sale. Fabulous.com does a good job combining PPC ads with a domain for sale announcement page and developed a type of hybrid between a parked page and a sales page. With that said, ‘This Domain Name is For Sale’ notice does a fairly good job of getting people to make offers, but there appears to be a better way.

That Fabulous page is a good approach but I would like it even more if the banner said “Domain Inquiry” since I believe “This Domain Name is For Sale” notice will detract from the the visitor experience and potential visits to your advertisers (at least to to a degree) since the page may have has less crediblity due to the site/domain being offered for sale. The words “Domain Inquiry” has a less obvious negative meaning to a web-surfer, imo.

Any reviews, comments or ideas you have about how to effectively and professionally sell Internet domain names or websites would 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.

About Green Couches & Ancient Sea Creatures

There are a couple things we have been wondering about regarding both ancient sea creatures and green couches so I posted this on a third partiy site but it was immediatey automatically rejected by the blog as being spam (which it is not) so am posting it here since some readers may find it interesting.

Since at the time we were in the process of purchasing the domain name GreenCouches.com we were doing research about green couches so this was mainly about “Green Couches” which were discussed on that web site.

We asked if the term green couches refers to both the color of the couch and in addition, it being manufactured from non-toxic materials? Also, can a non-toxic couch be called a “green couch” if it’s a different color such as tan or brown for example, or is it usually in-fact green in color?

Another subject of interest is wanting to learn about is what was unique about that website as far as the design goes since it was said the site is somehow similar to ancient sea creatures which have spiral shapes? That was regarding the interesting sea creature picture and the statement: “a fossil of ammonite, an extinct ancient sea creature, which is often used as an “index fossil” to link the rock layer in which they are found to specific geological time periods.

How does a website possibly embody the basic shape of the spiral, a growth pattern used throughout nature because it allows the organism to grow at a constant rate without having to change shape (as does the structure upon which this that site was built)?

Do any readers of DavidGreen.com blog have any thoughts about how the spiral natural shape of the ancient sea creature fossils (pictured below) could somehow be related to making good websites?

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