Hart to Hart by Frank Schilling

I’ve been watching lots of 1970’s TV lately. My kids really dig those easy-to-follow storylines and I love the trip down memory lane. What’s most interesting from a grown-up’s perspective is how the value of money has changed over the passage of time. A million used to be a big number in the days when Jonathan Hart flew his Gulfstream II to play poker with oil sheiks and generals. $25,000 a year was a salary that put you in the top 10%. Mr. Hart had earned his lifestyle by becoming an industrialist and self-made “millionaire”

Yesterday’s million has given way to today’s trillion and a trillion is 1 million times the size of Mr. Hart’s million. I may be an economics dropout, but my street-smarts remind me to trust the words of Abe Lincoln: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.” Abe’s turn of phrase, reminds me not be lulled into suspension of common sense, as we hear about the next trillion dollar bailout and how it will magically return us to the land of growth and normalcy from whence we came just 7-years ago.

I was living in Lyford-Cay in the Bahamas 7 years ago, in the wake of Hurricane Ivan. It’s a stepford, gate guarded compound of homes and club-buildings on the western tip of New-Providence, filled with old money, country club, trust-fund types. Nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there. One beautiful night my friend, the CEO of a major bank, who had helped arranged my temporary stay, called me to go running. He waved his arm across the twinkling star filled horizon toward a group of luxury villas: “All these people are broke Frank .. They are not productive and their wealth is slipping away without them knowing it”.

What’s more apparent today than at the time of that prescient comment 7 years ago, is that in inflation adjusted terms, most of us are working harder for less. Forget the number on your PPC stats page or the price you just garnered for that 5 figure name-sale, those dollars, euro, yen and francs you’re bringing home are buying less of what they would have bought 7 years ago. My friend had started his banking career in Countries outside the modern financial system. Brazil, Argentina and Africa taught him how fragile the global financial system could be and what it was like when the coveted “system” fails. He felt chastened by the sudden increase in the price of commodities and particularly, gold (the world’s universal currency) which had risen from the $300’s an ounce to the high $400’s in a very short time.

My friend turned his conversation from our neighbors who’s collective millions were quietly losing value, to my domain names – “How much are all your domain names worth if you have to break up the portfolio and sell each, one at a time?”. Hmmm… If I sold 10% of my portfolio and slashed prices 70%, burning the furniture to get the job done, I could probably raise about $250,000,000. He laughed at the number as it seemed implausibly large in 2004. “How long will it take you at this pace to sell them all?” Some quick fingertip math revealed that I’d get around to clearing my last great .com sale around the time I blew out the candles on my 190th birthday. Time my friends, is still the most valuable commodity. The last 7 years of money printing may have staved off an economic collapse and served to make the implausible “dollar” value of our collective portfolios seem fair, but no amount of printing can bring back the most precious commodity, the 7 years we all lost.

What we really need in the domain name business is a “productivity miracle”. A quote attributed to Alan Greenspan, I first grasped the concept of the productivity miracle during an afternoon in Cayman when a group of visitors, lay on the beach in front of the Ritz. This vacation scene unfolded out the window of my office where I had an incredibly good day domaining. Without my scripts, servers, and skills I would have needed 50 of those vacationers (and then some) to accomplish what I did that day. I added permanent value to my business, while those strangers lapped up Vitamin D and umbrella drinks. You have all experienced similar days. I “was” the productivity miracle that day. Without the productivity miracle of computers, software and programming it may have taken me a month to accomplish what I did – and I’d have missed tomorrow’s opportunities because I would never have had tomorrow free.

I continue to witness the productivity miracle in the office here in Cayman when John runs our monthly renewal list in 20 minutes, or when he gets the unlocks and authcodes for names and I run the bulk transfer script to move names over to our registrar. I see it when Ryan tweaks the traffic program and Roy and Ying roll out sales-site enhancements. I see it at InternetTraffic.com when each of you post your daily add-lists which come in like a never-ending river of opportunity for each of you. It’s heartbreakingly beautiful to watch the collective productivity of all our people and partners. All that mental horsepower (which is already focused), getting re-focused via our system. It would take all the people walking on the beach today to properly handle the hundreds of sales inquiries that the automated domainnamesales.com platform handled last night.

What this industry needs is a similar productivity miracle in name-sales marketing. So many buyers out there have no idea how to go about buying a better name. They don’t understand the value proposition, or they want a better brand but don’t understand the clerical process of getting to the point where they can put their new, shiny, better name on their business card. I am working for changes in the way we market our names. I can imagine a day in the not too distant future when domains entered into the front door algorythmic search-box at Google, Yahoo, Bing return a one-box result offering to help buy the name in exchange for a percentage of namesales revenue to the search engine that closes the deal.

Google would clearly have a massive tactical advantage with an established one-box product and their search footprint. Name-sales are a multibillion dollar annual business, and there are hundreds of millions of dollars in annual sales commissions for helping users facilitate the purchase of names – and billions more waiting for the party that helps those users create hosting relationships, signing certificates, email, etc. In a perverse way it may be New TLDs which spearhead the marketing push in premium domain names. As more people take up the opportunity to buy new names at registration price, the more those people will be able to identify the good names from the bad ones – and the more they will covet those better ones.

Well, a million may not be what it used to, but the million-plus names on our platform and millions of daily unique visitors they deliver are certainly appreciated here folks. So much so, that this month we intend to pass along our next rev-share tier payout to our partners. It’s the reason your wires will be just a smidge larger than the report number in your stats this month.

As our monetization platform has grown we’ve seen a large number of naked arbitrage operators try to join us. These are predominantly small accounts, with terrible names, which miraculously get 10,000 uniques a day. We’ve kept those folks at-bay. Arbitrage isn’t a dirty word. We’re all in the arbitrage business in one way or another. When you buy a domain for 10$ per year and sell 13$ per year of traffic, that is an arbitrage play. The type of Arbitrage which troubles us is the kind that changes the characteristics of traffic.

When you buy a piece of traffic from one ad network and sell it to another network for more money you are unknowingly changing the nature of the traffic you bought. Our upstreams have told us that InternetTraffic.com has far fewer traffic quality adjustments than other platforms. We are certain that has much to do with our collective vision regarding arbitrage. Visit an arb-page and click on PPC link after PPC link to get to an advertiser and you’ll see it is a frenetic, “lean back” process which bounces you around quickly, without much effort. When a user types a domain name into their address bar, they assume a much more focused, “lean forward” stance in their chair. The effort that goes into typing a URL and immediately getting your result without changing sites, creates the impression of authority and a more sincere user. It’s a subtlety that translates into greater sale conversions (traffic quality). Time and performance have born these facts out.

When you have type-in domains you are venting light sweet crude from the ground. When you run arbitrage, you are pumping saltwater into the ground to bring the heavy oil up – or worse, fracking, to get your oil. I would encourage any of you toying with arbitrage on this platform to please move that business to another partner. We have no place for it here. Arbitrage is always there for us. We can always get arbitrage back if we drive it away. Type-in traffic operators are more elusive. They have the pure traffic and we want to continue to provide a platform where it is appreciated.

Speaking of platforms – our DomainNameSales.com platform is chugging along and doing a terrific job brokering and handling sales inquiries for our clients, without charge. I continue to generate more revenue from that machine than I do from all my traffic sales. I strongly encourage each of you to embrace it, as I have. The version I use is no different than yours. I expect within less than a year, the time you spend investing in this platform will result in you turning more deals – and at greater prices than in your previous years. InternetTraffic.com’s parking program will continue to pay more than other PPC shops, but it is our goal to unlock the latent value of domain name portfolios by closing more sales, at higher dollar volumes, more consistently, than other sales platforms. I am so impressed by our site’s utility that I think, in 12 months, it will likely be the main reason that clients beat a path to our door.

Creating a great sales machine, unlocking the value of names and traffic, opening that platform for free to the masses – this may all sound very altruistic and too good to be true. But the cold truth is that I am doing this for me. If Jonathan Hart and my friend Pascal have taught me anything, it’s that I’m not getting any younger. I have a great deal of name inventory and it is my goal to unlock the value of those assets before Haley’s Comet graces the night sky above Lyford Cay again. If delivering a great product ultimately helps you to do the same for yourself, then all the better.

Diverse Portfolio of Health & Wellness Domains

Just wanted to let anyone who may be interested in acquring health domain names and websites that our health, wellness & disease portfolio of domains and websites is for sale.

It’s said to be the best large and diverse portfolio of targeted traffic health domains available. More information can be found at HealthWebsites.org, or listed for-sale at: Flippa.com…

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.

Low Price .US Domains are Getting Flipped a Lot

Over a year ago we decided to let expire more than 50 mostly bad or dubious value letter dot-us names that we had been holding since as long as the year 2002 when most of them were acquired. We dropped them due to no traffic or income, plus poor acronym use potential.

It has been quite interesting watching the majority if not all of that group sold, resold, resold, resold and sold again on the domain name forums between domainers.

The sale prices are mostly between say $5 to $20. What makes it even more interesting is what with the low prices I don’t see how the domainers are flipping them for a profit and if they are making some money doing that it would not seem to be worth all the time and effort involved. It seems there is no end in sight as I again see many of them posted for sale again on the forums by their latest owners.

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.

20k visits but revenue so low can’t buy a Starbucks!

Since the start of the major decline in parking page revenue over the past 4 years or so there have been several examples of poor performance from some major players. However, the current performance of a relatively obscure provider with a big company behind them is almost impossible to believe the stats could be true!

For example, look at the stats in the screenshot below, keeping in mind the incredibly bad stats are coming from several high quality websites, with more than 70% direct navigation (typeins), from mostly US traffic. The traffic was from ads placed on several high value websites, including a few health and wellness sites with very valuable well targeted domains, plus a popular social media site which gets substantial typein traffic.

With substantial and nicely targeted quality traffic of almost 20,000 visitors over the past 6-days the ads on those websites did not even earn enough money to buy a single cup of Starbucks coffee. Isn’t that amazing! Needless to say, of course the ads have now all been removed.

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.

What is the SEO Value of No Anchor Text in Links?

This is regarding anchor text in a link. Of course, website owners and html programmers realize the importance of having “anchor text” in a link which appears on the page before the closing tag but the issue is regarding the effect of “not” using any visible anchor text.

For example, on many blogs and websites there are often images which are clickable and go to a linked site since the clickable-link is in the code. However, the image is often there mostly for its graphical impact and also acts as a link when clicked. However, there is no indication to the site visitor to click-on the link and in fact the visitor may not realize they can click on the image to visit a linked website.

The question is does the fact there may be NO visible anchor text detract or even eliminate the link value in the search engines and if the answer is yes, to what degree does it negate or dilute the value of the link?

An example of this question is the picture of the anchor below. When clicked-on the link goes to the home-page of this website but what is the effect (if any) of there being no visible anchor text on the page?

Property.com/Properties.com vs Buying a New TLD

Breaking News: Rick Schwartz sells Property.com & Properties.com for $4 million plus stock. Of course, congrats to Rick on his latest amazing domain sales.

That great domain name sale got me seriously thinking about something I have been dwelling on for a long time, which is the potential impact of the new gtlds, which will be coming online as soon as 2012.

What I mean by that is that since the .property and .properties tld extensions can be purchased for $185,000 each (plus other fees and expenses) it makes the 185k cost look like a great bargain (at least to me), compared to spending millions on the dot-com domains.

Think about this for a minute, would you prefer to own property.com at a cost of a few million dollars, or buy your very own ‘property’ extension for less than 10% of the dot-com price? At this time, some of you may say property.com is best but I feel that view is mostly because so few realize the great impact the new extensions will have in the future. In fact, I predict they will eventually dominate over other tld extensions.

A reason I say that is I am sure most all large and possibly mid-size corporations (maybe even some wealthy individuals) will buy their own extension. After a while I feel it is likely they will decide to brand under their own extension instead of the dot-com.

For example, assuming Ford buys .ford and also owns ford.com, don’t you believe one day they will switch their online brand to .ford and simply redirect ford.com to .ford? Keep in mind, dot-ford should be able to resolve stand-alone, depending on the server dns setup, so you can just typein “ford” to your browser and it will resolve. Same is true for “property” and “properties.”

So again, why spend millions buying the dot-com when you can buy the word without the .com to the right of the dot for 185k? Also, keep in mind, that cost is expected to drop sharply in a few years, well below 185k.

An excellent example of the benefit of going right-of-the-dot vs left-of-the-dot is the acronym domain-name “POS.COM” (a somewhat obscure acronym intended to mean “Point Of Sale”) which has me wondering why anyone today would offer almost a million dollars for pos.com when for “only” 185k they can as an alternative possibly purchase the .POS extension.

Another example is cars.net which sold for a staggering $170,000 last month according to dnjournal.com. The reason I say ‘staggering’ is since it’s a .net extension it will lose a good share of its traffic to .com from typeins. That’s a big reason dot-net is considered to be such a poor choice for a business and branding is difficult.

Wouldn’t it make much more sense for the buyer of cars.net to spend just 10% more and apply for the ‘cars’ tld? Can you imagine the powerful value of owning .cars tld vs cars.net! There really is no comparison when you consider how a business could easily brand themselves as ‘cars’ and tell everyone just typein the word ‘cars’ (and forget about adding .com or .net).

One more example is “StockBrokers.com” that recently sold for $185,000, which by coincidence is the exact same price as buying .stockbrokers extension.

Think seriously about this, wouldn’t you really prefer to tell websurfers to just typein “stockbrokers” to reach your website vs the longer “stockbrokers.com” There are many other examples where the cost of buying their own tld extension would have a lower cost vs buying the high-priced dot-com domain, and also make more sense for overall branding purposes.

As a cool monetary benefit, and option, you will also be able to sell to the left-of-the-dot names for extra income to enable other brokers to buy a domain such as TopBroker.StockBrokers.com, for example, plus you can sell unlimited numbers of other domains to the left-of-the-dot since you own the right-of-the-dot. Isn’t that interesting!

Does Domain Development Help Domain Value?

Assuming a minisite page and ad content is targeted to the domain keywords I don’t believe a minisite will be an overall negative. With that said, a site will also likely not increase the domain value. However, a benefit to the minisite is your domain can slowly grow its traffic thanks to SEO work but a parked page will not.

As far as domain revenue goes, a parked page should perform better but that assumes the domain get the same traffic numbers and the parked page also gets organic and typein traffic. If not, site development is much better. As a side note, we have never had an end-use (a non-domainer) potential domain buyer ever ask about its website, revenue or traffic stats. Even if we offered to give that information the buyers did not want to look at it. It appears only domainers and resellers ask those kind of questions.

A major negative and significant issue with potential sales of developed websites (even a very small site i.e. 1 or 2 pages) is when a potential domain buyer goes to the URL and sees an active website he may assume since it is a site it’s likely not for sale (but it sometimes is for sale). Therefore, the possible buyer (end-users in particular) may think why bother inquiring, and quickly exit the web-page to go looking for a different domain, or try hand registering an alternative extension, or going with a slight name variation.

For those working on developing all their names thinking development will help sales, this may come as a surprise. Stephen Douglas earlier had said “Maybe, the “DOMAIN FOR SALE” link needs to be double-sized and bold!. Oh no, now you got me paranoid! Thanks a lot, David.”

However, there is still a problem Stephen because an obvious Domain Name For Sale announcement can make the visitor a bit uncomfortable seeing it and also may be an overall negative regarding potential PPC clicks too (and have an even greater impact on any product sales a site may be hoping to get).

CeilingVent.com common home product domain

A ceiling vent and fan is found in bathrooms and kitchens in most all homes and offices.

Sometimes they need replacing and people search the web to buy a ceiling vent.

You can make an offer or buy CeilingVent.com now by clicking-on the picture below:

Category defining: CorporateCommunications.com

The category defining name to own if you are in the corporate communications business. Owned since 1999. Sharp price reduction: For more details and to possibly buy or make an offer please click-on the picture below…

This name was verbally valued at approxiamtely 500k to 600k by a domain broker in 2009 who now works as a broker for a major domain firm.

Major Dilution to Existing .tld extensions i.e. .net

We have been writing for some time about the massive dilution to the current major domain name extensions which will be caused by the anticipated vast number of new gtld’s expected to be introduced starting in 2012.

As an example of dilution, we will discuss the long-time well known dot-net extension. It’s always played 2nd fiddle to the vastly superior dot-com however .net will soon have lots of competitors competing with it and causing general overall dilution to all extensions and to dot-net in particular.

The initial high Icann cost of $185k to buy your own extension will no doubt result in mostly the top brands or keywords being purchased at this time. However, we are sure the cost will drop a lot and more and more mid-size or non-famous brands and keywords will eventually have their own extension.

Using dot-net direct competition as an example it’s likely extentions such as .met (dating?), .let (EU rentals?), .pet (pets?), .wet (water/pools?), .bet (gambling?), .get (search?), .jet (jet sales?), .vet (veterans?), plus longer ones like .mynet .enet .inet .netgear and the real obvious .network will be taken in the future.

With so many similar potential domain name extensions all competing for Internet traffic and marketing themselves it would seem after a few years the direct dilution just to the old dot-net extension will result in many people saying ‘dot-who’ about dot-net. Therefore, we can predict the already low value .net domains will decline even more in general value.

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