Major Bear Market Expected for Geo Domains

Starting next year unlimited numbers of new domain extensions are scheduled to be sold and some will be up and running. We always assumed major brands such as .sears .apple .microsoft .hp .godaddy .ibm and many others would want to own their own extension, not necessarily to sell domains but for their own product, use and branding.

Now I am hearing many reports about large U.S. and international cities including the cities of .tokyo .sydney .london .newyork .sandiego .la .vegas and others planning to also buy their very domain extension. At an initial cost of $185k it may seem high to you or me but to a large corporation or big city it is not too significant a cost.

Having heard about many major cities with plans to buy their own extensions it would seem logical the end-effect will be to greatly devalue the domainer or investor owned geo dot com’s, including mid-size city dot-coms. The smaller or mid-size cities may not want to invest now or be able to budget $185k but they will likely do so as the ICANN price drops (and I am sure the fee will decline rather quickly and dramatically within a few years).

At that time I believe you will also see many mid-size cities such as Palm Springs, Bethesda, Burbank and Scottsdale for example, getting their own extensions. It’s also possible they may not wait for lower costs and instead apply soon, agreeing to pay the 185k ICANN fee.

Think about this scenario; A visitor (or resident) in Scottsdale Arizona knows many cities now own their own domain so would he be more inclined to typein to a search box or the browser window “Scottsdale.com” or the word “Scottsdale” without an extension? In our opinion there is little doubt as time goes by the word Scottsdale will prevail as the most popular choice, relegating Scottsdale.com to 2nd tier status, which dot-com decline would be ongoing and the scottsdale.com down-trend be more pronounced as time goes by.

In our opinion, this news marks the beginning of a very significant and long term bear market (a likely permanent major drop in geo domain values), impacting mid to large city Geo domains in particular. I would expect a number of them to go on the auction block soon before they decline more in value.

Good News! FTC Launches Investigation of Google

IT’S ABOUT TIME!

The Federal Trade Commission is preparing to serve Google with legal subpoenas, starting a major antitrust investigation of Google.

The U.S. FTC will be investigating if Google has abused its dominating market position to suppress competition. The new FTC investigation of Google is likely setting off serious alarm bells at Google due to its wide-ranging potential and scope.

This new investigation of Google involves their two key revenue areas of search and advertising. Other internet players have been complaining for years how Google’s search algorithm appears to be designed to drive web-surfers more to Google’s own services than their websites.

A major new concern for Google is that it’s widely alleged Google’s dominating position in online-advertising gives them far too much control over a businesses success or its failure. We wish the FTC the best of luck and succcess in its well deserved Google investigation which is so extremely negative to consumers and other online businesses.

Mo doubt about it, Google has become far too big and powerful. Would not be too surprised to see Google’s brand in your local supermarket soon on food products like Tomato Ketchup!

You can file a consumer complaint against Google by clicking-on the picture below:

Massive Dilution caused by New Domain Extensions

We have been saying for years (starting when the new extension plan was first announced a long time ago) the new domain-name extensions will bring about massive dilution in the name space and overall negativity to the value of the current major domain extensions.

In a few years the cost of buying your own extension could easily decline significantly belowr the current high cost of almost 200k, possibly all the way down to the 3 figure range where most individuals and small businesses could also afford to buy their own domain extension.

A huge benefit to owning your own domain name extension is only the extension could be typed-in (depending on how the DNS is setup) and the visitor would go right to that website based on the extension only. A few examples are by typing in Ebay you would not need to typein Ebay.com, or typein FreeMLSlisting and no need to typein FreeMLSlisting.com (and potentially zillions of others too).

RunningShoes.com: from $150 to 700k in 5 yrs

DNjournal.com reports that RunningShoes.com sold for $700,000 making it the year’s biggest sale.

To add to the news reported by Ron Jackson, this blog can report the domain name sold for a measly $150 in 2005. Isn’t that amazing!

From low 3 figures to high 6 figures!

How is Local News Related to Your Success?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reprinted with permission of Adam Dicker

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Is it a Good Idea to Use WordPress vs HTML?

Personally. I much prefer standard html sites vs WordPress sites. However, with that said, I must say a well designed WP site certainly can look great and be successful. Blogs and forums in particular do extremely well using WordPress where richness of features and live user interactivity are highly desired features, but with that said, I still like HTML vs Woprdpress by far for making “regular” (non-blog non-forum) new sites.

After working for years with regular html before using WordPress at first I found the WordPress learning curve to be huge and taking vast amounts of time. One of the toughest aspects was the look and feel of a WP site which is difficult to control and tricky to modify vs much easier to change html sites. Heavy spam or bot posts of WP sites are also a negative issue which is always looming but that is not a big problem involving standard html sites.

In addition, I do not think WordPress security is that good judging by some WP sites I know being hacked in the past. Speaking of security, the ongoing need to frequently update the version number is also an unwanted hassle, especially since the automatic upgrade capacity can and does sometimes fail.

In fact, you always need to worry your old WP version may not be fully compatible with the latest version and if not your site will go down when the upgrade fails and the old site will then stop functioning due to the upgrade failure. Been there and done that too. Even backups are a big hassle since there are extra steps involved to copy the data base but with standard html the database can be easily copied using simple FTP at the same time as regular htm files, with no other steps needed.

As far as search engine optimization is concerned I suspect WP and HTML are roughly equal in that regard. However, with that said, it’s much easier to do search engine verifications with html sites since it can be quite confusing trying to determine where the needed search engine verification codes are inserted into WordPress sites (because of the .php file names and confusing directory and folder structure, but with HTML and .htm files that’s all quite basic by comparison.

In my opinion, a big reason WordPress is so popular are the vast numbers of people who say they are WP programmers and designers (it must be easy to become one), or sell products that only work with WP, including many web-developer special offers and Clickbank products. Recently I decided to NOT buy several excellent sounding new developent site offers and programs since they were offered or designed only for WordPress and I was reluctant to add more WP sites no matter how good the offer sounds.

As a test, just ask a WordPress minisite developer, site designer or seller to help with some simple and basic modifications to your old html website and you will likely learn he/she can not do the job, no matter how basic it may be. Been there and done that. In fact, some of the things I wanted a bit of help or advice with from my WordPress developers or designers were real basic which I ended up doing myself, and I am far from being good with programming.

Some Domain Industry Players are Not Doing Well

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

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

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

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

A Recently Discovered Quality Domaining Site

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

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

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

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

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

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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Google’s Valentine Day Domain Names

As posted about on DomainNameWire.com, Google has registered the domains GoogleValentine.com and GoogleValentine.org on Feb 8, 2011. Since only the .com and .org were mentioned we checked Whois and see they also registered GoogleValentine.net at the same time, in addition to some other Valentine’s Day domains Google registered.

Since Valentine’s Day is only 4 days away we don’t see how there could be sufficient time this year (but if not this year, maybe next year?) for Google to get geared-up in time to actually use the domains as some kind of Valentine’s Day promotion, i.e. maybe you will be able to go to Google and get an Online Valentine? (don’t bother trying to get OnlineValentine.com as it’s been registered since 1999).

Below is our Valentine’s Day wish to you…

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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

Learn How Many are Searching for Your Domain

If you have your domain names registered at Godaddy.com you have the unique ability to discover exactly how many people are looking up your Whois information on the Godaddy site. This is very cool.

I am starting to think it may even be worthwhile to use Godaddy more simply to take advantage of this powerful feature. Knowing how many people looked up your Whois information can have major benefits, not the least of which is it can indicate how many possible buyers you might have and you can rank your domains in value based on the number of Whois searches performed.

For example, say you have a low traffic and lightly searched term but suddenly you see several Whois lookups. That can indicate there may be a buyer for your domain or website out there, possibly an end-user who will likely pay a lot more vs a typical low-balling domainer. It’s hard to understand why this very cool and great Godaddy feature has not received more publicity, or other domain registrars apparently do not offer it.

This is how you can discover the number of Whois searches performed on your domains using Godaddy: Go to the Domain Manager, mouse-over the Tools tab at top and click-on Exportable Lists. Next click on Add New Export with a drop-down list. Select All My Domains and click Next.

Now you can select the data to export. Check-off exporting both Current and Previous Period Whois Searches, and click-on Next. Then select CSV file for use by opening your Excel spreadsheet program. Probably no need to compress the data so select “none”. Give the exportable list a Name and click-on Finish. After a few minutes GoDaddy will compile the list and email it to you.

Buy a domain name or order website hosting by going to the Godaddy banner below:

Paris Hilton is on new Drooping Eye website

Some celebrities have drooping eye condition like the best known celebity with drooping eye, Paris Hilton, for example. It has been said that Paris Hilton’s eye drooping was a side-effect caused by botched eyelid cosmetic surgery.

A drooping eyelid can stay about the same, become worse over time, or come and go in severity. It can be on one-side, or effecting both the eyes. When drooping is one-sided it’s easy to detect by comparing it to the non-drooping eye. Drooping eye is harder to to detect when both eyes are drooping, or if there’s only a small eye droop.

A drooping eye can make you look tired and unattractive. Drooping eyelids are either there from birth or develop later in life. Drooping eye is not a cause for panic, but you should ask your doctor about possible treatment and cure.

Drooping eyes and eyelid-droop can be caused by misc factors, including strokes (which is what many people think of as its cause when they see someone with drooping eye condition), cosmetic face or eyelid surgery (more common than you would think, ask Paris Hilton about drooping eye), horner syndrome, reduced muscle control from normal aging, out-of-control diabetes, myasthenia gravis, brain tumors or cancers affecting the facial nerves and muscles, or be there at birth due to genetics.

Click-Here to read droopingeye and more about Paris Hilton’s appearance

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