Michael Jackson’s Death Bed with a genuine COA

Several items from Michael Jackson‘s estate are up for auction, among them and most controversally, the bed he died in.

Just like most anything you can purchase at an auction, Michael Jackson’s bed comes with a Certificate of Authenticity!

Poor Job with PPC Keyword Optmization

It’s hard to understand why a well known and large domain name parking firm like DomainSponsor.com appears unable to do a consistently good job with its keyword targeting of their PPC ads. Making money from the parked domain being discussed below would be extremely difficult, unless a better jon was done.

For example, the domain CausesOfMeningitis.com, which has these two important keywords in it “causes” and “meningitis” is clearly about spinal meningitis and obviously about nothing else but meningitis disease. So why in the world would just 1 of the 18 PPC ads on the page be related to meningitis?

In fact, out of the 18 pay-per-click ads only 2 are health and disease related. Ironically, domainsponsor.com in the past has been widely recognized by domainers as doing a better than average job with good automatic optimization of parked domains based on the keywords in the domain name.

meningitis
chrons disease
email marketing
online checking account
view credit report
medicare
auto accident lawyer
time warner cable
phone service
used truck
fashion design school
car insurance
cheap flights
used cars for sale
high speed internet service
satellite television
suv
cell phone register

Domain Sales; Numbers Game with Timing & Luck

You can judge very little if any significance to value based on the number or frequency of sales inquiries.

Assuming you have good keyword names it involves mostly a matter of timing and luck to get end-user offers and sales. Depends on if a business is in need of a name at a particular moment in time and somehow stumbles across your domain which would benefit from its keyword match.

You can own excellent keyword names which are niche dominating and category killer names but never get an offer over many years or possibly get occasional lowball offers (which lowballs come mostly from domainers or non-serious end-users).

When you read dnjournal.com you may think the vast majority of names had sold for far more than what they are worth. In fact, many names which sold for high amounts may look like reg fee names or domains you would not pay anything more than $100 for but they sold for $1000s.

End-user (non-domainer) sales is little more than a numbers game involving timing and luck.

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

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.

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.

Google Antitrust Hearing Invitations

Senate wants top Google executives CEO Larry Page and/or Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt to testify and are invited to participate in the upcoming antitrust hearings.

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).

World’s Oldest Light Bulb On for 110 Years

The World’s Oldest Functioning Light Bulb Has Been On for 110 Years!

Is it possible the Internet and World Wide Web will last this long? Will domain names last as long? Domains have about 85-years to go if you start counting from the mid 80′s.

Will dot-com last that long or give way to the unlimted new extensions which will be launched in the near future, so 85 years from now people will say “dot who”