Most everyone in the domain name and website development industry is reporting sharp declines of from 65% to as much as 85% in Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising Revenues compared to a few years ago. The income declines appear to go well beyond the overall decline in the economy, with several other factors involved in the big declines.
Making matters even worse is the future scenario of sharply higher cost domain name yearly renewals since it looks like the domain registry operators will be able to soon charge whatever they want for yearly name renewals, with non-fixed and non-regulated pricing looming on the dark horizon.
The double edge sword of low income combined with expected greater costs could easily put an end to the domain name industry as we now know it. Comments on this bleak outlook are welcome…
At one of the domain forum boards one of the well-known forum moderators Biggedon was talking about so called “direct navigation” which he said is “mostly used when you know or think you know the exact url of a website which has the product or service you want.” He went on to say “however, I see many of my co-workers who type their search into their “web browsers” search box, rather than using the browsers address bar window, then they click from a list of links the SE produces. The culture of “address bar searchers” is fading fast to those who use the browser window to search, especially with the search-engine companies urging you to search thru their service saying Google this, Yahoo that, Ask this, Bing…
Agree to what Don said above to a good degree. In addition, I don’t believe the likely scenario of web-surfers migrating somewhat from web-browser typeins to search box type-ins is really much of a negative since a search window type-in (assuming the relevant domain extension is added) is in my opinion still considered to be a typein and almost as valuable (though some experts may not completely agree).
My family members are good examples as they most always typein full url’s including the extension (usually either .com or .org) into the search box instead of the browser url window. In fact, I sometimes do that too and do it even more lately. With that said, not really the whole story because the most valuable and best part of the story is that if you typein the full url in the Google search box to a large degree and much of the time your site immediately resolves.
However, occasionally for some odd reason (perhaps if was recently indexed or maybe ranked very low) the url will be listed in the search results instead of instantly resolving (still OK because the web siite url will be on the clickable list, frequently shown in #1 position, or ranked high). I believe for these 2 scenarios to work the url needs to in fact be at least indexed in the SE.
That is why you should not always rely on the search-engines finding you but should also submit your URL direct to the search engines. Yahoo makes it difficult to submit URL’s since you need to first have a Yahoo! account. However, Bing and Google make is real easy to submit your URL’s (no account required). Here is the link for Google URL Submission, and a link so you may also submit URL to Bing.com
Type-in address in to web browser
Some folks claim lowball offers for domain names are simply a starting points and a negotiating method to initiate negotiations, with an assumption both parties realize the real value of the domain.
The “starting point” view doesn’t work too well with me. If I start out with a reasonable offer of say $800 (not desiring negotiations) for a name which I feel is really worth no more than $800 (especially without any known traffic) and the seller counters with a price of say $11,000 I know right away an eventual sale is most unlikely, if not impossible.
Actually had that scenario happen recently when the owner later wrote again asking me to make a new higher offer but I countered with a new lower offer of $400 due to the declining economy and lesser desire for the name vs originally. He then indicated maybe he would take a price much closer to my original offer after all if I had not gone down in the offer, to which I said no more higher offers and the domain sale negotiations were therefore finished.
The more and more we look at non-wholesale domain-name sales reports (including a number of believed average or mediocre non-premium looking names) which nevertheless sold for good coin, i.e. as listed and discussed in DNJournal.com the more and more we realized that domain sales success is *mostly* luck if you domain name sells or does not sell.
If you look at the current DNjournal.com DomainSales page you will see listings of 100s of substantail sales. However, if you look closely at all the sales you can tell most came about by being listed in the major domain names for sale firms, places such as Afternic.com, Sedo.com, BuyDomains.com, Namejet.com and Snapnames.com.
These domain venues in our opinion do not sell many domains as a direct result of any marketing or promotions they did but in all likelihood the sale transaction was the result of simply being listed there for sale and found by a link, forwarding to a parked page with a for sale notice, a for-sale page, typeins, or listed in the search engines.
That is based on the law of averages theory. For example, if there are say 1 million names for sale at any given time. Based on domain sales statistics say one-half percent a year successfully sell. In effect, that means roughly 14 names will sell on a typical day (per million for sale) at end-user pricing, irrespective of the strength or amount of any marketing, promotions, for sale websites, advertising, email spams, auctions and domain forum posts.
In other words, what we are trying to say is the typical futility of trying to market (non-wholesale) domain names for sale, especially selling on a web site (without very high traffic, but even then of dubious value) and on forum boards. For example, look at the incredibly dismal looking failed for sale threads on the various domain name boards such as namepros.com and dnforum.com for example.
Again, we are referring to sales which are above the wholesale price level, which by definition tends to exclude most domainer-to-domainer sales which are rarely based on commercial interest and appeal.
Of course, like most things in life there are always exceptions to our “luck theory” such as a domain owner who needs some cash and therefore offers a good name for sale at a price perceived to be low by a bargain-seeking buyer, often a domainer with excess investment money available (assuming the asking price sounds good). Thus seller may achieve a higher price non-end-user sale at a comparatively upper-tier wholesale price area.
How can the domain-forums (and other venues) generate so much quality and highly targeted internet traffic and yet it’s so rare for end-user price level sales to occur (beyond low price domainer to domainer sales and so called domain flips)? The obvious answer is so much of it is based heavily on timing and mostly just plain luck, combined with a shortage of potential commercial appeal level of prospective buyers to those domain-sales venues.
A domain end-user buyer (often a small business) may eventually come looking and knocking on the domain owners door, based mostly on luck as far as the timing of the buyer and their deciding one day they want or must have a specific name, so he/she goes out looking for it, finds it, and finally decides to buy it, for a reasonable non-wholesale price. Luck is without a doubt a huge issue and also the main factor.
CorporateCommunications.com is now available for sale. Now accepting substantial offers based on the strength and strong business use popularity of the name. We have owned this domain name for going on 10-years.
The term “corporate communications” is a widely used term used in business and marketing. Many mid-size and large businesses and corporations have a corporate communications division, department, corp communications manager or director of corporate communications, which is an important part of the company.
CorporateCommunications.com is currenty used as a small website. It gets steady site visitors without any marketing or advertising from people who simply typein the name into their browser window. There are a substantial 5,000,000 plus results in Google for the exact term “corporate communications”
Before you can even get started with a website you’ll need to go through the process of registering a domain name. If you’ve never registered a domain name, you’ll realize that there is not one set company to use for domain registration. There are a number of internet providers offering domain-name registration and each company has their own set prices. The domain regsistration cost can range from as low as about $8, all the way up to as much as $35 per domain name registered, per year.
When you are first getting started with domain registration, you’ll also find that many of the names you would like to register are already taken. This name shortage can be indeed frustrating, but due to the internet being around for over 15 years, the vast majority of dictionary-based internet domain names are already registered.
The most popular domain name extensions are:
.com: This is the original and most popular domain name extension. By default most people expect websites to end with .com, so you should always do your best to register a .com domain extension, especially since dot-com will get more so called “typein” traffic from folks typing-in the words they are looking for (without spaces) in front of the dot, followed by the extension which will frequently be .com. With that said, our website traffic research indicates dot-org is second in typein popularity behind dot-com.
.net: Most people consider this domain name extension to be the second best among domain name extensions. If you are unable to secure a .com with your chosen name, then you can go for a .net or .org, and consider other extensions such as .biz or country-code domains including .us (United States).
.org: This domain extension was initially setup for non-profit organizations but may now be used successfully by for-profit business too. The dot-org extension carries with it a nicely perceived degree of trust and a non-commercial connotation
.info: This domain extension is for “information” type websites and is usually the lowest price of all extensions
.biz: The idea behind .biz was its potential use by businesses based on the biz-business connection. Dot-biz recently appears to be getting more popular.
Some other domain name extensions are .me .tv .name along with many country specific domain name extensions including the very popuar .de (Germany), .ca (Canada) and co.uk (United Kingdom). When conducting your domain name research you’ll able to search for your name and you’ll be provided the results of if the domain name is available with your chosen extension. If not available, you are usually given the option to view if any other extensions are available for the selected name.
A simple search for “Domain Registration Providers” using Google will provide you with a list of companies to choose from for your domain registration needs.
« Previous Page
