Dallas Cowboys Alleged Domain Price Stupidity

Part of the problem with domain name disputes and domain complaints is the fact so many companies are unwilling to spend a fair amount of money buying already registered domains to protect their valuable brands.

A more or less perfect example is how the Dallas Cowboys representatives made a bid of only $275 (really $275 and not a misprint) for the great Cowboys.com domain name at an auction when other auction bids were in the general area of 200k or higher.

However, strangely the Cowboys allegedly grossly misunderstood the auction price level (in spite of the fact a series of auction bids had worked their way up to more than $200,000., while they were present in-person at the venue) but somehow were oddly thinking a bid of just $275 would buy that great domain. Isn’t that amazing! They say the truth is stranger than fiction. A story like that is so far fetched it could not be made-up!

There is a TV show about the World’s Dumbest and the Dallas Cowboys reps at the domain auction (who I heard it said at least one was a Cowboys attorney) should definitely be on that show based on the alleged auction bidding events.

The proposed world’s dumbest appearance would include the upper management where for just 275k (which should be insignificant to an assumed billion dollar plus business) they later cancelled their absurd $275 bid after being informed the bid should have been $275,000.

This incredible true story about some of the alleged dumbest people on the planet is very hard to believe but this did in fact happen a few years ago.

Yahoo! buys Me.Me domain but is it smart of them?

Yahoo has just announced they have purchased the Me.me domain for a Twitter-Like Microblogging Site. Yahoo is apparently still going full-force with its Twitter competitor, Yahoo Meme. Yahoo has now bought up the clever domain name, Me.me, from the .ME domain registry, which is based in the country of Montenegro. No word on how much Yahoo paid for me.me domain name.

Yahoo calls the purchase “an essential component of our online branding strategy.” The buy suggests Yahoo is readying a wider roll-out of the service, which has not been advertised widely. On Meme, users may write short entries and add photos or videos to their pages, which are called “memes;” users can “follow” other memes and track entries from those pages via a dashboard.

The domain Me.me in our opinion is a dumb domain name and indicates how Yahoo! is alleged to be far from sharp or smart. Another example of Yahoo’s lack of success is the multi-year beta-testing of the Yahoo Publishing Network and its sudden closing at end of April.

To further demonstrate how allegedly dumb YPN was last year YPN called and emailed us to take down our access to their keyword ad targeting tool. They refused to say why other than saying they did not like the way we were using it. That was onviously BS since we used the tool exactly as intended to target ads about the subject of the site and domain and never wrongly deviated from its correct use.

YPN allegedly really did not have sufficient ad inventory in some important categories we were targeting so they allegedly did not truly desire the ad tool to be used correctly by us since that in-effect prevented them from running non-targeted ads. We believe they had inventory of non-important keyword ads such as dating, games and cell phones, etc., for example, but alleged low inventory in hgher paying categories such as financials, credit, trading and health for example, for which we were using the ad tool successfully (as they had in fact intended) until they took it away from us.

How GoDaddy Captured a 50% Market Share

I just read about how GoDaddy recently achieved a 50% domain market share, which internet people are saying is an amazing accomplishment. I am far from being surprised about that.

My reasons to expect their great success are (A) GoDaddy.com has a strong combination of excellent marketing skills, (B) very large ad budget, including substantial money for high price Super Bowl ads, (C) very diverse and extensive offering of additional products and services for sale, (D) including various web hosting products/services, and something you may not think much about but important to small domain buyers and small business owners is their overall (E) good 24X7 support with short on-hold wait times, often no hold time, all combined with a (F) powerful upselling program.

I am sure GoDaddy will soon go well beyond capturing a 50% market share, with the next big level being my prediction GD will eventually capture a 75% market share and dominate the space. hmmmm…..does GoDaddy have stock we can invest in?

LiveApp.com and LiveApps.com domains for sale

Two very high profile premium domains for sale, LiveApps.com and LiveApp.com. Registered since 1999. Available as a pair or individually.

There are more than 65,000 app developers and well over 100,000 apps already developed. I believe Apple Computer purchased AppStore.com last month for a ton of money.

The domains are not being sold by a broker at this time. Please contact me direct for more details or with any reasonable offers.

P.S. also interested in finding a good domain broker to market and sell these 2 great LiveApp(s) domains. Willing to pay substantial commission upon sale but not paying upfront fee as unfortunately was done before. As a side-note, domainers can be warned to avoid paying a fee in advance to a broker no matter how legit he seems, or well known he is. That’s because there’s always a possibility of a falling-out and you losing the money (since the broker already received his money, with the potential sales commission perhaps not really being his main goal but you did not realize that aspect) and thus the broker may not do much ‘work’ for you or be slow at the marketing (possibly because he already has his money) so you may end-up in a dispute and ask for a refund but the broker may not want to refund your pre-paid money, been there and done that, unfortunately! Another issue which casts doubt about how legitimate the up-front fee model is you have to ask yourself why if the broker can really get a buyer he simply does not do so regardless of getting money in advance, especially since his commission will normally be far greater than the up-front fee he wants?The answer to that question should be obvious.

Next Big Thing in Your Cell Phone, PC & The Web

Regarding the next big thing on the near horizon, in my opinion I feel that Live Apps are going to be a real big wave.

I thought I would post about Live Apps and Apple Computer. There are also several other large live app corporate players in addition to Apple.

There are already over 100,000 Live Apps with more than 65,000 worldwide Live App developers and programmers.

Apple now owns Appstore.com which domain registration information appears to have changed last month (it seems the domain name was previously owned by SalesForce.com)

Click for AppStore.com Domain Name Whois

Click for Live App Store Google results

Click for Apps Store Google results

Click for App Store Google (an amazing 34 million search results)

Sales Should Be Atributed to the Correct Website

Regarding domain name sales reports I noticed AfternicDLS gets credit for more sales than deserved. For example, I personally purchased a good health related dot-org domain last week but it was listed in DNjournal.com as being sold by AfternicDLS (even though Afernic.com had nothing to do with the process). It appears credit for many of the sales in both DNjournal and in other media too are often attributed to Afternic when the BuyDomains landing page was responsible for the sale, having nothing to do with Afternic’s name.

The name above and several others I have purchased this year were always a direct result of typing on the domain name and seeing the BuyDomains landing page. The landing page has the BuyDomains phone number at the top announcing the name is for sale and inviting a phone call to the BuyDomans toll-free number, or clicking the link for more details or making an online purchase it goes to the BuyDomains.com website, with Afternic not mentioned on the web-page from what I can see. In fact, I don’t believe Afternic is mentioned at all during the sales and ordering process which appears to be done only under the name BuyDomains.com

Of course I realize they are both divisions of NameMedia.com but it seems like the Afternic.com website gets undeserved credit for far more sales than warranted and greater marketing benefit than is due them. In fact, I would be willing to bet BD landers are responsible for many sales, especially to end-users and higher priced domains) compared to Afternic which is believed to have a lot of sales mostly to domainers and resellers.

The reason we mention this is that Afternic.com is obviously getting more marketing and advertising credit plus greater overall publicity than justly deserved for domain sales. On a more personal note, I dislike the Afternic.com web site which has been riddled with various bugs for ages, lacks certain important features such as bulk operations, and unfortunately has offered poor support for a long time). In fact I removed my domains from there some time ago.

It Sure Seems Difficult to Get Affiliate Referrals

Here is a transcript of a recent live chat session with a well known domain name firm who offers developed sites either free or for a monthly fee and has what sounds like a lucrative affiliate program. For the benefit of those who don’t know, an affiliate program is where you get commission based on the income of the person you referred. The affiliate income you receive comes from the company and not out of the revenue of the referrals account (according to the terms of all ther affiliate program agreements I have seen).

Support: Hi, how may I help you today?

Me: Hi, regarding your affiliate referral program. I have HEAVILY marketed it with probably 100’s of forum posts and our affiliate link being on each post in the signature area, plus marketed it in my Blog too which gets good and relevant traffic but no affiliates are reported by you under me from all that time, work and energy I put into it.

Me: Are you sure your 90-day Cookie which identifies those who clicked the link for the next 3-months is really working?

Support: Yes, as far as I know. I can double check yours. Ok, please hold. Ok, I see your referral link is working fine. But I noticed that not all of your websites have the “develop your domains” affiliate link placeholder on the site.

Me: Right, because it detracts from the web site in my opinion.

Support: And you are using the correct referral link which is this number (example 12356789)?

Me: Yes, that number is accurate.

Me: No one could have possibly marketed your affiliate program more than myself recently what with 100s of forum board posts and many other posts including website blog articles but not even 1 sale from all that time, work and energy! My one and only affiliate was from personal level marketing I did with a close friend.

Me: What a complete waste of my time this has been. I will not be offering the affiliate code in blogs and forums anymore since it is an exercise in futility ASSUMING the COOKIE really is working for 90-days.

Support: Well, it could take some time for you to see the results

Me: Why?

Support: It would be difficult to predict any kind of average time

Me: If someone wants to sign up for an account why would they delay?

Support: Well, all new sign ups do need to go through an approval process

Me: But that takes a few days and I have been marketing your affiliate program for a much longer time (about 2-months) so that it makes no sense (to not even get one referral with all that effort).

As a side note I can say I did not market this affiliate program for only monetary purposes as I sincerely felt these sites were excellent and had great potential and in fact still feel that way today. That is a reason I marketed the affiliate program as much as I did since I felt other domain investors could also use this web site development service well. However, with that said, any revenues from the affilliate program would have been most welcome, especially in view of substantial declines in my other income sources.

The hard to believe poor results affiliate code was immediately removed in my signature lines at the 3 forums and I stopped the marketing of their service (at least from the affiliate aspect) since this entire affair and this support chat made little sense to me. Unfortunately, I suspect non-crediting (for whatever reason) of affiliate referrals may be more common than you would expect.

Internet Affiliate Marketing Has Negatives too

Interesting report from Mike Cohen (Wannadevelop.com/articles/affiliate-marketing) - who is extremely upbeat and excited about internet affiliate marketing. My response is there are some major negatives regarding affiliate marketing.  For example, there is a big problem involving the typical low Click-Thru-Rate (a.k.a. CTR) with internet-affiliate-marketing, what with the CTR being so very low on average. Unless your website gets lots of visitors  it will prove tough to monetize well, especially with consistent revenue.

Another problem with affiliates is you need to watch the links constantly since places like CJ.com seem to always be cancelling various programs for unknown reasons. If you do not handle the cancellation email you won’ t know you are not getting paid. Also, if you deal direct with the affiliate account there is the issue of the affiliate frequently changing the banner or link code and again you may not replace the code (perhaps forgetting) and not realize you are not getting paid.  Even if you do handle ongoing web site coding changes it will involve constant monitoring, time and work changing the code.

Mama Don’t Take My Kodachrome Away

Eastman Kodak Co announced yesterday they will no longer produce Kodachrome Film, which has captured some of the world’s best images for over 74 years. The company started making  the 35 mm color film in 1935, and it rapidy became a top seller and the color photography icon for decades (even inspiring this famous and classical iconic song itself, Kodachrome by Paul Simon) which YouTube Video you can listen to by clicking-here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujhdf9_IO4w

Turning-Down a Ten-Million Dollar SEO Job?

Just visited an interesting website (www.wannadevelop.com/reviews/seo-expert-rand-fishkin-seomoz/) and read a few of its domain name and website development articles.  A quote from an interview/article about Mr Rand Fishkin is extremely difficult to understand (believe) regarding why in the world he or anyone else could turn down so much wealth and compensation because of some alleged stigma attached to doing search engine optimization (seo) work on a gambling web site. Personally I certainly could use ten million $ regardless of any perceived negative stigma (which alleged negativity I doubt even exists).

Here is the quote: “Not so long ago… Rand turned down a $10,000,000 offer from a company to help boost up the ranking of one of it’s gambling sites to the top of Google’s results. Rand knows his stuff and mostly does clean and whitehat SEO that is effective and works long term. Having a gambling site on the client list wouldn’t look so solid. Smart man.” 

Victoria’s Secret Super Model & T-Shirt Marketing

Victoria’s Secret is doing some excellent marketing of their Facebook Page which has almost one million fans already. Spotted in New York: Supermodels Alessandra & Doutzen showing their support for the new Facebook page at the flagship store on 58th & Lex.

Losing Sales by Not Showing a Website Address

Last night I was watching late night cable TV and the typical marketing with the short infomercials which are on frequently.

One commercial in particular looked real interesting so I decided to possibly order the product but first wanted a bit more product information. Therefore, instead of calling the toll-free number (where you could only place an immediate phone order) I waited and waited some more for the website address so I could later go online to check it out some more but there was no website address given. In fact, even if I wanted to order using the toll-free phone number I could not because I had neither a telephone or pen and paper handy to write the number down.

What idiots the producers are to limit their sales by not giving a (easy to remember) website address during the infomercial for someone like me who prefers to place an order later for whatever reason!

Organized Bulk Voting for Amercan Idol Winner

There is a Kris Allen Fan Club type web site which somehow arranged for Kris Allen fans to do bulk voting for the American Idol winner. Perhaps without this organized mass voting Adam Lambert may have won?

Here is what we found on this website: Go-Here

One member of the fan club had 11 folks at the house and posted they managed to vote for Kris Allen an estimated 33,000 times using a “power texting” text message system!

“This was a long grueling voting night, the last one we’ll ever have to/get to do for Kris. 7- hours was daunting, but in the end at least 450 of the initial 1000 that were on this site voting for 4 hours stuck around til the end. After some sleep, brag about your vote totals here. We’ll tally the votes and let you know how much KAnation did to help bring home the prize for Kris! 105 people who have reported their votes voted a staggering 436,650 times last night. That’s an average of 4,158 votes per person.”

Some People Don’t Understand Good Marketing?

We recently called a company LiveFaceOnTheWeb which markets their service this way “With thousands of LiveFaceOnWeb Virtual Greeters on the internet, we are seeing very creative and innovative ways to implement LiveFaceOnWeb Technology. We would like to help you pick out your LiveFaceOnWeb Virtual Greeter and explore the many options that will further improve your websites performance.”

When we called we were quite ready to buy their service and would have signed-up right away to put their Virtual Greeter on our FreeMLSlisting.com real estate website – if only we could have got a discount (even a small discount would have been OK at the time) since we dislike paying full price, especially for a higher priced service (which we assumed could have a degree of price flexibility, especially to attract new clients.

However, the person on the phone said absolutely no discounts are possible (even a small discount) and I need to pay full price which was about $600 for the package I had it mind. He said there is no negotiating possible, with a bit of a negative sounding voice, at least in our opinion.

Today we get email from them offering roughly 25% off the regular price bringing the cost down to near $400. Unfortunately, we are not as inclined to order today compared to a couple weeks ago so may not take the offer after all.

This shows the importance of offering prospective clients who are looking for a good deal on first contact a discounted price rather than waiting until you realize they did not buy the product so then you later want to give a lower price, but that’s often a failure due to the time delay.

Ironic as websites get better, revenue can decline

It has been asked on the domain name forums about improved ways to make money from mini-sites and other websites, including blogs and forums, such as WordPress blogs for example.

One reason that is asked is because domainers who run blogs or forum boards typically encounter extremely poor results as far as advertising revenue is concerned. It has been widely reported blogs and forums have “ad click rates” of 0.01% or lower, which is dramatically less than most all other website categories. A lower “CTR” normally results in lower revenue.

There appears to be very little that can be done to improve the dismal revenue for blogs/forums because of content issues. What we mean by that is obviously folks who operate blogs and forums want to do a quality job and get considerable valuable content to make their site better and result in a good visitor experience.

With that said, the main issue is quite ironic because the better the blog or forum is as far as good content is concerned the worse the revenue tends to be. As the owner adds more and more nice content he/she will see their PPC (pay-per-click) revenue constantly on the decline. So quite ironically the better job being done ends-up with less income from website ads.

Why does that scenario happen? In our opinion the primary reason is visitors tend to get seriously ‘distracted’ by the content. The more content they see and the better the content is as far as informative or entertaining value goes the visitors will be much more inclined to read the posts but end-up paying little if any attention to the advertising and marketing on the pages (which is usually there to pay the bills).

That situation is a most unfortunate position for the web site owner to be in and is contrary to the goal of providing valuable information to the site visitors, which of course is incredibly ironic.

P.S. The above odd scenario is also typical with non-blog and non-forum websites too. If anyone reading this knows of possible solutions or has some suggestions on ways to solve this problem they are invited to post a comment.

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