MSNBC features an article on domaining today. Not many big news in the article, other than that the author does not seem to get the concept:

The Web addresses being amassed by these companies have generic-sounding names like moviedirectory.com and internetgames.com. They typically don’t get enough traffic to make it to the top of Google or Yahoo! search engine results. But the owners of these sites hope that Web surfers will happen upon them by typing an obvious-sounding word or phrase directly into their browser’s address bar — a process called direct navigation. For example, someone interested in motor scooters might try motorscooters.com.

Most of these domains do not need to rely search engine traffic, because people actually do type them in. People use domains as a method of search.

Some interesting data:

Those clicks add up. Direct navigation sites generate an estimated $150 million in revenue per quarter, according to RBC Capital Markets, a Toronto-based investment bank. That’s 7.5 percent of the $2 billion in total search engine revenue each quarter.

[...]

Traffic to Marchex sites has grown substantially, from 21 million unique visitors in July 2005 to 28 million this March. The sites generated revenue of $11.3 million for the company in the first quarter of this year, which is more than a third of the company’s total revenue for that period.

And here is something that I found quite interesting:

Some domain-name companies are eyeing so-called user-generated content, in which members of the public contribute content for free, to expand their generic Web sites. That’s clearly the strategy of Demand Media, the company that recently bought Bellevue domain-name registrar eNom.

Demand Media’s lead investor is Richard Rosenblatt, former chairman of the wildly popular social networking site MySpace.com. MySpace allows people to post content such as text, photos, music and more. The site has become one of the most popular on the Web and was sold to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. last year for $580 million.

“Consumers want more than just a link to something else,” said John Kane, vice president of business development for eNom. “We’re using the same concept of what Richard had built at MySpace.”

Demand Media has accumulated 150,000 domain names so far and is “aggressively” looking for others, Kane said. ENom, now a subsidiary of Demand Media, will handle the technology infrastructure of the new company. ENom will expand its staff 30 percent to 50 percent by the end of this year, and plans to move into new offices, more than doubling its space, in June, Kane said.

The idea of combining user generated content with domains is nothing new. But maybe there’s some potential in allowing users to create content on a larger group of domains in order to drive additional traffic and advertising revenue.