Today’s Miami Herald features an article about Direct Navigation traffic. While the article itself does not feature any big news, I’d like to quote some figures and add some comments.

Michael Berkens, a Fort Lauderdale lawyer, has bet his business, Worldwide Media, on the concept. [...] He owns 50,000 website names and hopes the next time someone wants their prayers answered, for example, they will visit one of his websites — specifically AnswerMyPrayer.com or HearMyPrayer.com — rather than invoke Google or Yahoo.

Hey, here’s someone who I haven’t seen profiled before How does he get his ads though, if he does not involve Google or Yahoo! There are not too many alternatives for search feeds out there.

This year, advertisers will spend between $400 million and $800 million advertising on direct navigation sites, said Malindi Davies, an analyst at Susquehanna Financial Group in New York.

[...]

Denise Garcia, an Internet analyst at WR Hambrecht, said the websites are increasingly competing with search engines. ”The Internet is so new and searching for information is so important that I just don’t see that the search engine is the only way to find information online,” she said.

Well in the end the ads are still provided by search engines. Even some of the parked pages integrating content are doing this in order to attract additional eyeballs, referred to them by search engines. At least currently I see this more as a symbiotic partnership rather than any type of fight over traffic – at least for the moment.

Overall, 70 percent of Internet surfers type a name in an address bar to reach a destination, according to WebSideStory, an Internet analytics firm in San Diego. That’s up from 53 percent four years ago, although those numbers include visits to sites known to users. Most of the rest use search engines.

The article also confirms the trends to hold on to your domains and to develop:

Berkens said he rarely sells his domain names unless the offer is extraordinary. He’s asking $5 million for malls.com and OutletMalls.com together.

Many direct navigation sites are taking a different tact — they’re adding simple content to their pages to get visitors to return those sites. At Marchex’s NewYorkDining.com, for example, visitors can post reviews for restaurants in Manhattan.