The EU registry EUrid has announced today that they will be lowering the registration price (charged to registrars) from 10 Euro to 5 Euro as of January 1st, 2006. Hopefully the registrars will pass on their savings to the registrants.

[update] Great commentary by Antony from Names@Work.

[via DomainNews.com]

I have been traveling quite a bit in the last three weeks, so I also ended up spending some time in a business centre of a hotel where a teacher’s conference was taking place. Imagine two female teachers sitting in front of the computer (and me sitting at the next table with my laptop). So one says to the other (they had just entered “.org” into the browser) “Try .com”. Up comes a parked page. “Scroll down, maybe it’s further down”. They had no idea they had landed on a parked page. Always good to experience this live.

FabulousDomains, the retail website for the portfolio (550,000 domains) of the registrar Fabulous.com, is now offering an affiliate program with Commission Junction. This is part of the follow-through for Dan Warner’s (COO of Fabulous.com) Domain Aftermarket proposal, which I wrote about earlier. Since Commission Junction is a large platform for affiliate programs, this will help create additional exposure for our industry.

[Full Press Release]

Following the offerings of some domain registrars, Pool.com announced today that they are now offering a domain traffic testing/tasting service (For background information see my post: How does traffic tasting/testing work?). The service is called “Catch & Release” and requires a minimum deposit of $250 USD. You can then test the traffic on the domains for 4.5 days and keep the ones that generate enough visitors.

Some information from the pool.com FAQ for this service:

The cost for testing a domain depends on the amount of money submitted in advance. If you deposit under $10,000, the cost is $0.20 per domain. If you submit under $50,000, the cost is lowered to $0.15 per domain tested and if you have many domains to test, you can submit up over $50,000 and pay a price of $0.10 per domain tested.

The registration fees for the domains you keep are the same as the new pool.com registrar Rebel.com, which is specifically targeting domainers.

[Thanks Peter]

Oversee.net sent out an email announcing DomainFest Global 2007, which will be held in the Renaissance Hollywood Hotel in California from January 31st, 2007 to February 2nd 2007. For further information, visit the event’s website.

[Update (Nov 22nd)] The website for the event has now been released.

Buydomains/NameMedia had some of their domain names listed on eBay, as I reported earlier. Apparently they have pulled the listings, as the store has been closed according to the website.

Marchex, Inc. (NASDAQ: MCHX)(NASDAQ: MCHXP) today announced the launch of the Marchex Network, an advertising network featuring Marchex’s more than 200,000 owned and operated Web sites which attract tens of millions of unique users per month. Advertisers can directly bid for placement on a Cost-Per-Click basis across Marchex’s network of Web sites, based on designated keywords and categories.

While this move mainly is more or less a marketing move at this point, I consider it quite significant for the domain-industry. Marchex has been including advertisers from their Enhance network on their domain sites before. Also they had an “advertise on this network” link on their direct navigation properties before. And as we all know ads from other networks, such as Google, Yahoo!, Revenue.net and Roar.com are also included on domain name based pages.
But to my knowledge this is the first large scale approach to directly market direct navigation domains to advertisers. This should help promote the aspect of Direct Navigation as a valuable approach to advertising, plus it might alleviate the huge dependency of this market  of Google and Yahoo! as the main advertising providers.

According to a 2006 WebSideStory study, direct navigation traffic (when users type a domain or keyword directly into their browser bar or use a bookmark) converts at 4.23% on average, a higher rate than other sources, including search engines at 2.3%.

Examples of the targeted domains within the Marchex Network include www.debts.com, www.insuranceinformation.com, www.floral.com, www.videocamera.com and travel related sites, such as www.napavalleywine.com and www.californiadining.com, which feature additional content provided by Open List, Marchex’s search technology and content aggregation engine. This content includes product or service descriptions, ratings, expert third-party reviews, user-generated reviews, awards, maps and other information. In the coming months, Open List content will expand beyond the travel vertical and be integrated into additional categories across the Marchex Network.

Advertisers interested in the Marchex Network can sign-up or learn more at www.marchex.com/network, or contact Marchex Network sales at networksales@marchex.com. 

[via Press Release]

National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) and Afilias India Private Limited have announced that the .IN domain has reached 200,000 registrations, nearly doubling its presence in the market place since last year. The .IN registry has grown to nearly 30 times the initial size of approximately 6,500 domains prior to the January 2005 re-launch. The re-launch included a more competitive price, expanded eligibility, a state of the art technology platform, and broader distribution through the global registrar network.

While India rated 63 per cent in the usage of .IN domain name, 37 percent were registered outside Indian soil. Over 150 countries are represented by .IN domain owners. The most popular countries are India, US, and Germany, which together account for over 81 percent of registrations, followed by the United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Switzerland and Italy.

There are now more than 100 million web sites on the Internet, which gained 3.5 million sites last month to continue the dynamic growth seen throughout 2006. In the November 2006 survey we received responses from 101,435,253 sites, up from 97.9 million sites last month.

The 100 million site milestone caps an extraordinary year in which the Internet has already added 27.4 million sites, easily topping the previous full-year growth record of 17 million from 2005. The Internet has doubled in size since May 2004, when the survey hit 50 million.

Blogs and small business web sites have driven the explosive growth this year, with huge increases at free blogging services at Google and Microsoft. Domain industry juggernauts Go Daddy (U.S.) and 1&1 Internet (Germany) have also seen strong demand for low-priced domain names and shared hosting accounts.

[via Netcraft]