In my article “2007 – welcome to the year of convergence“, I wrote about the industry become more professional and I’ve been meaning to add more details to that. An example is Mike O’Connor’s approach to selecting a broker for one of five of his premium domain names – an interesting and new approach for our industry, but rather common in “oldschool” markets.

What’s an RFP? Let’s ask Wikipedia:

A Request for Proposal (referred to as RFP) is an invitation for suppliers, through a bidding process, to bid on a specific product or service.

Mike was kind enough to take out some time to answer some of my questions via email.

Frank: Mike, thank you for taking the time to conduct this short email interview with me. First of all, let me congratulate you in doing something innovate. While not everything new we try will work out, it’s always important to keep on trying to move the industry forward. Why did you choose to create an RFP?

Mike: I decided to do an RFP partly out of old habit. Back in the days when I worked for a living, one of my jobs was with a Big 8 (er… Big 6 (er… Big 4)) consulting firm and we did boatloads of projects selecting vendors for one thing and another. So the RFP process is just a familiar one.

Another reason is because I wanted to reflect on what services I want the broker to provide. My sense of the current brokerage environment is that it’s pretty early-stage and the services I want may not be available yet. So I wanted to lay those out in a lot of detail before going out to the vendor community.

I also want to have a way to do a side-by-side comparison on the brokers, and an RFP is a good way to structure all that information.

Finally, I wanted to get the word out as widely as I could. I don’t know who all the brokers are and by publishing the RFP I’m hoping to cast a wider net than I would if I just worked word of mouth.

Frank: And why would the broker only be selling one out of the five names?

Mike: I’ve decided that I want to sell about one name a year. My guess is that the names will continue to appreciate, but I want to hedge that bet by taking a little money off the table. By selling a name a year, I’m hoping to strike a balance there.

My approach is to find a broker who is really good at marketing AND sales, and has specialized in a retail market segment that’s appropriate for the domain. So I’m letting the brokers choose which name they’d like to sell, so as to be able to best match the name to their selling strength.

Frank: I would expect that some brokers will respond to the RFP, while others might pass considering the amount of time required to provide all the requested information, because they might consider it cumbersome. Could this possibly lower your chances of actually selling a name?

Mike: I’m getting pretty strenuous push-back from some of the brokers, that’s for sure. In some cases it’s getting quite vehement. I, of course being Irish and loving a good debate, have been rollicking along defending my position and approach. But the upshot may be that I will have thrown a party to which nobody comes.

That’s ok with me. That’s another facet of the RFP process. Sometimes the outcome is “no interested or qualified vendors.” It’s a lot cheaper to find that out through an RFP than to go through all the pain of being in a deal where I’m fundamentally at odds with my broker.

Frank: Thank you very much for your time Mike – please keep us in the updated about the progress you are making.

Unfortunately no broker selected a proposal by Mike’s deadline, which was February 12th.

But let’s look at it through Theodore Roosevelt’s eyes:

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”

(Thanks for the quote to Paul Whiteside.)

[via Mike's blog]

Another advance in the (huge) Brazilian market:

Sedo, world leader in the market for secure intermediation in the sale of domain names that have already been registered, has chosen the Brazilian company Nomer.com as its strategic partner in Brazil. Nomer.com is the first ICANN accredited Registrar in Latin America. The alliance allows internet users to consult, through Nomer.com’s website, the over 6 million addresses in the database of registered domain names that are for sale through Sedo.com.br.

[via Press Release, email]

The Targeted TRAFFIC conference in Las Vegas is less than a month away and there are only about 50 seats left for the conference and the hotel rooms at the special rate seem to be already booked.

Again, the conference kicks off with a golf tournament, which is still sponsored by GolfCourses.com. However GolfCourses.com is now owned by GeoSign Golf Network.

Also, Rick Schwartz and Howard Neu have just announced a new keynote speaker:

We also are happy to announce that online marketing legend John Reese will be our Keynoter on Tuesday night. John has been actively marketing online since 1990. He has created numerous businesses that have targeted a wide-range of niche markets. John is most well-known for his “Million Dollar Day” when he did the unthinkable and produced over $1,000,000 in sales in less than 24 hours for a new product; and he did it without spending one penny on advertising. Reese is a master at performing online research and identifying new opportunities. He’s also an avid tester and an expert at traffic generation and conversion. His web properties have generated over 1.5 billion visitors since their inception. Reese has owned over 35,000 .com domains and has been involved in the domain game since 1995.

Ed: John Reese’s site MarketingSecrets.com is well known and is soon going to be transitioned into a new site called Income.com.

And of course, what would TRAFFIC be without the Moniker Domain Auction:

Our famous auction is going to be another home run!! HomeRun.com that is leads the way with MonaLisa.com closing in and followed by the singing of Sopranos.com. As you can see below, the starting line up looks pretty impressive. In the coming days will will release more info and more domains that will be at the live T.R.A.F.F.I.C./Moniker auction. In addition, as soon as the details become available, the http://www.targetedtraffic.com website will have a direct link to the Moniker auction information page that will answer your questions and direct you as how to proceed.

While I will certainly be attending TRAFFIC, recent experience has taught me to be careful to promise blogging from an event when I am not sure how much writing I will actually get done there between all the networking. So no promises.

[via Email from the TRAFFIC Organizers]

Launched a few days ago, it appears that DomainTools.com now has a Blog. And what do you know, it looks nice, too.

The time has come to leave the herd and the barn. It’s been a blast, I will miss you all as much as I am lookup forward to working on a new startup with Peter. Read more about it an my personal blog.

The Internet Commerce Association (ICA) has recently launched their new website. They also named Jude Augusta (formerly with Sedo) the Executive Director of the ICA.

[via Internet|Inc]

VeriSign announces their intention to increase COM/NET pricing (Feb 2nd) at the registry level, then there’s a DNS root server denial of service attack (Feb 7th) and then VeriSign launches project “Titan” (Feb 8th) which includes DNS infrastructure improvements. A good build-up of counter-arguments in case someone objects the price increase. However I think that the decrease in the cost of buying equipment, storage and bandwidth should be considered as well, when discussing price increases.

Search engine marketing spend in North America totaled $9.45 billion in 2006 – the bulk of it for paid search advertising, writes MediaPost, citing data from the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization’s “The State of Search Engine Marketing 2006″ report.

Paid search spending, mainly for pay-per-click advertising, totaled approximately $8 billion, or 86 percent of search marketing spend, according to SEMPO. Spending on organic search – search engine optimization – totaled $1.1 billion, or 12 percent of spend.

So how much of this traffic went through ppc on direct domains? Any guesses?

[via Sempo]

Network Solutions, the former COM/NET/ORG monopoly registrar, has been aquired by General Atlantic, a private equity firm. Rumour has it was a $800 million deal.

I wonder if  the purchase price has anything to do with some of the high-value names still registered there.

[via TechCrunch | Press Release]

DomainTools.com just released a new Ajax whois query tool, which they call “Psychic Whois” (http://www.psychicwhois.com/).