As per an Email from Fabulous.com to Frank Schilling, Fabulous.com has launched their domain distribution network (DDN), allowing Domain Portfolio owners to list their domains for sale via Fabulous’ various partners. On top of the Buydomains/Afternic network, this appears to be another large sales channel developing. A while ago Pool.com had tried something similar, by opening the Global Domain Name Exchange (GDNX), which failed to lack of adaption by the industry.

As you may have already heard, Fabulous.com has launched its Domain Distribution Network (DDN) that allows access for domain portfolio owners to list their domains across multiple aftermarket domain sales platforms.

Some of these platforms include Registrars, Aftermarket Portals, WhoIs query websites, and Lead Generation Affiliates. In addition, Fabulous also enables domain owners the ability to have domain sale functionality embedded on their own parked domains with only a 3% (bank fees*) transactional cost for successful domain sales.

Our current implementations include a real time aftermarket sales process (during registration attempts) with the world’s largest registrar. We also expect live implementations to extend to four of the top five ICANN registrars progressively between the next few weeks and October. The sales to date have been very encouraging.

The advantages of the Domain Distribution Network:

• Dramatic increases in domain sale exposure through registrar registration processes
• Access to new Lead Generators
• Real time settlement “Instant Transfer Protocol” (60 second settlement)
• Use of domain classification, pricing tools and live customer support
• Centralized management of domain sales and traffic
• Discounted fees for sales generated by your own domains (X%)*
• High commissions for generating leads as an Affiliate
• Fixed and/or Make Offer pricing**

[...] Please contact your Fabulous.com representative for more details. You could be live this week!

The timing seems right and it also seems that Fabulous is in a great position to pull this one off. They offer an easy API for close to real time domain name sales, which is a key feature for adaptation by registrars and hosting companies.

Which hosting company or domain reseller would want to offer a premium name to a customer and send the customer away to another site during the sign-up process and then have the customer wait 7-10 days to receive their domain name? While other domain marketplaces also offer an API, they often lack direct control over the domain name as a registrar (i.e. Buydomains can only offer close to instant domain owner changes for their own names).

[via Seven Mile]

Tom McDonald comments on how Google and Yahoo! prefer not to have domainers as clients, but they do want their traffic through one of the aggregators, such as for example DomainSponsor, NameDrive, Parked.com, or Sedo.

Tom writes:

Now let’s look at the large ad networks out there; Google and Yahoo!. They’ve become fairly hostile towards individuals with a plain ‘ol parked page. Sure, it can be done if you’re large enough or if you go through an aggregator but for the folks with just a handful of domains, they’re making it tough. I wonder what is going to happen? I wonder what monster of an advertising facilitator is going to fill the gap? What do GOOG and Y! have to lose? Well, the little guy may very well turn into a big guy, but he’s already been chased away. And, this new monster company may woo other huge advertisers away form the two staples. It’s opening the door and I think the two biggies are going to be left with tremendous feelings of regret for having pissed on the [for now] little guys. I could be wrong but my guess is that AdBrite or some other soon to be monster stands to gain quite a bit from the policies imposed by the biggies.

So who could roll up this field and enter it successfully, who can tap the secret stream of “unwanted” traffic? In order to properly monetize several hundred thousands of ads, you need a broad range and number of active advertisers. As Michael Gilmour points out, AdCenter by Microsoft would be a candidate, but while I hear rumors that they are running trials with selected domain owners, they generally seem to not to want to associate with the domain investment industry. They’d rather monetize typo traffic via their IE default search page.

Who knows, maybe one of the domain rental companies will fill in the space, or maybe a new player will emerge…

As several sources have reported, Google has asked their Adsense for Domains publishers, Google will not accept any adult domains in the program as of May 31st, 2007. The domain parking company and marketplace Sedo had already recently warned that adult domains with non-adult keywords would not display any ads.

Stephan Spencer summarizes a session at the Web2.0 Expo (unfortunately I only arrived last night, after this session was already over, but I am at the web2.0 expo as well) about SEO. Todd Frisen and Greg Boser also covered the domain space briefly. Stephan writes:

They also recommended Google’s “Domain Park” program if you are a domainer with a bunch of domains you want to monetize.

They also advised folks to stay out of Google’s contextual advertising space so that you don’t get your AdWords campaigns onto the domain parking pages, because it is junk traffic that doesn’t convert.

The domain parking pages advertising traffic is for the most part of the “search” network in Google and Yaboo! and not part of the contextual advertising. Users search via domains. They type in “videocameras.com”, if they want to find video cameras.

I would really appreciated it if one of the people calling ppc parking pages “junk” traffic would back up their claims with facts at one point. Estimates say that up to 15-20% of Google’s search traffic is type-in traffic on domains and the search engines would even not be able to serve the advertiser’s demand without this additional traffic.

Sure, there’s some arbitrage, some typo traffic etc. that might not convert as well as you’d expect. But if you have made a bad experience, please provide the numbers: I would really love to compare and explore possible reasons you encountered the problems. And the fact is, that I can register a domain today that has never been registered before, that is not a typo or a trademark infringement and that domain gets type-in traffic.

[via Stephan Spencer's Scatterings]

According to the DeSilva and Phillips Media Investment Bankers website, NameMedia has recently acquired Visionary Networks, the company that owns and produces the tarot.com website. Even though most of the purchases are published, this goes underlines that many of the big players in our industry consider content a key component for future success: Demand Media, GeoSign, iReit, Marchex, NameAdministration (see their webhealth.com project) and NameMedia.

Adding content to PPC pages increases the value to the user and if done right, will increase return visits to your pages.

Chris Ambler, Chief Software Strategist at eNom (a division of Demand Media), has relaunched his blog. I am a subscriber now, and I am looking forward to reading more.

Many professionals of our industry have recently taken to blogging as a new means to sharing their experience with the community. David Bleaman has chosen a different method: He provides a daily list of available domains to subscribers of his David’s Daily Domain Drop (subscribe by sending an email to David@eBuv.com). And while there’s no charge to get on the list, he asks you to send him a Paypal donation of $2 per domain bought – which I think you should do if you buy any of his names. The names go quick, so start registering now. Thank you for sharing, David.

Here’s today’s list:

AffiliateDealers.com
AlarmGalaxy.com
AlbertaShop.com
AquaDevices.com
AugustaShops.com
BakeryShows.com
BankWarranty.com
BasicVersion.com
BeefChicken.com
BetterDinner.com
BizTreasure.com
BonusBrain.com
BreakInside.com
BrokerSex.com
BuffaloDealer.com
BuyingStyle.com
CancunGames.com
CandyNurses.com
CapitalLaws.com
ControlMeds.com
CordPhones.com
CureSongs.com
DadSwap.com
DesertDays.com
DiningBucks.com
DiscussWrestling.com
DoubleLamp.com
DryRoots.com
DVRRental.com
EarlyForum.com
EasternForum.com
EuropeanFlix.com
ExecutiveShare.com
ExInvestments.com
FairJournal.com
FasterMall.com
FasterMath.com
FedSecrets.com
Fleetster.com
FoundJunk.com
FreightOnly.com
GalaxyReview.com
GeneralGadgets.com
GrandWish.com
GreatAids.com
GroovyTales.com
GuardMy.com
GymRates.com
HerLoss.com
HockeyGang.com
HowToJobs.com
HumorBasics.com
IdealParent.com
InternetUnit.com
JockParties.com
JumboFly.com
JustSkinny.com
KillerTrial.com
LaunchProxy.com
LingoReview.com
ManageDeals.com
MarketingMLS.com
MediaWives.com
MemberBreak.com
MobileNannies.com
MorningPain.com
MovieLogin.com
MyOpponent.com
NameReverse.com
NorthBistro.com
NorthManagement.com
OfficeVirus.com
PaperLoad.com
PMBaseball.com
PopUpSecure.com
PremiumRobes.com
RepairTeeth.com
ReportDomains.com
ReportProxy.com
ReportTechnology.com
RestoreDoor.com
RevenueShow.com
ReviewEquipment.com
RingTraders.com
RoyaltyMoney.com
SalesHealth.com
SeekGraphics.com
SeekGuys.com
SexualVenture.com
SexualVoyage.com
ShoppingConsumer.com
SmokingPlan.com
SpanishBBQ.com
SpeedyWords.com
SuperiorMoms.com
SurfQuiz.com
SUVTest.com
TacticalAds.com
TalkingEbay.com
TaxElite.com
TeacherFair.com
TennisInstitute.com
TennisSystem.com
TouristMILF.com
ToyEngineers.com
TrackSources.com
TrashCafe.com
TropicalHair.com
UKCowboy.com
UltimateCPA.com
uWizard.com
vAddicts.com
ValueTaxes.com
WatchWealth.com
WeekRates.com
WinterShows.com
WomenHoops.com
WordReverse.com
WormBlock.com

Make sure to send $2 per domain that you register to David via Paypal.

According to an email, that was forwarded to me by someone who as using AdMedian as a backfill provider for PPC ads on their domains, AdMedian will stop supporting this channel in the future.

AdMedian will no longer be paying for or counting queries and revenue generated from search box, sponsored search, content banners and domain parking. These changes will be effective March 31, 2007. AdMedian’s publisher based graphical ad solutions will continue per normal.

However they are still promoting their Domain Parking product on their homepage.

[via Email]

Happy Easter to the ones that celebrate it.

Easter domains: I recently sold “pascua.es”, meaning Easter in Spanish. Easter.com redirects to Hallmark and the domain is actually owned by them. HappyEaster.com does not resolve for me at the moment, what a waste.

The war is on. You might not have noticed it, but the search engines want the direct navigation traffic back, since participating in via the Domain Channel is not enough for them. I would imagine that it might even surprise them a little that direct navigation traffic is increasing. I’ve always wondered why the search companies are not buying domain names on their own.

While I might not always agree with Richard Ball, I enjoy reading his blog and his latest post is once more of interest to Domain Investors.

We often focus on Direct Navigation/Type-In traffic (i.e. people that type the domain name directly in the browser URL bar), but any websites may also lose traffic where users type a domain name directly into a search engine. In the past Google used to show the domain name itself as the first result, but this behaviour has changed. It’s no surprise that Google does not index PPC parked domains, but at least the traffic would come to you, when someone entered the complete domain name.

Richard used the term and domain “NoMoreAllnighters.com” (which is part of a FedEx Kinkos campaign, and confirms the trend for companies to use “slogan domains”) as an example. The domain was only registered on February 21st, 2007, not too much in advance of the beginning of the campaign. By now the domain and site are indexed by Google, but when Richard ran his test, a search for the domain in Google yielded no results at all. So Richard ran a PPC test for the last week of March, using the domain name as the keyword. And guess what, there where 203 searches on Google for the domain that never got to the real Kinko website.

So to closer investigate how search engines deal with searches for domains, I used “cameras.com” as a search term. The domain was sold in the TRAFFIC auction last October. The name used to have a real website, but is now parked with parked.com. Let’s start with Google:

So the top search result for “cameras.com” is “digital-cameras.com“. Also note the advertisement on the right, citing the term “cameras.com”, when it’s not really the advertiser’s domain. In the past, “cameras.com” would have been the top result.

What about the other search engines? Let’s try Yahoo!:

Interestingly enough, camera.com is listed as the top result, however the listed appears to be the page before it was parked. Keep in mind that it’s been parked for about 3 months, so the data seems stale.

Let’s try MSN live.com:

It appears that live.com also is using some older data for their results, but in any case, the domain itself is still listed at the top. When you do a search for a domain that has been parked for a longer period of time, you will see that live.com simply removes those from their index, so apparently their fight is not just against CyberSquatters.

Google is also employing other means by allowing their advertisers to advertise on other media, such as satellite TV ads and even benchads. And the ads do not simply point to the advertisers, but rather say “Google X”, with X being the keyword that brings you to the advertiser’s website. It’s all about increasing search engine traffic, even if it means subsidizing ads.

So the question is: How much traffic are you losing to Direct Navigation searches in search engines, and should you be placing ads for some of your domains? Would this be considered arbitrage?