The CNBC story was indeed about Kevin Ham, but it mainly focussed on Agoga, the business that monetizes the “.cm” (Cameroon) ccTLD. So unfortunately the story portrayed in the show did not show the most positive faces of domainers, since it mainly focussed on how the “.cm” domain makes money of “.com” typos. However the short interview with Business 2.0′s Paul Sloan was based on the title story of tomorrow’s business 2.0 magazine, “The Man who owns the Internet”, which promises to be a more in-depth story.

The story mentioned how Kevin also is trying to make similar deals for .om (Oman), .ne (Niger) and .et (Ethiopia). It failed to mention, how Google and MSN also profit directly from Typos by displaying default search results in some webbrowsers when a mistyped domain does not exist.

[Update]: You can watch the video here.

The CNBC on the money show that is just starting now (7pm Eastern) is going to feature an interview with Paul Sloan about the domain industry.

Paul Sloan:

Just a heads up. I just recorded an interview for CNBC about a cover story that I wrote for the June issue of Business2.0, which is now on its way to subscribers. The interview (or a tiny piece of it) will be on a program called On The Money, which airs at 7 pm eastern. All I can say is it’ll be a challenge to boil it all down, which is why I’m no longer working in TV (I did a few-year stint at CNN). The magazine article, which is about one of the world’s top domainers, is scheduled to be posted tomorrow at Business2.com.

A friends’ guess: It’s going to be about Reinvent, the company new company by Kevin Ham and Colin Yu, which includes the Hitfarm parking company and Nameview domain registrar.

[via Conceptualist]

A recent press release by Sedo helped getting me started on the topic of bringing premium domains to the mainstream market.

Sedo announces partnership with DomainsBot – from the press release:

“This partnership provides an enormous amount of value to service providers by increasing the domain registration rate while adding a new revenue stream without additional costs,” said Mark Klein, Sedo’s Director of Business Development. “The tool itself adds tremendous value to the customer experience by making it increasingly easy for people to find a domain name that fits their needs.”

When a Webhost company or Registrar integrates and displays the Sedo portion of the domain suggestion tool to its users, Sedo will pay the costs that would normally have to be paid to Domainsbot for the queries executed and will also pay the service provider commissions of any transactions that come through Sedo.

DomainsBot executives are excited about the opportunities this integration brings.

“Having Sedo sponsor our name suggestion is a terrific win-win for the entire market,” said Emiliano Pasqualetti, DomainsBot’s Chief Operating Officer. “This gives registrars the opportunity to increase their sales and profit from the exponentially growing secondary market at no cost, and registrants the advantage to find the most relevant domains available and for sale in one place.”

This means that any registrar that would like to integrate the DomainsBot Namespinner with the Sedo results, can now get a namespinner for free if the search results include domains listed on the Sedo marketplace.

The name spinner marketplace

DomainsBot has managed to sign up the right clients and assemble a good development team. There are two major competitors in their market, with DomainTools’ Domain Suggestions being the oldest competitor, after VPOP‘s NameBrain faded into oblivion. Also the registry operator Verisign offers accredited registrars a free namespinning tool. All of those tools are being offered to registrars and DomainsBot and DomainTools offer theirs on their own website as well. As far as I know the marketplace currently lacks a service that is capable of providing similar name suggestions for other languages than English.
What differentiates Verisign’s NameSpinner, apart from the fact that it’s free, is that it integrates some of their data from the news aggregator Moreover. However Verisign’s tool does not include domain names that are listed for sale, which are included in the search results from DomainTools and DomainsBot.

Bringing premium domains to the mainstream registrants

In order to bring domains to the retail market, endusers need to be made aware of the value and option of buying premium domains. However there is a major hurdle to overcome in order to get hosting companies and domain resellers to integrate premium names into their offerings: They don’t want to send their customer away.

Let’s take a look what a typical integration of an affiliate program for a domain marketplace would look like on the hosting companiy’s website.

1. Registrant searches for available domains
2. Finds a premium name in the results that he likes
3. Clicks on the affiliate link that brings him to the domain aftermarket website
4. Places a bid on the domain if it’s an auction or submits an offer
5. Receives a response, possibly needs to respond again
6. Finally purchases the domain name
7. Escrow procedure starts
8. Escrow procedure completes
9. Registrant takes possession of new domain
10. Registrant sets up hosting

If the registrant in this scenario is not a current and loyal hosting customer at the hosting company where they performed the lookup, they might now end up hosting their domain elsewhere. After all this whole process probably takes a couple of weeks already, so the hosting company might have sent a customer away, instead of serving the customer directly. While they might earn an affiliate commission, their longterm customer value is much higher if the customer signs up for hosting immediately.
In order to get more hosting companies and resellers to offer premium domains, the purchase process needs to be integrated. This also means that the marketplace selling the domain will need to have control over the domain name when it’s offered for sale, in order to facilitate a quick purchase/transfer process. And after the sale is closed, the registrant should be referred back to the hosting company where the lead originated.

So here’s what the sales process should look like:

1. Premium domain is offered on the webhosting companies’ site in an availability search
2. Registrant decides to purchase premium name
3. Registrant choses hosting package
4. Hosting company bills the Registrant
5. Hosting company transfers domain name to their registrar and changes contact information

Currently there are only a few market places that can offer this level of integration, including a quick domain transfer via an API. First of all, companies that sell their own portfolios, such as FabulousDomains or Buydomains can offer this. Also the Pool Marketplace, which requires users to transfer their names to them before you can actually sell them, could offer this level of integration. So only a company that also holds control over the domain name is uniquely positioned at this point to offer a fully integrated sale and transfer. After all, if you were running a hosting company, would you want to send the user elsewhere when he’s just about to sign up?

Google is not only getting rid of adult domain names in their domain parking program, they are now also trying to clean up the arbitrage play. Arbitrage means driving traffic to your sites from cheaper keywords (sometimes on other ad-networks) and then converting them to higher paying keywords on your own site, in order to pocket the difference. This strategy is often employed on so-called “Made for Adsense” sites.

Numerous AdSense publishers have been receiving emails from Google the past couple of days stating that their use of their AdSense account is an unsuitable business model and that accounts would be disabled as of June 1st, giving publishers about two weeks notice to prepare for the loss of the AdSense accounts… and since it seems that arbitrage publishers are the ones receiving this account disabled email, to give those publisher enough time to shut down accounts or use an alternative source for their outgoing traffic.

Right now, I have only heard from those doing either “Made for AdSense” style of sites or those doing arbitrage, and it does include publishers making significant money per month ($10,000 USD and higher). So they are not giving a pass to those who are earning above a certain threshold. And it seems that no one who is outside of the arbitrage/MFA area of AdSense earnings has been affected thus far.

And good news is that Google will be paying out earnings to those publishers, so they do not need to worry that they will lose any income earned thus far.

At this point I don’t know if this is affecting Adsense for Domains (the parking feed for many domain traffic aggregators) as well, however it would coincide nicely with the shut down of some newer parking companies that might have had some problems keeping “junk” traffic out of their networks.

[via JenSense]

A press release from Sedo says that they have lowered the minimum commission for .co.uk sales to 50 Euros, which is about 35 British Pound or just under $70 USD.

From the press release:

This comes at a time when the .CO.UK Secondary Domain Name market sees a growth of more than 150% in the last year alone. Sedo’s Director of UK Operations, Nora Cotter comments that “many of our customers, particularly those on Acorn Domains Forum have requested such a reduction, to further drive growth and development in the UK domain name aftermarket. We hope that our price cut will pave the way for increased development of the UK market and will especially help to foster a greater volume of sales in the under-€500 category. Our statistics for 2006 show that the role of organized domain sales platforms like Sedo are gaining in importance and ultimately driving a greater value than private sales as we provide a variety of services that can help domain owners optimize their investments. We hope this commission reduction will be another aid to development in the UK aftermarket and will help both buyers and sellers alike.”

Not content to just slash service prices, Sedo is also aiming to improve performance in their domain transfers. In a small number of transfers each year, the buyer of a domain name delays sending their Sedo transfer agent their IPS Tag. In those instances, Sedo can now temporarily move the domain to their own Tag so they can pay out those sellers, who have completed all of their responsibilities, more quickly. Nora Cotter points out that “this might not sound like much, but it’s something that the Sedo customers and UK forum members have been requesting for some time. We hope it will make it more possible for us to make timely payment to a seller in the occasional case where the ownership formalities have been completed but the buyer is delaying the process.

I’ve found Sedo a good place to sell the occasional domain, even though the completion of the sale and the payout can sometimes last a long time due to the escrow period.

Personally I would prefer it if their commission would differentiate where the buyer came from. If a user types in the domain name directly and then proceeds to submit an offer, the marketplace itself is still facilitating the sale/escrow, but has little to do with getting the actual client. So the facilitator would only deserve their full commission if the buyer finds the domain in the marketplace listings.

Finally we are able to lift the curtain to a allow you a peak what Peter and I (and of course also the rest of the team) have been working on the last months.

SharedReviews.com’s new product review website launched today. You can sign up today to be part of our Contributor Beta in early June, which will allow you to submit reviews. For any 5 approved reviews you will receive $10, up to a maximum of $100 per person and up to a community maximum of $10,000. We will share our revenue with those who share their reviews with us – visit our site to find out more and write some reviews.

My apologies for the recent blogging slowdown, but one of my projects is going to launch soon, so I have been busy preparing for the launch.

Rumour has it that Microsoft is to buy Yahoo! Funny enough, we were talking about this in our startup office some days ago. When I mentioned how the parking service ParkedNames.com was shut down by Yahoo! Peter said: “Maybe Yahoo! is preparing to be bought by Microsoft”.

ParkedNames issued this short statement: “Yahoo! and Google do not see the value in domain traffic and are making a slow but certain move away from supporting domain monetization.” If you consider the termination of Klickerz by Skenzo (which mainly uses a Google feed) and the earlier split between DomainSponsor and TrafficClub (TrafficClub was sharing DomainSponsor’s feed), this might just be a sign of the times to come (the cold war against domain traffic).

A quote from the Bloomberg article on the possible purchase of Yahoo!:

“It’s all about the battle for the advertisement market. Who will be the dominant force on the Internet,” said Wim Zwanenburg, who helps oversee 27 billion Euros at Bank Degroof Group, including Microsoft shares. “Microsoft won’t be able to catch up with Google on its own. If you want to play a role, you’ll have to gain market share and conquer a position.”

So if the advertising market is all that matters, why neglect the value of domain traffic, direct navigation or direct search (whatever you want to call it)? Do we really want trademark-infringements and badly executed arbitrage to drag down our entire industry? While domainers might be used to working “underground” in the past, the time has come to show that this is a legitimate industry which already provides tremendous value to the search, internet and advertising market today. Do we want to gamble on the possibility that the power of our traffic is strong enough to validate and secure our existence, or should we join forces (for example in the Internet Commerce Association) to create a common voice that speaks for all of us?

[via SevenMile]

While Jennifer Slegg is looking at this from the view of a Search Engine Marketer, it is important for domain investors to remember that the click-through-rate (CTR) for a domain name might be an important measurement for the domain name owner, but in the end the return-on-investment (ROI) for the advertiser is what matters the most. In the end, the advertisers are the ones paying for the clicks on our parked pages and their return on investment is what matters.

However the return depends on many different factors, and many of them are beyond our control:

• targeting of the search terms
• landing page related to the search terms
• landing page itself
• price of the product
• easy of purchase
• tracking of the click, related to sales (not all sales happen right after the click on the ad)

With yesterday’s (re-)launch of the sale of premium .tv names by eNom (which appears to have launched a couple of hours late), many of the premium .TV names have become available again. Of course they remained at a premium price, just like before.

The sale of the names appears to have been integrated into eNom’s aftermarket site where all of the available premium names are listed. The prices range from $52 for “gaps.tv” and to $500,000 for “business.tv”. The list of premium names currently contains over 52,000 names.

Over the years the registry and different licensees of the ccTLD for the island of Tuvalu have tried different models to market their premium names, including increasing renewal fees for some of the names deemed special by the registry. In the current model the site states that the annual renewal fees will be as high as the initial purchase price, but also says that the renewal fees are “subject to change”. So the question remains: Will successful sites be charged a higher renewal fee?

As reported earlier the .tv TLD will be promoted with the inclusion of sitebuilding and MySpace like-networking tools, which is a unique approach for TLD promotion. The portal into all of the sites, originally called “ChannelMe.tv” has now been relaunched as “me.tv“. Sample sites built with the new tools are: Carson Daly.tv and ambler.tv (eNom employees were given a .TV domain each, more information on it here).

The tools included in with the purchase of the domain are:

• Channel Builder: Seamlessly integrated with a .TV purchase, users can create a full-functioning video-centric website “Channel”, including a choice of pre-designed themes and easy-to-use video management tools.
• Grab It® Bookmarklet: Users can browse top video sites and with a single click “grab” embed code and links for their favorite videos, allowing for quick and easy programming of their own .TV Channels. All “grabbed” video links are displayed live in the user’s .TV content archive, which can then be used to create custom playlists.
• Social Networking Tools: Each .TV Channel is its own social networking site, featuring private or public profiles, blogs, message boards, on-site messaging, user ratings, favorites, friends lists, comments, and photo albums.

The keynote for the re-release of the domain is being webcast today at 6pm PST on the AlwaysOn conference website, which also features an article on Carson Daly joining Demand Media in the promotion of the .tv TLD.

[via Press Release]