A new Domain Industry Event Calendar was launched today. Take a look and let me know what you think, but keep in mind I am still working on the site.

Keith Pieper of Zetetic sends an email with his report “Eight players dominate the domain name aftermarket“.

While private sales account for the vast majority of the US$111 million domain resale market (more than 24 percent), eight exchanges or brokers compete for dominance while domain valuations skyrocket.

“Private transactions are where most of the big deals take place,” Zetetic Senior Analyst Keith Pieper said. “But the market has gotten very lucrative with a dominant four holding companies accounting for nearly 46 percent of all transactions.”

1. Afternic
2. Afternic Bazaar
   
3. BuyDomains
4. DomainCargo
5. GDNX
6. GoDaddy
7. Moniker
8. Sedo

For more information please see the full report.

Interesting that DomainCargo made it to Keith’s list, while DomainMarketPlace does not appear in it. I am surprised to see GDNX in the report, unless this refers to Pool.com sales. I would imagine that there are some brokers that dominate the domain sales market in private sales, but the sale data is almost impossible to obtain.

Verisign (VRSN) has released their latest Q2/2007 DomainBrief. If I have a chance, I might publish some excerpts/highlights at a later time.

NameBio 3 released a report today of the 3 letter domain sales over the last 60 days.

As it would seem from the chart above, a little less than 82% of these domain names were purchased by domain investors and setup on parking services. Only 12% of LLL.com’s purchased in the last 60 days ended up as actual websites.

Of the four domain names that ended up in the hands of end-users, 2 of them were in the top 3 reported domain sales (AMT.com: $100,000 and BCF.com: $71,200). The only domain sale that was higher was for Rex.com: $395,000. Although this domain name is somewhat developed, it is basically an elaborate parked page, and is included in the parked domain figures.

Of the 33 domain sales, only 2 of them were for below $4,000 dollars (JHW.com: $2,200 and VKY.com: $3,498). The sale of JHW.com was well below the standard resale value and we wanted to know why.

A case study by Efficient Frontier mentions how using the Google Adsense for Domains network doubled the conversion ratio of search ads for their clients. According to their website, “Efficient Frontier manages more than $400 million in annual PPC spend under management, counts 80 of the top 500 search advertisers as clients and manages over 30 million keywords“.

Tommy Hanson, Efficient Frontier’s Director of Partner Relations:

“Our clients’ conversion rates with domain ads are double their conversion rates on search. Domain park sites generally convert at a rate of over 5%, while search and content conversion rates are at about half that.” Furthermore, Efficient Frontier’s clients are paying for cost-per-clicks that are equal to that on search for conversions that are coming in at twice the rate. “When we analyzed the results, we were shocked. We didn’t expect to see that domain park sites can bring in the quality of traffic necessary to result in twice the conversion rates, at a cost-per-click that’s equal to that on search.”
Finally there is some public statistical data on the conversion of domain parking ads. You can read the full story here (PDF). Interesting that the sidebar mentions that Adsense for Domains is part of the Google content network, which I don’t think is the case.

[Thanks Mathias]

Yahoo! introduces performance bases pricing, in order to increase the quality of their advertising traffic network. Donny Simonton, Parked.com‘s CTO, sent an email on this topic:

Last night Yahoo, our primary search provider, announced to all of their advertisers and partners that they would be implementing a “quality based pricing” system starting immediately in the United States and Canada.

“…quality-based pricing is designed to adjust advertiser pricing based on the quality of traffic coming from our distribution network. Traffic is intended to be priced in a manner that is consistent with the quality delivered to advertisers, based on conversion rates and other proprietary factors.

To assist you in better understanding the level of your traffic quality, we plan to provide you with a Traffic Quality (TQ) score for each of your implementations. TQ scores should be included in your partner reports and communicated as a number from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest rating.

By pricing traffic commensurate with quality, we believe that we will deliver higher value to our advertisers, thus strengthening our marketplace and driving up monetization for our partners.”

This is how the “quality based pricing” system will work at Parked.com. A person comes to one of your domains parked with us, they search and click out to an advertiser, Yahoo will look to see what your traffic quality score is and let’s say you are an 8. The advertiser will be charged whatever an 8 is worth, if the click was originally $1.00, I was told that the click would be at least $0.80 but it could be much higher.

We will provide you with your traffic quality score once we receive it today, the TQ scores are supposed to be updated every 2 weeks. Over the next few weeks as we learn how the TQ scores are calculated we should be able to provide a little better guidance on how to increase your scores. If you feel that your score is too low, we should be able to work with you to see how we can improve your score.

Over the next 10 days Yahoo will continue to make improvements to the new system. We do not have any news on when any other countries will be added to the quality based pricing system. One last thing is that this will affect all parking companies that are using Yahoo, not just Parked.com.

Please don’t hesitate to contact your account manager [...] if you have any questions.

In the end this should hopefully increase payouts for high-quality traffic domains. Also this might actually give domain investors an indicator as to which domains perform best for the advertisers and where the targeting needs to be improved.

You always need to take a close look at your supplier’s terms and service. Especially if you are using their DNS, since some registrars will reserve the right to “park” the subdomains of your domains if you use their DNS.

From Dotster’s terms of service:

DNS Wildcard. In the event you utilize Dotster, Inc.’s DNS management services and fail to configure a wildcard DNS for your domain, Dotster, Inc. may insert wildcard DNS records to resolve subdomains of your domain that would not otherwise resolve. Dotster, Inc. may point those subdomains to a web page that may contain advertisements and other materials selected by Dotster, Inc. in Dotster, Inc.’s sole discretion. This may include, but is not limited to, third-party website, third-party product and service offerings, and/or Internet search engines.

So don’t be surprised when someone misstypes “ww.yourdomain.com” and sees advertising.

I’ve heard stories about GoDaddy doing similar things when you use their DNS, can anyone confirm? As far as I know they don’t even allow users to set a wildcard themselves. Plus, many registrars will default-park your newly registered domain of you are not using your own nameservers.

Oh and yes, then there’s your friendly hosting provider. Some of them are even so friendly that they will default to displaying ads on your error pages.

If you know of any other nice places that try to make money of your site/domain, please let us know in the comments.

[Update]: Just to add to this. Imagine you advertise your site via PPC. Someone types in ww.yourdomain.com and ends up on the registrar monetization page. Your ad is displayed, they click on it. The registrar makes money off you in order to get a visitor that is trying to get to your site.

[via NamePros]

As we already know GoDaddy will be taking over the RegisterFly names. It looks like they have now started contacting customers in order to let them know as of when they will be able to manage their names at RegisterFly – it seems like the user import will be completed next week.

It would be very interesting to know if ICANN and GoDaddy were able to recover the registration information from the domains using the RegisterFly whois-privacy service (which actually was also used by other registrars).

Apparently CTO Farzad Nazem is not the only one who left Yahoo! over the last year. ValleyWag uncovered that out of the 26 executives originally listed on Yahoo! Management page a year ago, 8 are now gone.

Valleywag writes:

Take a look at an archived copy of Yahoo’s investor relations site from a year ago. Of the 26 execs pictured, eight are gone, or going. Dan Rosensweig, the powerful chief operating officer, went when Sue Decker was put in charge of sales. The Hollywood exec picked by chief exec Terry Semel to take Yahoo into original video, Lloyd Braun, was dismissed. John Marcom, Chris Castro, Phu Hoang are all gone. Daniel Finnigan left after Hilary Schneider, one of Sue Decker’s favorites, took over classifieds. The departure of the troubled internet company’s long-time engineering head, Farzeed Nazem, was announced this week. And now Rabbe’s disappeared.

[via ValleyWag]

Some Canadian news from the public Domain Company Communicate.com, holders and developers of such sites as perfume.com. Their current CEO, David Jeffs stepped down:
From their blog:

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA — (MARKET WIRE) — June 01, 2007 — Communicate.com Inc. (OTCBB: CMNN), an emerging growth, debt-free eCommerce company, is pleased to announce the appointment of seasoned Internet industry executive C. Geoffrey Hampson as Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board of Directors, effective immediately.

David Jeffs will continue as Communicate.com’s President and will remain a Director of the Company’s Board.

Communicate.com is also pleased to announce that Mr. Hampson has invested USD$1 million into the Company through a non-brokered private placement of 1 million units. Each unit consists of a common share of Communicate.com and a common share warrant exercisable at $1.25 per share. As per U.S. Securities regulations, the common shares are restricted and are subject to a minimum one-year holding period.

Mr. Hampson has been a Founder, President and CEO of many successful start-up and operating companies over the last 25 years. Mr. Hampson was CEO and President of PEER 1 Network Enterprises, Inc., an Internet infrastructure company. During his leadership, PEER 1 grew from a small local player with annual revenues of approximately USD$250,000 to one of the largest in the industry, with annual revenues of approximately USD$61,000,000 and data centers and network points of presence in 14 cities across North America and in Europe. Mr. Hampson was the founder and CEO of Novocon International Inc., a manufacturer of fiber products for composite reinforcement until Synthetic Industries acquired it in 1997.  

[via blog.cmnn.com]