The Targeted Traffic Conference and Expo in Santa Clara begins today with a tour of the Google Headquarters and a cocktail party hosted by Google. Unfortunately I will not be able to attend the event.

ICANN | ICANN Posts Revised Settlement Agreement

The newly proposed agreements contain significant changes from the October 2005 proposed agreements in response to Internet community feedback. The proposed changes include the following: the elimination of the proposed registry-level transaction fee (which would have been passed through directly to registrars); a direct contribution from VeriSign in the form of significantly increased fixed registry-level fees (which VeriSign will not be permitted to pass through directly to registrars); a new limitation on the frequency of permitted price increases for domain name registrations; a revision to the ICANN consensus policy limitation relating to the introduction of new registry services; a clarification of the permissible uses of traffic data; and the incorporation of new service-level specifications for the .COM registry.

• Review Comments
• Submit Comments (via email)

According to a report at Excite Money & Investing (based on a study by WebSideStory) a conversion to a sale is more likely when the user comes to a site from a search. It seems that the study differentiates between searches (including targeted PPC), banner ads, shopping search sites and direct navigation/type-in.
Search Sites Better At Getting Shoppers To Buy: Study

• Direct Navigation/Bookmarks 4.23%
• Search Engines (incl. PPC) 2.30%
• Banner Ads/Content related ads (Other) 0.96%

The study, by researchers at WebSideStory Inc. (WSSI), found that search sites produce more than twice the conversion rate of many other Internet marketing efforts. The study defines conversion rate as the percentage of visitors to a site who view an ad or clicking on a search result and purchase a product or service. […]

According to the research, search sites had a conversion rate of 2.3%, meaning that for every 100 consumers clicking on a search result or advertisement, 2.3 people made a purchase. Online banner ads, shopping search sites and other online marketing efforts had a conversion rate of 0.96%, the study found. […]

Consumers who went directly to a company’ site without using a search engine - perhaps because they set a bookmark - had a much higher conversion rate of 4.23% .

I’d love to see a more detailed breakdown showing the difference in the conversion ration between “search” by direct navigation and search engine. I am quite surprised that shopping/price search engines (is this the same?) are not doing that well. It also looks like they placed banner ads and content related ads in one category. It is not surprising that direct navigation ranks the highest in the conversion charts - after all the user most likely wanted to visit this merchant’s site for a reason.

[Thanks Wayne]

Sedo issued a proposal for the auction of one letter .COM domains in order to avert an increase in ICANN fees.
Sedo proposes that the proceeds from the auction of uniquely valuable domains go directly to bolster the ICANN budget, offsetting the proposed new ICANN fees. The company estimates that the sale of the remaining 23 one-letter .com names would generate approximately $2 to $5 million.

• Original Press Release
• Full proposal

[via The Whir]

Yahoo! News write about a UN report about the rise in ‘cybersquatting’. Now if only they specified who is the cybersquatter here, the original domain holders or the complainants ;-)

The U.N. copyright agency on Wednesday reported a 20 percent jump in “cybersquatting” complaints last year, coming mainly from top tech firms, trendy fashion brands, Hollywood stars and sports personalities. […]

The agency registered 1,456 complaints for cybersquatting — or abusive registration of trademarks as Internet domain names — and the practice appears to be on the rise, said Francis Gurry, deputy director general of the World Intellectual Property Organization, or WIPO.[…]

In total, WIPO has received over 8,000 complaints, nearly half of which were filed by people or companies based in the United States. U.S. firms and individuals were also the targets of nearly half of all complaints. […]

Since 1999, WIPO has decided in favor of the complainant in 84 percent of all cases.

So the complainant wins in most cases. Where are the statistics that show that the complainant are mostly large corporations and the targets of complaints often were individuals?

More facts from the press release:

Most disputes concern international domains, with .com again representing over 80% of names involved. However, in 2005 the Center also dealt with 44 cases involving country code top-level domains (ccTLDs). […]

The Center’s new report, “New Generic Top-Level Domains: Intellectual Property Considerations”, recommends the introduction of a uniform preventive intellectual property protection mechanism in all new gTLDs, in order to complement the curative relief provided by the UDRP. The Report is available at http://arbiter.wipo.int/domains/reports/newgtld-ip.

• Yahoo! News: U.N. Reports Rise in Cybersquatting - Yahoo! News
• Press Release: WIPO responds to significant cybersquatting activity in 2005

8008135 reports that GoDaddy has just uncovered another revenue source. According to his report, he created a niche web-directory and send an offer for free listings to a small discussion group he is part of. Apparently someone reported it as spam.
And if GoDaddy receives a spam report they consider credible, they will charge you a $199 non-refundable spam abuse fee. If you don’t pay that fee, they cancel your services, which apparently includes ‘redirecting’ your domain name. Which I would imagine includes redirecting it to a parking page.

Isn’t GoDaddy also the registrar that charges a $29.00 fee when they receive a domain name dispute?

Update:

Turns out that I should have read on, as the story continued: There is no fee to be paid since the complaint volume ‘appears to have tapered off’. GoDaddy now considers the case closed. A day ago they were still planning on charging $199 USD for it, but now it’s considered closed.

Ron Jackson of DNJournal posted his latest report on sales of domain names. Highlights include the infamous sex.com sale as well as übersetzer.de, a German IDN name meaning ‘Translator”.

SEO by the SEA feature some interesting research and an article on Google’s most popular and least popular top level domains. William Slawski went and checked the amounts of results that Google stored for each TLD and created a nice table of the results. Quite interesting. A great idea.

Now who’s got the same data for searches? ;-)

[added Jan 14th]

I noticed something interesting about the data - it seems .CA ranks higher than .DE, which seems a bit weird, considering that there are way more .DE sites.

[via SeachEngineJournal]

As you might have noticed we are updating the design of this site. You will notice a couple of small changes and possibly bugs over the next couple of days. However it’s not too early to say that I enjoy working on this together with robakdesign.com, so this will not be my last project with Bartek.

If you notice any bugs or have any comments, please feel free to post a comment on this very post. Thank you!

Peter just pointed me to an article adding to the speculation about Google becoming a registrar: Jim Boykin’s Internet Marketing Blog » Blog Archive » What does Google know about your domain names? by Nick Wilsdon

Nick points out that Google does gain additional privileges by becoming a registrar, such as carry(ing) out high volume automated queries.

It would allow them to track the age of domain names and connect likely networks and portfolios. They would see when a domain name changed ownership and allow them to adjust the value of that domain in their engine.

While their accreditation status would probably giving higher query limits for the registry whois, this whois only contains limited information. For the biggest gTLDs, COM/NET, the whois only contains:

• the domain name
• the creation date
• the expiry/ date
• the last updated date
• the nameservers
• the sponsoring registrar
• the sponsoring registrar’s whois server

The most valuable pieces of information for Google would be the nameservers, the creation and expiry date. In the past there has been some speculation (based on a patent google filed) that they give higher evaluations based on the length of the registration term. I personally do not thing that this is such a great idea, considering that a lot of hobby websites are only registered and renewed year by year. Plus it looks like some names are now actually being sold to new owners without being re-gistered, so they are actually never dropped.

The registry API (at least for the gTLDs) will not give Google access to any additional information - as long as the domains are not registered through them.

I’d like to clarify something: In order to track actual owner information for domains (at least for COM/NET), they also have to query the whois-servers of the registrars, who in turn have their own rate limiting. Don’t get me wrong, it is a common request between registrars to increase the whois query limit, but in most cases this request is only granted in order to facilitate transfers from one registrar to another (for transfers you need a confirmation from the current admin contact listed on the domain). Since Google is not actively selling domain registrations, I am not quite sure how many registrars would increase their whois query limit for Google.
Also it is important to note that getting accredited for ccTLDs is a different process from being accredited for gTLDs, mainly because most countries create their own rules and API systems/access methods.
As Peter also reminded me, registrars also have access to the list of names that will be dropped for the registry, which would indicate a change of ownership.