Yesterday’s 60 minutes featured an interview with Barry Diller, Chairman and CEO of Interactive Corp. (IAC). The video summarizes his business life and how he got to be where he is today and where he wants to go. Interactive Corp. is quite an interesting mix of different companies, including such well known brands as ask.com, lendingtree, ticketmaster, realestate.com, citysearch, evite, excite, bloglines, gifts.com, collegehumor.com and match.com. I am sure someone there must also know a thing or two about domains. Especially interesting for me, that he also briefly mentioned ‘reviews’ in the interview. Nice to have a confirmation that we are on the right track.

Watch the video here.

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]

Today is going to be a big day for all .info lovers. The drop includes names such as bank.info. If you remember back the .INFO sunrise period where trademark owners were allowed to process early domain registrations related to trademarks they own, you might remember the disaster it turned out to be.

While some registrants filled in invalid trademark registrations, in other cases the registrar took care of providing false information. After 6 years some of the names become available again to the “general public”. Which basically means that they’ll be auctioned off by our favourite drop-catchers.

Here’s a selected list of some of the names - happy bidding.

• airline.info
• americanism.info
• auction.info
• bank.info
• bonds.info
• briefmarken.info
• coins.info
• cruise.info
• cyberscape.info
• fashion.info
• flight.info
• florida.info
• gifts.info
• healthcare.info
• immigration.info
• investment.info
• investments.info
• legal.info
• medical.info
• nursinghome.info
• orlando.info
• retirement.info
• securities.info
• sehablaespanol.info
• shipping.info
• soccer.info
• stamps.info
• usa.info
• vacation.info

Business 2.0’s latest cover story “Kevin Ham, The man who owns the internet” by Paul Sloan is out today. The article tells the story of how Kevin build his domain empire, now known as Reinvent. Also mentioned are Gary Chernoff, Scott Day, Frank Schilling, Yun Ye and Craig Lovik.

[Update]: Here’s a link to the TLD typo patent application.

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]

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…

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]

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.