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?

As we all knew Verisign went ahead and confirmed that they are planning to increase the registration cost for COM/NET domains by the maximum permitted amount of 7%. The new prices (which are paid by the registrars) go in effect on October 15th, 2007. The annual price for .COM registrations increase from $6.00 to $6.42 and .NET registrations will increase from $3.50 to $3.85. We can be sure that the majority of the registrars will pass them on to us.

As a little remedy (yeah right), ICANN has retroactively (from July 1st, 2006 onwards) lowered their ICANN fee to registrars (some registrars, such as GoDaddy, charge this fee separately for endusers) their fee from $0.25 to $0.22.

Meanwhile Jay from DomainTools lets us know that former ICANN Board Member Karl Auerbach told him that Verisign spends $0.14 on maintaining a domain name for a year. I guess their expenses are going to increase a lot, since infrastructure, bandwidth, hardware and storage are getter cheaper more expensive all the time. Oh the irony. But they are going to build us a much safer DNS infrastructure over the next 3 years, and they are going to need all of our money to do so. And then there was this item about increasing their own company value, so their shareholders are happy.

And yes, Jay is right. Verisign has yet to complain about the Domain Tasting and the load it puts on their servers. My guess is they make too much money from the kept names to care about it. And how come the .ORG registry PIR complained about it and was able to push through a resolution that allows them to charge for “excessive” deletions? My take would be that the “keep-rate” of tasted domains in the .ORG namespace is quite a bit lower than the rate for COM/NET domains.

In order to keep things safe, the US Department of Homeland security would also like to participate somehow. How about giving them the private key to the Root servers (thanks Tia), that make our domain names work. After all, how could we implement the new DNSSec without their help. And let’s not forget, that the US government still reserves the right to oversee ICANN/IANA.

Meanwhile ICANN is considering to seek immunity from US laws (thanks Tia). Maybe this is about tax laws? Lawsuits about Registerfly and the like? And what exactly is ICANN doing again, and who are they representing? Who is financing them again?

I’d go along with Frank Schilling here and say: Advance Renew your domains. The good ones, at least. You can save 7% erm, make that 6.5% now (with the ICANN fee being 3 cents lower).

Elliot Noss, CEO of Tucows (my former employer), posted some guidelines as to how to pick a registrar. In conjunction with the Registerfly disaster, those are good questions, everyone should ask. And especially if you are a commercial (larger scale) registrant, you should keep in mind that your domains are your assets, so you might have to spend some money to protect them.

Here’s his list in short, for full explanations, see the Tucows Blog:

1. What is your primary business model?
2. Do you make transfers as easy as the rules allow?
3. Do you allow for easy locking/unlocking?
4. Do you make it easy to opt-out of auto-renewals?
5. Do you tie domains to your services?
6. Do you offer Whois privacy? What are your privacy policies in general?
7. What are your policies on compliance issues like litigation, ownership disputes and WDRP?
8. How easy is it to contact you?
9. What happens when my domain expires?
10. Are you a registrar or reseller?

I would like to add two more items that are mostly related to security and the ease of management of your domains that especially matter the more domains you hold.

11. How easy is it to manage your domains in bulk (i.e. bulk contact/DNS changes, bulk locking/unlocking, retrieving the authorization code).

12. Is there any additional security functionality to protect your domains?

In any case, I would recommend every domainer or large scale registrant to also consider becoming ICANN accredited. Having your own registrar can provided additional protection. Maybe even your current registrar can offer you services and help in becoming an registrar and migrating your domains to your own “tag”.

Until about two or three months ago I would have said that I don’t care about .mobi at all and that the main reason I bought some of them was for resale. Well, I probably still wouldn’t buy any new .mobi’s today, but I have to admit that I am impressed with the marketing approach the registry is taking.

The registry is currently targeting media companies, hosting companies, resellers and developers, because by bringing content to .mobi, they will bring traffic to it. It’s a good approach and it seems to be working better than I expected.

Initially I wrongfully assumed that the approach was to gain power simply through the cellphone and search companies that are part of the project – but most of them probably joined mainly because their competitors did.

I was thinking that without a .mobi button on the cellphones, little or nothing would happen. But of course building active sites that work on mobile phones is a good approach. And while a .com site can tell if there’s a mobile phone “looking” at and, and change it’s design accordingly (see google.com on a cell phone), not all sites will be changing to provide this option. So while in the long run cellphones and websites will work better together under all TLDs, there might be a chance for the registry and early adopters to brand .mobi as the TLD that will work on your cellphone.

Everybody has a hidden agenda, everybody wants in on the lucrative domain name industry, especially with more and more advertising money moving online. While this post is pure speculation and without any proof, some of the following observations just seem obvious:

• VeriSign and ICANN are justifying the upcoming price increases for domain name registrations with the recent denial of service attacks against the root nameservers. While those attacks do mean increase infrastructure cost, let’s not forget the the cost of hardware, software and bandwidth is still going down.
• WIPO would like to let everyone to know that there’s a reason for their existence. And they would also like companies to know that there are evil Cybersquatters out there. The amount of increasing domain disputes can probably mostly be attributed to more public awareness of the issue at hand – of course this also helps some companies to go and try to get good generic domains from legitimate owners. And let’s not forget that lawyers benefit from an increased amount of disputes.
• The UN thinks this is a great opportunity they would like to seize in order to emphasize that the control of the doman name space should be taken away from ICANN. I doubt that this would speed up any of the slow progress we are seeing now.
• Microsoft is using the same topic in order to fight Google and Yahoo. Many people have been wondering why Microsoft hasn’t entered the domain space with their adCenter product. Yesterday in a conversation with Peter, he came up with the answer: There is more money in having more non-resolving domain names for them, especially if all typos and trademarks would be “outlawed”, hence the Strider Typo-Patrol project. The default search from Internet Explorer, which kicks in by default if you enter a non-existent or non-working website, would capture way more of the user’s typos and allow them (and some ISPs) to monetize this traffic.
• For Google and Yahoo large parts of their revenue are dependent on the domain channel. Without it, they probably would not have enough traffic inventory to satisfy the needs of their advertisers. As much as they would like this traffic to come directly to them, the users just don’t want to change their behaviour.

As for my hidden agenda, I’ll let you know what it is when I find out.

While you don’t normally hear a whole lot about domainers doing good things with their money, there are actually plenty of stories out there. Now here’s finally one that is documented by this story in the 2theadvocate.com:

A man who made a fortune from Internet domain names has pledged with his wife one of the largest donations ever to LSU [Louisiana State University] – a $25 million gift. [...]

According to a news account, Stephenson told LSU business students in 1999 the biggest decision of his career was to purchase three dozen generic Internet domain names.

Other stories never published include: people that pay the bill for the person behind them at the supermarket, pay for layaways at stores, take an orphanage out to Wal Mart for Christmas shopping and Michael Mann’s grassroots.org.

There are many people feeling a need to share their wealth. If you want to share your story, or someone else’s, please do so in the comments. After all, most of us are so much more fortunate than many others in this world.

[via Seven Mile]

The reports on problems with the registrar Registerfly have been numerous over the past months. It appears that the escalation point came, when eNom decided to cut Registerfly off as an reseller – more and more people went public about their problems with Registerfly. So after many complaints (including yesterday’s letter to ICANN by the ICA, the RegisterFlies website and the article by Computer Business Review online) to ICANN has managed to finally to pick some of the complaints and put Registerfly on notice for a breach of their registrar accreditation agreement. Registerfly now has 15 days to correct the problems that ICANN listed in their letter.

The main basis for the notice appear to be several recent incidents where Registerfly failed to comply with a registrant’s request within five days. But apparently ICANN has been receiving complaints about Registerfly since late 2005.

A list of the breaches of agreement according to the ICANN letter:

1. failure to provide authorization codes
2. (documentation breach) invalid whois records
3. non payment of ICANN invoices
4. insufficient funding of registry accounts

Other items mentioned:

• failure to unlock names
• failure to renew domain names
• customer service failures
• customer billing errors

What are the lesson from this for registrars?

• Customer service is key.
• Try to keep personal issues out of the business.
• Provide customers with accurate information, let them know what is going on.
• It still takes ICANN a long time after serious complaints against your company to take action.

And what are the lessons for Domain Name Owners?

• Pricing alone should not drive where you register your domains.
• Don’t count on ICANN to protect and help you quickly when needed.
• Watch and choose your registrar carefully.
• If you hold enough domains (or domains of a high value), you should consider becoming an ICANN accredited registrar. I’ve been saying this for years.

Frank Schilling’s got the blogging bug. He just start blogging a few days ago and I’ve already got difficulties keeping up with his great posts. One of his latest articles “When is a Typo Domain, Not a Typo?” shows how difficult it can be to distinguish between a typo and a generic domain in some cases.

Truly generic domains are free to be registered by anyone and owning them does not make you a cybersquatter, as you didn’t take something that actually belonged to someone else, but rather claimed a stake that was available to everyone before. That’s pretty much a clear case. But how about the following scenario:

Deel.com (not owned by me) may look like a variation of Dell.com but in fact it can also be a brandable variant of “Deal” the English word for ‘discount’ or ‘bargain’. This is not an isolated example. I own eShopping.com and paid alot of money to acquire that name at auction because it is one of the big “e” names (email, ecommerce, eshopping etc.) But wait!! The “E” is very close to the “S” on my QWERTY keyboard. Does that make it a typo of Shopping.com?!

[...]

Representatives of Yahoo indicated they would try to secure Flicker.XXX as a TYPO of Flickr.com (their made up brand name) during a potential new TLD sunrise period.

[via Seven Mile]

This time, there’s actually an Associated Press piece about domain testing/tasting. If you want to read more about traffic testing, you might want to read Frank Schilling’s: “The Closing Window: A Historical Analysis of Domain Tasting” over at CircleID or my earlier post “How does traffic testing/tasting work?“.

While the article does not really bring anything new, there’s one sentence that I cannot resist commenting on:

A newer variant, sometimes called “kiting,” involves the same company reregistering the same name every fourth or fifth day to hang onto it in perpetuity, without ever paying for it.

As I mentioned before, the registry requires pre-payment for any registration a registrar processes. While the registrar does receive if they delete the domain within the grace period, the amount will be deducted from their account again if the re-register the same (or any other) domain. So the only possible savings are

1. If the registrar has a credit line at the registry and thus would not really have to pre-pay the registrations. Of course the registry could revoke this credit line after a while if the registrar was “kiting” too many domains.
2. The ICANN fee. Since it seems that the ICANN fee is not charged for domains deleted during the grace period, the registrar performing the kiting, would save the current ICANN fee of $0.25 per domain under management per year. I am not quite convinced that this would be worth risking your entire ICANN accreditation.

[Update]: And let me add something. I’d like to see an example of someone who abuses the grace period for spamming. Spammers are not really likely to be accredited registrars themselves, so why exactly would their registrar give them free deletions? Most registrars I know actually charge a small fee for deletions. I can imagine spammers using domains that are being tasted as a sender address, but that would mostly just be a coincidence, like any other address they use.

[via MyWay.com/AP]

While I did see the Sendori booth at DomainFest Global, I did not get to talk to them there. So I was glad to find out that TechCrunch posted something about them yesterday.

Sendori is a traffic broker company that connects domain owners and advertisers. TechCrunch’s Marshall Kirkpatrick has more information:

Sendori will auction off redirects from parked domains through their servers and to sponsored advertiser pages.

There’s a $2000 minimum buy-in for advertisers and the company is just expanding beyond very small beta tests now. Advertisers bid on a per-visitor basis. Sendori is currently running on angel funding.

The company’s patent pending technology will use cookies to ensure that visitors are redirected to the same page for 30 consecutive days even if the winning bidder has changed. Sendori will also track sales conversion rates for visitors it redirects to your site, it will allow advertisers to geotarget redirects and it will (try to) monitor and block click-fraud automatically.

[via TechCrunch]