Development of domains is and will be a big topic in the future. How do the big portfolio holders approach this topic and are they able to address it on a larger scale, or do they develop names individually? Most of those companies now own their own content networks, and some of them have already integrated some of the content into their domain lander pages. I figured it’s about time for an overview of the companies and their development/content related holdings and partnerships:
Demand Media

• eHow / weHow
• InterMix
• HillClimb Media
• AnswerBag

NameMedia

• improve.com (formerly MoreFocus)

Marchex

• OpenList

iREIT

• Netster
• Associated Content (partnership)

This is probably not complete, since I did this from the top of my head. So let me know if I forget anyone. Please go ahead and comment or email me.

Someone apparently thought that this was a good time to deface DNJournal and NamePros. The administrators of the forums are working on assessing the damage. Be careful though when visiting the sites, it appears that at least on DNForum there’s some ActiveX code.

The article “New ways to strike it rich on the Web” by Paul Sloan from the latest printed issue of Business 2.0 is now also posted on the Business 2.0 website. The article features David Carter and some of his websites (for example AsbestosServices.com). It talks about how David starts off by seeing demand for something, builds a website, creates a demand and then figures out a way to fulfill the demand. Eventually he became a certified asbestos surveyer. Very impressive story.

It actually reminds me of a story that I believe I read in Wired in the pre-bubble web-boom era. There was a company that would create websites for products they didn’t sell (i.e. a custom car) and in the beginning they would just go out and buy the product elsewhere, even if it meant selling at a loss in the beginning.

The Internet Traffic Association (INTRAS), which was mentioned in iREIT’s press releases now has a website: http://intras.org/.

So far the following (founding) members have been mentioned publicly in a press release regarding the new ICANN gTLD registry agreements: Internet REIT, Inc. and Name Administration, Inc..

The Internet Traffic Association is a business organization made up of individuals and companies that own, buy, sell, resell, host and manage Internet traffic which comes from search engines, domain names and Internet links.

Our mission is to promote the value and benefits of Internet traffic, including the value of buying direct navigation traffic, on behalf of our membership – to the media, the advertising market, government and regulatory authorities around the world.

DomainSponsor is sponsoring a domainer gathering in L.A. September 20-22. Unlike most domain conferences, this event will focus less on panels and sessions and more on networking and deals.

Event Website: Domain Fest in LA from September 20th to September 22nd, 2006.

[via DomainNameWire/DomainFestLA]

I the light of the rise of the recent “cybersquatter” screams, many companies in this business are starting to clean up their act. This is an attempt to summarize some of the things that have been happening – please add your information in the comments.

• Sedo has started removing domains from their system that are listed in the Strider Typo-Patrol domain list.
• If you use the Fabulous domain parking system for expired domains, you might have noticed a change that was recently introduced in order to ensure qualified link traffic. If you enter a domain parked with them via a deep link, the system does not show ads, but a link to the homepage instead.
• The publicly visible larger portfolios have (or are still) selling off some adult and trademark names.
• Some landing pages have now added additional “over 18″ warning to their adult domains.
• Ad-feed providers talk more and more about traffic quality (and also landing page quality)

This is only the beginning of some of the changes coming to this industry – exciting times are upon us.

Domainers will be getting together in Barcelona Spain from July 25th to July 27, 2006. The details and further information will be published at http://www.domainermeeting.eu/ .

There have been many recent public comments that consider all domainers cybersquatters. I have been meaning to comment on that – as you might imagine I do not quite agree. But here’s an article, where I could not hold off commenting on – this time against whois privacy.

On CNET the lawyer Doug Isenberg tells us that ICANN needs to clamp down on domain name abuse. Of course he also had to use the “Cybersquatter” word: Today, cybersquatters have rebranded themselves as “domainers.” Mr. Isenberg also is a panelist for WIPO.

Some rumors and public data lead me to believe, that the author of the article, Doug Isenberg, is also the owner of the domain “couponcodes.com”. So let’s take a closer look: On DomainTools.com, we found an old whois record showing the following owner (from March 2006):

DOLESCO LLC
5310 South Trimble Road
ATLANTA, Georgia 30342
United States

Registered through: GoDaddy.com
Domain Name: COUPONCODES.COM
Created on: 06-Dec-99
Expires on: 06-Dec-07
Last Updated on: 16-Jan-05

Administrative Contact:LLC, DOLESCO doug@isenberg.net
5310 South Trimble Road
ATLANTA, Georgia 30342
United States
404 256 4334 Fax –

Alexa also lists him as the owner of the site, if you seach for his main site, GigaLaw.com:

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=Gigalaw.com

Today the whois of this domain is protected with Whois Privacy, which he also mentions in his article: http://www.iwhois.com/couponcodes.com

Also “couponcodes.com” seems confusingly similar to “couponcode.com“, which also is a registered trademark:

The domain currently is serving ads from SiteLauncher.

Whois privacy also helps to protect site owners from receiving spam, so of course this is a double-edged sword. If there is a valid legal complaint, any registrar will lift the whois privacy veil, so I do not really see the big problem here.

[via CNET/News.com / DomainNameWire]

According to an article in the Boston Globe (“Internet stealth company steps out“) YesDirect (which includes BuyDomains) is becoming NameMedia. Today (7:15am ET), www.namemedia.com still points to BuyDomains.com, however the YesDirect Site already shows a NameMedia website. Now at 10:15am ET NameMedia.com points to the NameMedia website as well.

The company, called NameMedia, is being led by Kelly P. Conlin , 46, a veteran media executive who previously had been chief executive of International Data Corp. in Boston and Primemedia Inc. in New York. NameMedia has already hired 75 people in its office near Route 128 to buy, sell, and develop businesses around Internet domain names.

NameMedia, which already is profitable, says it owns more Internet domain names than any other party and draws more than 25 million consumers monthly to its vast collection of websites. It makes money when computer users type the name of one of its sites, such as photography.com, bookstore.com, or jobfinder.com, into the Internet address bar and then click on advertising links.

The article goes on to explain that NameMedia will be following the current industry trend and is planning to develop some of their most valuable online properties.
On top of the 650,000 domains in their own portfolio the company also says to have exclusive rights to sell or monetize 350,000 additional names. I would imagine that those numbers includes the GoldKey and ActiveAudience domain parking services.

I am sure we will be hearing more about them.

[Update]

I needed to find out more about the 350,000 additional names, since I wanted to know if there’s any partnership besides the domains parked with GoldKey and ActiveAudience. Goldkey has a little over 66,500 domains pointing to their DNS in the registery according to the zonefiles [webhosting.info]. Active Audience has about 5,600 names pointing to their dns [webhosting.info]. So this adds up to 72,100 domains. Even if you would add some domains that are parked via domain forwarding, I would doubt that the total amount of domain names from those parking services is higher than 100,000. So it has to be assumed that NameMedia includes a partnership with one or more portfolio(s) with a another 250,000 domain names.

There are 700,000 names in the zonefiles pointing to the BuyDomains namesservers [webhosting.info].

And here comes the Press Release.

(by Adam Strong)

With over 3000 attendees, the Internet Retailer show seemed to be buzzing with the type of energy seen in the early days of the internet.

I’m no MENSA member, but it’s always been my perception that a packed tradeshow full of attendees and sponsors means that a sector is white hot. The last 4 internet- related shows I attended were all very well attended and many, compared to previous shows, have grown dramatically. More sponsors, more attendees, more buzz, more press releases during shows. As examples : Domain Roundtable has grown dramatically from it’s first year in 2005. Last I heard TRAFFIC in Las Vegas was attended by over 500 people. . The Affiliate Summit in January was sold out. The recent GeoDomainExpo shows that even a highly targeted niche sector of the internet has grown big enough to have its own gathering. So, the Internet Retailer 2006 show is not alone and I would make a fairly safe bet that all of these shows will see more growth at their next locations. Internet business is on fire and the tradeshow business sure seems to be a good place to be as well!

Ok, so how does any of this Internet Retail show tie in to the direct navigation space (aka domains)? Since we all are online based businesses we’re essentially all in the same space so to speak. My thoughts are that the info coming out of any internet business show provides a perspective and insight that can relate directly to the future of any internet based niche. So, Frank asked me to write a bit about the show and since this is a domain oriented site, hopefully some of my immediate “take-aways” from the presentations will relate to the space.:)
As an entrepreneur and a wet behind the ears newbie considering a jump into the retail space with a start-up idea (no I won’t go into details . . . it’s incubating), I was overwhelmed by the amount of information packed into the IR show. Fortunately, the show provided a conference packet as thick as the yellow pages packed with the slides and bios from each presenter. This was an incredibly nice freebie to reference during the show and to take home. I also picked up the cd-rom version so I could listen to the presentations I missed later. You can see the agenda here.

There were a lot of facts and numbers presented by researchers throughout the show. All of them were very bullish on the future of the space. The growth of online retail is predicted to continue, but what’s amazing is that that the internet retail channel still represents a very small percentage of the whole of the retail world. Many of the top retailers on the Internet Retailer Top 500 are noticeably the multi-channel big box stores like Best Buy, Staples, Office Depot, etc or the manufacturers like Dell, Sony or HP, but it’s great to see the list also includes many pure play internet retailers. One statistic that amazed me was the low conversion ratios (1-5%) that were cited by some presenters. Remember, I’m new to internet retailing in general, but that number seems like it is very low and in desperate need of improvement.

An presentation by Heather Dougherty of Neilsen/NetRatings talked about user behaviors when shopping online for apparel. Heather didn’t get her presentation into the booklet on time so I’m hoping that I can track her down and cite some of it later. However, from what I can remember her company studied how users that purchased an item navigated to that store where the purchase was made, how long it took, where they came from , etc . Obviously there is some interest in this study as it can relate to the direct navigation/domain channel. Overall the study of these users showed that many of them preferred to “search” for the products (apparel) by brand rather than product type. In several of the cases the user typed in a brand straight into the address bar. Oldnavy.com for example, but in many cases they would land at a search engine first and perform the search for that brand. For example, they would go to yahoo and perform a search for “oldnavy.com”. HELLO WORLD! I didn’t realize that the “average joe” was still this handicapped when navigating the internet. Hey Joe, if you know the brand, why aren’t you navigating right to it by typing in Oldnavy.com into the browsers address bar?

The other point I found interesting from this was that shoppers are trending toward the brand search rather than an item search. This was very insightful from a direct navigation perspective. If there is a trend showing up in a study on shopping behaviors, can this correlate to a possible future trend that would lower the number of type-ins of generic, keyword-based domains in the future? As the consumer becomes more brand-aware on the internet will they continue to type the generic keyword into their browser? For example : I’m a user shopping online and I want to buy a sweater and I like Jcrew and Polo and I know I can get a cheap version at Old Navy, do I type in sweater.com as a direct navigation to find information/products on sweaters or do I bypass ths “search” activity. Since I already know where I can get the product I like, I can navigate right to those retailers by typing in the brand jcrew.com, polo.com, oldnavy.com etc

The last take-away I picked up was from a presentation by Safa Raschtchy of Piper Jaffray where he spoke about the Wall Street perspective on the e-retail space. He spoke about the impact of local search on e-commerce and gave an example that got me thinking about local search a bit more. He spoke about the next/last phase of the local search being for merchants to add real-time inventory based listings to the local search. For example, a shopper can presented with options not only of places to buy the particular product online but also options of locations nearby that actually have that exact item in stock, in your size and color and ready for pick-up. If you know the new sweater you want to buy is on the shelf ready to go in your size and color and you can pick it up on the way to your dinner date, there is an instant gratification and ease of use that will drive more shoppers to search online and buy offline.

What was interesting to me about this topic was I was actually faced with this exact sort of situation while in Chicago for the conference I was staying with friends who just bought a new condo. I wanted to purchase a house warming present and wanted to pick it up locally to be able to give it to them before I left. Of course, naturally as a domain owner, I went to telescopes.com first. I knew I wouldn’t be buying from them as it would take too long to get to me, but I was able to do research and find the types of products I should be buying. (a great feature of this site is the amount of information on buying a telescope for the newbie). Since I knew I wanted to buy offline to save time I went looking for a Chicago based shop on google by searching “telescope shop in Chicago”. Shoplocal.com comes up first but doesn’t really help me find what I want (contrary to it’s clever domain). It was virtually impossible on the limited time and internet access that I had to track down a shop within the 1-2 mile walking radius. It would have been nice to search for the item by city/location and be able to find a retailer with in a few blocks of my location and walk over and buy the telescope.

When this type of search is possible on the search engines it will definitely impact online buying. It will drive more shoppers to perform their search online and then make their purchases offline. This could impact pure play internet retailers who don’t have the benefit of a local brick and mortar location. I could also see an impact on the direct navigation channel as the shoppers gravitate away from direct navigation (telescopes.com) and toward the ease of finding what they want to buy nearby by performing local based searches. Obviously this innovation will be good news for the search advertising channel since the as this activity would increase, overall search advertising revenues would increase as well as more non-internet retailers convert to advertisers based on the notion that search engines could now bring more customers in the doors of their “brick and mortar” business.

I’ve got a lot of info buzzing around in my brain but this is a pretty good start on the topics that got me thinking about internet business in general and more specifically as it pertained both to the direct navigation channel and the new business venture I may soon be undertaking.

All in all it was an insightful show.

[Thank you Adam Strong]