Domain Name Blog

Today I will discuss a few things. First why did Google buy YouTube? We will analyse an article that has been published by CNNMoney. Second we will discuss a few domain terminologies: CTR

There is one question that has dominated the internet space ever since Google acquired YouTube two weeks ago. Why did Google buy a 19-month old internet site? Good question to ask any internet real estate specialist to answer you. According to the fortune editor David Kirkpatrick, Google acquired YouTube because of its belief in the staying power of conventional broadcast television and cable.

Google makes a lot of money online through advertising as evidenced by an increase in its third quarter earnings from a year ago which reflected on growth due to flourishing  sales of search engine related searches. Total revenue for the third quarter rose 70 percent to $2.69 billion, up from year-ago revenue of $1.58 billion. Google is indeed the search engine king.

Many writers recently pointed to the obvious opportunity for a Google-owned YouTube to profit from placing video ads next to the 100 million video streams that YouTube claims users view there each month. That is surely one reason Google can justify paying so much money, but a closely-related reason may be even more important.

IMO Google’s acquisition of YouTube might prove to be one of the best investments made ever by the company. It will be surely interested to see how the ROI turns out by it is certain that it is making good $$$ from contextual ads already through Google adsense. The full article by David Kirkpatrick can be found here.
Terminologies 

CTR: it is simply a ratio of clicks to the number of visitors to a website. Better definition still CTR refers to the number of clicks divided by number of impressions and generally not in terms of number of persons who clicked. This is an important difference because if one person clicks 10 times on the same advertisement instead of once then the CTR would increase in the earlier definition but would stay the same in term of later definition.

Ever wondered why some might be correct to say that the domain industry in 2006 has pushed into record high levels? Didn’t camp.com this past week sell for $150,000 at Sedo? What’s more, diamond.com in May sold for a whooping $7.5m! DnsBlogs today takes a critical look at some of the domain industry’s top notch players. Did you know that…

Sedo registered over $25m worth of domain sales in 2005

$4b was spent in advertising within the first quarter of 2006

Moniker and Pulse 360 were acquired this summer by Kanoodle (Seevast Corp)

Dan Warner owns Fabulous

Sedo has rolled out a new “better” parking system in late summer 2006

DNForum entered into a strategic domain management and acquisition partnership with iREIT

…

For more insight on the state of the industry and what happened in 2005 and at the beginning of 2006, read The State of the Industry: Insight From 20 Domain Experts On What Happened in 2005 and What’s Coming in 2006

I was reading through one of my favourite domain discussion forums Domainstate.com when I came across the name Chris Chena. The topic of discussion focused on a popular spanish website Juegos.com that, according to the info posted there, had not only been bought by one Chris Chena for a wooping 7 figure but was also parked on PPC generating $$. As a young domainer, I am always curious to do research and to investigate intriguing issues. I believe in the power of research and development in order to make a break through as an upcoming entrepreneur. Thus I decided to google search for Chris Chena and found substantial info about him. There was one interesting article based on an interview with Chena that was posted by the DRT Domaining Blog. The 27 year-old Chena is the owner and president of Chena Ventures, Inc which controls the Hispanic market. You will like the story about Chena’s ride to stardom from humble beginnings in childhood until he propelled himself into a topnotch a domainer. He entered the domain industry in 2002.

To cut the long story short, Chena not only co-owns the PPC company Namedrive but also has the whole of the spanish domain industry at his control. He boasts of collection of over 100 domains that consists of such prime spanish domains like Juegos.com (games), animacion.com (animation), animation.com among others. According to the story there was a particular day when he posted 8 of the top 10 weekly sales chart on the DNjournal. I have no comments about this guy who has made it. I think he is a model for many new domainers to take after. Take for instance he encourages quality not quantity and discourages typosquatting of whatsoever kind. He remains sceptical and sees no big future for the PPC business model–the bubble will bust at sometime when advertisers will turn to CPA (Cost Per Action).

Oversee.net, a technology-driven media company, today announced it has acquired 10 domain portfolios over the last two months. The Company continues to aggressively build its portfolio of successful domain names and then quickly monetizes them. Oversee monetizes more than one million domain names per month and has more than 100 million unique visitors per month. The Company owns DomainSponsor, the industry leader in domain monetization.

DomainSponsor is the leader in domain monetization—a service that enables domain owners to maximize earnings on the traffic generated to their domains via direct navigation.

InterSearch Group, a leading provider of Internet search services and operator of industry specific destination portals, announced today that it has acquired the internet domain www.Banks.com. The article can be found here.
The sale reminded me of another domain commercialBankers.com that sold for $4,600 at Moniker/Traffic. Going a little backwards in time reveals that www.bankers.com sold $40,000 Jan 04 Sedo/Traffic. Obviously this last sale was done more than two years ago and thus bankers.com is certainly worth a value higher than $xx,xxx!

Back to the weekly sales, according to the DNJournal.com, NewYork.info was sold for $46,392 in a transaction handled by Moniker.com/DomainSystems.com. Moniker actually handled an even larger sale this week, a $60,300 deal for AnimeOnline.net, a fully developed website which is more than just a domain.

In the September issue of Sedo Newsletter reports the PPC provider that .DE is rising in popularity on the internet coming only second to .COM. But I already thought that it was a foregone conclusion that .DE was the strongest of all ccTLDs? This is exactly why Sedo has not informed me much in it’s September issue. The letter goes on to say that .DE has been popular because of the huge population size of Germany and economic muscle. While the I find the first reason rather too light the second one that DENIC’s policies have played the biggest role is the best IMHO. Why do I say this? Denic, like any other registry has well laid out a domain registration policy that only allows domain registrants (owners) to provide valid German street addresses while registering a domain. That is ok. But while this has its own advantages, it does have its own disadvantages e.g. leads to cybersquatting. The domainers who own .DEs have won in this regard. A liberal Denic is a good example of a success story as compared to its backward and conservative french counterpart Afnic. However, the good news is that Afnic is slowly loosening the bolts as we saw last June–individuals not companies can now register domains in France.

I recently read an article published on eWeek.com that I found a bit stingy. The article entitled “Typosquatting, DNS Wildcards and sucky state of domain affairs” addressed several points about the internet that I found very controversial. According to the author of the articled, which can be found here, the domain industry is a lawless world where, unless you’re a large company with a trademark being violated, the system is set up to the advantage of fast-moving speculators with no sense of respect for rights of authors.

According to him, it is only the strong muscled internet companies like Google, Ebay, Amazon among others which could seriously fight off any violations on their trademarks. I would disagree with the part the article claims that those who capitalize on website typos. In my opinion, the owners of typo do not mislead internet users through ads on typo webpages but rather offer leads to a variety of other goods within the related category!
While I agree that this author knows what he is talking about, indeed he has a point that he is making. It is important to note his wishful thinking of a day when the internet will be free of speculators who in my humble opinion are what makes the bulk of the online business success story.
However, I acknowledge when he rebukes rogue domain registries, like Cameroon whose CTLD incidentally squats on the .com TLD, over their overly handy decisions to wildcard all domains with the .cm extension last month.

In a similar vein the article challenges a proposed tiered pricing of domains with .biz/.org/.info extensions which will obviously give registrars unprecedented powers.     Says the article “ICANN is famously uninterested in protecting the rights of ordinary people. And now it has shown a renewed interest in making things worse”.

In the ensuing blah blah and meandering, the author ends up discussing the controversy surrounding the .eu phony registrars during the landrush mid this year.
TO sum it up, the article correctly acknowledges George Kiriko’s credit for raising amongst domain owners and other internet entrepreneurs about the proposed unfair pricing by ICANN.

According to one article that I came across at DomainNameWire, search spam blogs might in the near future eclipse the relevance of .info domain extension.
Apparently what many spammers have been doing, says the article, is to buy .info domains which sell cheap and transform them into transportals or blogs. A transportal is defined as Web page consisting almost entirely of pay-per-click links…
This description defines exactly what is a parked webpage. The author of the article tends not to differentiate transportals from parked pages. While his argument gets smashed in his face there is the underlying point which might hold some truth in the near future. .info domains might be soon be discounted by ranking companies to give credit ranking to legitimate websites as opposed to spam search generated for monetization purposes through a PPC services company. Consequently as time goes by .info might loose its special status among search engines which might shun it for fear of spam search. Therefore I agree with this author that spam, indeed is a major threat to the .info domain extension!

Spainless
Today Tuesday all the domains using the Spanish extension .es went offline for at least 2 hours. The failure by Esnic, Spanish registry due to technical problems reinforces the need for stable registries with good technology backbone, reports Domainnamewire.
From news reports:

Madrid, Aug 30 (DPA) The biggest blackout in Spain’s internet history had shut down websites, e-mail and other services using the domains for at least two hours.