DomainMasters Live from SES San Jose

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Monte: Hello everyone. This is Monte Cahn. Welcome to Domain Masters. We are at San Jose at the SES Conference, which is the Search Engine Strategies Conference put on by Jupiter Media and can tell you from the first couple days of this show the buzz in the air is all about direct navigation, domain name type-in traffic, and search engine optimization obviously. A lot of great stuff is going on. Wow, what a weekend domain sales too. That’s part of what we’re going to dedicate our show towards today. Not only did we see a $750,000 sale of the domain name property.com, which was purchased by one of customers, Rick Schwartz; we were just involved in a great transaction for MonsterCommerce and the At Home Liquidating Trust for shoppingcart.com for $285,000 and it’s hitting the news like crazy today. So my first guest is going to be Stephanie Leffler of MonsterCommerce and we’re going to talk about why her company felt it was important to step up to the plate and buy this domain name and spend the money that they did. Then we’re going to talk to a great company; we’re going to Greg Hartnet from BestoftheWeb.com. This is a company that’s been monetizing domain names for quite some time. We’re going to understand his business motto. They’ve been at a couple conferences that we’ve been at; and we’re going to have him on after Stephanie. So hang on for a couple commercials. We’ll be right back with Stephanie Leffler and talk about some of the domain sales.

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Monte: Hello folks. Welcome back to the show. Again, this is Monte Cahn, your host, and again we’re live at SES Search Engine Strategies Conference here in lovely San Jose, California. Had a great time at the Google dance last night. That’s their fourth annual Google dance at their headquarters, and saw a bunch of people Googling all night long. About 4,000 people were there. It was really crazy at their headquarters. The night before, Yahoo.com, which is also based here, rented out the entire Great American Amusement Park, I guess that’s the Paramount Pictures Amusement Park; so we got to go on roller coasters and all kinds of rides with no lines; and everything was pretty wild. And tonight MonsterCommerce, InfoSearchMedia, Moniker.com., WebMasterRadio.FM, and TextLinkAds are throwing a big bash tonight at Studio 8 down here in San Jose, and it should be a blast. Our first guest is Stephanie Leffler, who we’ve had on a couple times on our show, mainly because she’s an expert in the ecommerce shopping cart space and she’s been a great guest to have on to talk about ways you can have your shopping cart be SEO friendly. She speaks a lot and also moderates a lot of the forms at Webmaster World, at the conferences, and here at SES to the JupiterMedia event. Stephanie, welcome on board.

Stephanie: Thank you. Thank you. I’m happy to be here.

Monte: Congratulations to you. I know this is a long time coming, besides all the great news that’s been happening around here, you guys stepped up to the plate and made a great purchase on a domain name that is basically at the heart of your business. Shoppingcart.com. You paid $285,000 for it, we helped orchestrate the sale for you. Why don’t you give the listening audience a little bit of an idea of why you felt it was so important to have this domain name and what you’re going to do with it.

Stephanie: Sure. From my perspective there’s no question that the shoppingcart.com domain name is one that is very valuable. It is really what defines what we do. It’s one of the most recognized terms, other than ecommerce, when it comes to a transaction online. As you shop online, anything you’re doing is adding something to a shopping cart, so consumers definitely understand it. You know, any merchant that you ask, if you ask them how they take orders online, they’re going to tell you it’s through their shopping carts, so there’s no question that this particular domain name really defined our business; and we felt that it was a great long-term investment as well as a domain name that we can leverage in the short term for, as you must said a few moments ago, for its type-in traffic. We can put some solid content behind that domain name and hopefully move up in the search rankings with that domain in addition to our main corporate presence.

Monte: Right. Now, I notice that you along with a bunch of other companies in the shopping cart space, who build shopping cart systems, basically compete with each other on a regular basis to try to bid on the key terms, the key search terms of shopping cart, and you bid yourself up to become, you know, to have yourself the number one placement in Overture and Google. And so, how did you look at the purchase from that standpoint in terms of how much money you spend on a regular basis. Can you give the audience an idea of how much money you spend on a regular basis to keep yourself in that high position and maybe how it justified part of the purchase price?

Stephanie: Sure. Well, shoppingcart is a very expensive keyword, as a lot of the listening audience likely knows.

Monte: What does it currently go for right now, though, the term.

Stephanie: You can expect on any given day that it’s going to go for somewhere from $4 to $6 for the number one position; so, really when you know that and you know the type-in traffic, a lot of the decision comes down to some simple math. You know, how much do you value those visitors, the type-in traffic, at let’s say $5 apiece, you really can do the math; and it comes out that shoppingcart and under those terms alone was a good investment, let alone its value as an asset. We all know that .com is king. .com will remain king. And owning those key terms that are so essential to your business, there’s nothing that can replace the value in that. I think that there are a lot of large players in the space that would’ve liked to get their hands on a name like shoppingcart.com. It’s certainly something that you can wrap a brand around; so, when you think about it from the paid perspective, it really does come down to dollars and cents, and this is one that perfect sense to us.

Monte: Right. And what a strategic move. I mean, who do you usually compete with? What are some of the other companies that are in your space that bid on this term on a regular basis along against you and with you?

Stephanie: Sure. I mean you’ll see there are a number of companies that compete for this particular term; but on a given day, you’ll see PayPal bidding for the term shoppingcart, MonsterCommerce, YahooStore. You may even see a company called StoreFront by LaGarde. And that’s just a few. This is one particular keyword where you can go many pages deep in terms of just the sponsored listing, so there’s a lot of competition for that phrase.

Monte: Yeah. That’s great. So this gives you a very strong, competitive advantage in your space by owning a keyword. Now what are you going to do with the domain name? Are you going to rebrand yourselves? Are you going to put some subset of your information on this site? I know right now you’re probably just steering the traffic to your main home page; but what are some of the future plans that you have in mind?

Stephanie: Sure. Well, we do have a couple of possibilities for the domain name. At this point we are not planning a rebranding of MonsterCommerce.

Monte: Well, you guys have a cool name anyway, so I wouldn’t rebrand it.

Stephanie: Yeah. Well thanks. MonsterCommerce has definitely made a name for ourselves in our space and we’re very comfortable with that. What we plan to do is put information and resources that will help small businesses looking to purchase a shopping cart online on this site; so we do hope that sometime in the early 2006, which is when we plan to really start leveraging the domain name, you can expect to find great tools for small business as well as a lot of information helping people understand what they need to know in order to add the best shopping cart to their web site.

Monte: Yeah. That’s great. That’s great. So, regarding the SES Conference, I know that you, I believe you spoke a couple times, or one time so far. What are some of the hot topics that are going on in the sessions in this go-around versus the last event that you attended and where do you see this particular industry going?

Stephanie: Sure. Well, I think you know that there’s no question that from a depth of index standpoint, Yahoo announcing their 20 billion page figure certainly stirred, raised some eyebrows and stirred some controversy; so in terms of the actual straight search space, I think the depth of the index is certainly interesting and that the engines are trying so hard to really find all the content that is on the web and sort of be dominant in terms of who has the most.

Monte: Now [inaudible].dot just kind of, I know it shocked all the audience, but it’s like in many cases, double what Google was basically quoting, right?

Stephanie: Yeah. That’s correct. It’s a big jump and was something that I hadn’t heard before. I don’t think many people had heard it before, and you know, I think it’s great that engines are able to go out and find that much content, and I think that it’s great to see them continue to push each other. I think it’ll only make the industry as a whole stronger.

Monte: Definitely. Definitely. What else are you seeing?

Stephanie: Um, well from my perspective, you know, I’m often asked questions about ecommerce sites and conversion rates. As you know, that’s kind of my main topic that I speak on at these events; so a lot of the discussion from my perspective is regarding ecommerce and seeing that it’s becoming obvious that page load times, for example, are becoming very important. It’s was something that people sort of overlook as broadband took over the landscape; and people are going back and realizing that the speed, the load time of sites is really important and it is influencing conversion rates significantly. I think in addition to that, analytics, although it has been a big topic at other conferences with Google’s acquisition of Urchin has really taken, they’ve really moved to the forefront of these conferences. Analytics is such a key element of search and monetizing search and understanding what you’re doing that anybody at these conferences realizes that before they go out and do anything with any company, they have to have the analytic solution in place.

Monte: Right.

Stephanie: You know, I’ve been a long-time proponent of Urchin. I personally think it’s one of the best softwares out there and I’m not surprised that Google snapped it up when they did. So, I think that the merchants and web site owners will continue to employ tools like that to get a completely new level of intelligence that none of us ever even imagined before.

Monte: Yeah. I caught the last end of a conference of one of the sessions where, I forgot who it was from Google, but they asked, a lot of people were asking why did you make that purchase? And it is quite obvious when you think about it. When they’re talking about the ad sense product alone, and being able to provide that in one package to give good analytics on what’s converting and what’s not, where people are coming from, what they’re clicking on, where they’re going to. Urchin software actually, you know, has some advantages; and the fact that it can be tightly integrated to a Google solution for all those products and services that they provide, it’s a huge advantage for them.

Stephanie: Yeah. I completely agree. I think that it’s not just Urchin. There are other softwares out there as well. A lot of these guys have goods and they’ve all put together great products; and I think it will only propel the search engine straightforward as web site owners and merchants have more data at their fingertips to make good buying decisions, they’re going to be a lot happier with their investments in the various paid spaces, and in their investment to build their organic placement. I think it’s another great step for the industry as a whole.

Monte: Yeah. Definitely. And your products actually, your shopping cart product, actually comes with Urchin software built in correct?

Stephanie: That’s correct. That’s right. Yeah. It does.

Monte: So you have that as an advantage already going in; and I know we talked about it before, but just give a brief explanation of how your shopping cart comes kind of preconfigured with an [inaudible] of readiness that others do not. Because you’ve built your shopping cart around being search engine friendly and giving an advantage in that aspect.

Stephanie: Yeah. That’s true. You know a lot of ecommerce systems out there, because they’re dynamic, their URL strings are too long, they’re not paying attention to some of the most basic search features that any webmaster would building into their site. So, we’ve really focused on that particular aspect as we developed our platform. You know, making sure that the pages are named appropriately, that the meta-tags are there, that we’re not putting roadblocks in the way of the spiders. We make sure that the URLs are short and sweet and relevant so that, when Yahoo and Google and the other engines come, that they can read the sites and the merchants subsequently get indexed. You know, we employ a combination of static and dynamic pages, but we see all of them showing up in the index, and we have a lot of merchants coming from other platforms that aren’t search engine friendly, I see a huge boost in sales just from that alone.

Monte: Yeah. Well that’s great. Well, Stephanie it’s been a pleasure talking to you and again congratulations. And just so that everybody knows, this shoppingcart.com sale has been basically the kickoff domain name, one of the top domain names that’s in the portfolio of the former ExciteAtHome inventory when AtHome combined with Excite and became the largest ISP and email provider in the United States back in 2000. And then during the bust, got caught up in the bust, and went bankrupt; and this inventory has been sitting here at Moniker safe, waiting to be sold for an asset liquidation sale, and finally we were able to kick off the sale with this domain name. And so, AtHome has been very happy with the transaction and I know Stephanie, you’ve been pretty happy with the transaction. And there are several other really killer names in this portfolio that people are all over. One is home.net, stuff.com, mystuff, and of course the AtHome and the ExciteAtHome corporate names, which are all trademarks, and another name that seems to be pretty popular called MathLogic. So, we’re going to be handling exclusively the domain sales for this organization and it has really hit the press hard. Stephanie, right before I called you, I noticed that the St. Louis Examiner wrote a story about your company and the purchase, and you made the headlines. And it’s been in the Red Herring today, and also SeaNet and several of the online media and offline media periodicals too.

Stephanie: Yeah. I think so. I think that there’s no question that this particular domain is obviously big news in St. Louis. We don’t have much going on over there.

Monte: [Laughing] We’ve got MonsterCommerce going on there.

Stephanie: Right. And the tech publications, of course. I think it just shows how strong the market is right now for all of these products and the domains in this portfolio. People have been watching them for a long time. Of course, I’ve been watching them for a long time; and I’m excited to see what happens with the rest. There’s no question that some great businesses will be built around some of those domains.

Monte: Okay, well great. Well, thanks for taking the time with us. Of course, we’re co-hosting a big bash tonight.

Stephanie: That’s right.

Monte: So, we’re going to throw back a couple cold ones together and celebrate the big purchase and the successful show that we had.

Stephanie: That sounds great. I’m looking forward to it, Monte.

Monte: Okay, take care. I’ll see you in a little while.

Stephanie: Alrighty.

Monte: Alright guys. Just hold on a minute. We’re going to have Greg Hartnet on from BestoftheWeb, and we’ll talk to him. By the way, next week we’re going to have Jacqueline Crawford on from the AtHome Liquidating Trust. She’s going to talk about a little bit of the history of the ExciteAtHome bankruptcy, the inventory, and why the liquidating trust finally decided to start liquidating the assets. So, we’ll get some more history about the company, because it’s a pretty phenomenal story back in the heydays. So, we’ll be back in a couple minutes. Stay on.

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Monte: Hi everyone. Thanks for coming back to the show. I ran a couple commercials there. Again, we’re live at SES. I have as my next guest Greg Hartnet who is the President and one of the founders of BestoftheWeb; and this is an organization that has several hundred domain names they’ve been monetizing their domain names in various ways. We’re going to learn a little bit more about their organization. We run into them at almost every conference and wanted to find out more about their business and why they feel their domain portfolio has been so important to them. Greg, welcome to the show.

Greg: Thanks, Monte. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Monte: How’s SES treating you so far.

Greg: It’s been great. The Yahoo party on Monday was great. The team at the Google Plex was fantastic. It’s probably my favorite part thus far.

Monte: So, yeah, last night, going to Google’s headquarters was pretty cool. I’d been there before, but it’s amazing how many people you can actually fit in that campus. They do a helluva bash, huh?

Greg: Yeah. That was my first visit. It was like 3 separate parties, the inside, the main one, and back by the volleyball court. It was a blast; it was definitely a lot of fun to be there.

Monte: Great. So tell us a little bit about BestoftheWeb, because I know a lot of people know you and know of your organization; and you have acquired quite a bit of domain-related property for a long time. Give us a little bit of history about how you founded and started the organization, and what you currently do with your domain name inventory.

Greg: The web was founded in 1994 by a couple of professors at the University of Buffalo. They pioneered the web awards back then. There wasn’t that many people online, everything looked like crap, so anything that was different really stood out. So it was an opportunity to recognize the best in each field. It did that for a handful of years, and the project kind of got sidetracked, and in about 1998, my partner, Brian Prince, the CEO of the company and myself stepped in in 1999, purchased it, stripped down the award concept, added a directory, which we built by hand. Not Brian and I, we had our tech guy do it; built by hand about two years. Built it out, and launched the directory as it now stands in 2002. We are a blend of the best qualities of Demoz and Yahoo. It really makes us the BestoftheWeb. Over the course of the years, Brian and myself, as internet entrepreneurs, have acquired a vast amount of domain names that we use for monetization from anywhere, from type-in traffic to splash pages for other businesses. I mean the domain names that we have definitely proved invaluable over the years, for sure.

Monte: Now how many domain names does your organization own and operate?

Greg: Well, BestoftheWeb is pretty much, its botw.org is the URL company, and that’s pretty much a stand-alone company. Our other organization, [inaudible] Hotline, that company owns north of 900 domains I believe is the current count; and that is the one that we really use for monetizing all those extra domains.

Monte: Right. Your monetization model is through the various directories that are provided on your site.

Greg: Yeah. I mean we monetize those domains specifically to drive traffic to our main parent travel destination instead of for us, quite frankly, instead of risking any wrath that may happen with the domain sites, we set up the soldiers to go out there, play the games in the engines, and drive the traffic in. So that’s really been the number one impetus behind buying as many domains as we have. You know, search engines are a war; and you have some guys that go down, and you keep the generals in the back commanding the war and keep those guys safe. We also do a lot of type-in traffic from some of our domains, not so much from the dashes and double-dash domains I’ve gotta say, but we do some type-in traffic from some keyword friendly purchased domains, most of them are used for SCO-type purposes.

Monte: Right. Now maybe you can help the audience out a little bit and explain a little bit of the philosophy of some of the domain names that you’re talking about and the ones with the dashes; and why you felt that they’ve been good purchases for you.

Greg: Oh boy. We have such a wide range, like I said, because we expect limited shelf life on aggressive SCO-type domains. So that’s the really number one reason for our breadth of coverage. The double-dashes and dashes we bought more experimental a couple of years ago when they first got introduced and, you know, the top-level keyword friendly domain names were taken, and we tried the dash and double-dash. We found that each engine responds to them differently.

Monte: Right. Right. I understand that Microsoft, the MSN engine actually recognizes the dashes as they originally intended as a space so that you get the benefit of two search terms when that happens.

Greg: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So those, of course, the type-in traffic just isn’t there. Nobody’s typing in New-York-Hotels.com.

Monte: Right. No one types that in.

Greg: Right, nobody types that in. We found very good success with them in terms of SCO-type activities; and if you’re looking to focus, as you have to do, on more than one search engine for SCO, different domains work better in different neighborhoods.

Monte: And some of your flagship properties; because you own some very good names as well. I mean, what are some of the top domain names that you’ve been able to accumulate over the years and kind of what they’re being used for now.

Greg: Yeah. By far, far and above the number one domain name in either company’s portfolio is BestoftheWeb, botw.org. The history behind it, there is more, much more behind it, much more that goes with that URL than just the 4-letter URL, which is nice to have anyway. We have HotelHotline, which is fantastic, HotelHotline.com.

Monte: Is HotelHotline kind of like a hotels.com competitor?

Greg: Yeah, yeah, we have, it’s online reservations, discount reservations for cities throughout the world. We have our own merchant model program that we run with that, somewhere the hotels.com not quite the breadth.

Monte: So how does it compare thought? Is it comparable savings and everything?

Greg: Yeah. I mean actually, that’s the one thing that we have going for us, because we don’t have the overhead that hotels.com has because we’re not a public company. We don’t have to hit the numbers like they do. The one thing that really keeps us apart from them is that, where we have overlapping inventory, ours is typically cheaper than theirs, and sometimes significantly. We also have the hotelscheap.org name which is fantastic, and that’s probably, outside of HotelHotline, the number one driver of traffic to our business.

Monte: Wow.

Greg: We’re big fans of the .org.

Monte: Yeah. Yeah. Explain that a little bit; because you know a lot of people don’t talk about the .org that much. A lot of us live in a .com world and I know .org, it’s original intent of course everybody knows it was made for non-profit, charitable organizations; and you guys have done, have had quite a bit of success making money with .org names, which is great.

Greg: Yeah. We have a standing joke around the office of don’t let the .org fool you. We are definitely for profit. I think the .org are, they’ve been overlooked. We’ve found, you know, going into whoever your registrar of choice may be, Moniker probably. Typing and checking for domain names, they come back with whatever, and the .nets and .orgs are of course more available than the .coms. Even the .nets are taken I find more often than the .orgs. It’s really just been a matter of it started off as, well it’s the last one left, it’s better back then .pv was the next one out I think. I think it was more of just grabbing what’s left of the best keywords and has turned into now, I find that we don’t even really go for the .nets at all. It’s either .com or .org for us.

Monte: Right, right. Because the .net a lot of people feel is kind of stuck in the middle like the bastard child, stuck in the middle between something that had a use and intent, which was commerce in .com and for organization in .org. What’s .net? You know, .net was originally supposed to be used for network; but although it’s an important infrastructure domain name for a lot of DNS server networks, there’s not a lot of big businesses running on the .net platform yet. However, if you’ve been keeping up with the .net situation, VeriSign just won the registrar accreditation for that domain name again and lowered the price for .net. So like, for instance on Moniker, we’re offering .net names for $4.99 now, which is a bit huge discount of a .com. I think it’s going to have a little bit of a comeback.

Greg: Well, maybe I’ll start picking up some .nets in my portfolio from Moniker.

Monte: [Laughing] Okay. Alright. Out of your inventory, what kind of traffic are you driving to your directory on a monthly basis; because it sounds like it’s pretty big.

Greg: Yeah. We’re getting large. We try to keep our stats a little close to the best. I know that our competitors are out there listening for sure. But, once again, the type-in traffic and all the portfolio traffic for BestoftheWeb, botw.org, is not from our portfolio. It’s pretty much just from branding. That’s our one, the one name in our portfolio that it’s nice we actually have something that we can go out and try to brand. So most of our traffic from BestoftheWeb is from us doing trade shows, from us getting out there and meeting the people.

Monte: Right. And soliciting advertisers, obviously.

Greg: Exactly. Exactly. We currently have a, BestoftheWeb is similar to, I mentioned before, kind of the best blend of Demoz and Yahoo is really what we try to go after; so, we have a commercial, and in our commercial submission policy, all non-profit sites are free submission, all commercial sites are now $39.95 per year annually recurring, we also have a one-off one-time pricing of $99.95, we have an adult directory for adult webmasters. It’s actually not an adult directory, it’s the adult branch of the BestoftheWeb directory.

Monte: Right. That’s been pretty successful for you, hasn’t it?

Greg: Yeah, it’s been great. Yeah, yeah. I mean everybody knows that that’s where the eyeballs are.

Monte: Yeah. A lot of eyeballs there.

Greg: Yeah. Definitely a lot of eyeballs.

Monte: So, given your adult side of things, what’s your feeling on the new .xxx extension and are you guys going to be in a position to cover some of your brands that way?

Greg: I don’t think so. You’d know better than I; but from what I’m aware of, you have to be “in the industry” in order to qualify for the .xxx.

Monte: Yeah. That’s correct. The first found, the trademark protection round will be that, if you have a famous mark brand or use of a domain name and that is adult related, and you are an adult industry provider, that you will have first dibs – stop rights they call it or IP protection, trademark protection rights for your key brands, as long as they’re not too generic.

Greg: Would we be able to then, would we be able to go for [inaudible].xxx and say that it’s going to be the new domain of our adult branch?

Monte: Actually you would be able to go for your own domain names that are non-adult related and have them protected. That’s the other advantage. So, for instance, Procter & Gamble, or a company like yourselves, and even us would be able to at least protect the .xxx brand. As a corporate player that is not in the adult space, we are allowed to protect our own identities so that someone can’t take that it identity and do something with it that we wouldn’t want them to. So you would be allowed to do that. Now, you have an option to load that domain name into the zone or not. So, obviously, Moniker.xxx, we’re probably not going to load to the zone unless it’s going to be a strict site to register domain names in the .xxx platform. That’s probably actually what we’ll probably do with it. The other example is Disney. You know, Disney is probably not going to allow Disney.xxx to go live in the zone, so they’ll have first dibs to protect that mark and that domain name and they’ll be able to register the domain name and keep it out of the zone so it never goes live. Nothing can ever put on it, no content, anything.

Greg: I would imagine that you would be able to switch the status of in the zone and out of the zone in the future.

Monte: Yeah, yeah. And there’ll be kind of a, the way I understand it from attending the panel, that you will be able to, if you don’t want it in the zone, it will be actually a reduced registration cost. So it’s more like, hey, protect yourself so no one else gets it. So it will be some portion of the $75 registration fee, maybe half or something; but if you wanted to go live, it would be the full price. And if you wanted to upgrade from a no live to a live, you would pay the difference or something.

Greg: Interesting. I would definitely see the purchase of some of our domain names .xxx for at least trademark protection, copyright protection, and probably, I would imagine, maybe [inaudible] one or two. We’ll see.

Monte: Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. So, given the fact that you’re a, and I get to see a lot of customers and clients and a lot of people buzzing around these trade shows, and you guys are very active and in the know. The good thing I see about you and Brian is that you’re in at the SES shows, you’re attending the Webmaster Worlds, you’re attending the adult webmaster forums and conferences as well to be educated about what’s coming, what’s going on. Given that, where do you see the market going? One thing I’ve noticed over the last couple days of being here is that this market is on fire. People are happy, there’s a lot of potential, a lot of opportunity in this market right now, given what’s going on Google and Yahoo; and I also see a huge war brewing or a big battle about to brew between MSN, Google, and Yahoo in terms of who’s going to own the search space. Give us some feedback about what you’re seeing, because you’re probably more ears to the ground than even I am.

Greg: It’s nice to be in the position that we are because we see the volumes of submissions but what’s hot, new areas are opening up.

Monte: What are some of those that you’re seeing?

Greg: Of course, TexasHoldThemPoker is just absolutely on fire. I’m probably not surprising anybody there by saying that; but since the rage has become, we’ve seen just ten thousand [inaudible]. I think from everything that I’ve heard over the last few days, I think probably the biggest thing going forward in the immediately forward is going to be an explosion of RSS. Microsoft just announced a few months ago that they are going to be including RSS in their [inaudible] platform.

Monte: Now explain to the audience what RSS is for those that don’t know, so people can understand where some of the trend is going.

Greg: Okay, yeah. First of all I’m going to qualify this by saying that I am not a tech guy at all; so you are getting this from somebody who had a layman’s understanding of it at best. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, it’s an xml, it’s a stripped-down version of the content on your web page called an xml format made for publishers of content to syndicate content on other sites so other people can get that content. So sign up for RSS to get your RSS reader of choice which, instead of having to go to the New York Times and search for any articles that I’m interested in, I can get, I can subscribe to the editorials of the New York Times and have just the editorials delivered to my RSS reader inbox.

Monte: So, you get kind of alerted when that happens.

Greg: Exactly. It’s all real time. So that’s the web about a month and half ago or two months ago, wants an RSS feed on our “What’s new”. So every day, if you’re interested, for people who are, instead of coming to the web and saying what did these guys add in Arts today, or in Science, you subscribe to the feed and get it delivered to your inbox every day.

Monte: It’s a cool new up and coming trend. And it opens up a world of advertising opportunities, because you can always send a message, or send an offer, or send some kind of special price or special opportunity when you’re sending and alerting those folks that you have something new on your web site.

Greg: Exactly. The early adopters of the art has really been the blogging [inaudible]; and I think that as corporate America learns that they will be able to deliver the content that they want to exactly the people that are asking for the RSS, you will see more and more of people jumping on the band wagon. I think the only thing really holding them back at this point right now is just consumer acceptance of the product; and that’s just because they don’t even know about it yet.

Monte: Right. Right. It’s all new to people. What else are you seeing besides RSS and how powerful that’s going to be?

Greg: Well, of course the search engine wars are doing nothing but heating up more and more, as you mentioned, the three-pony race now between Yahoo, MSN, and Google. In terms of search, personally, I think it’s between MSN and Google, even though I read on Webmaster World last night that Yahoo has the most indexed pages spidered, I still think they’re a ways back from where Google’s at. The long horse, the long bet right now is MSN, but how can MSN really be a long-shot. I think given the proper time and resources, which they definitely have, I think they are the, in my mind, they are probably the biggest contender to knock Google off.

Monte: Wow. Yeah.

Greg: Google is a great company, I think they have a wonderful product. I just, you know, we all saw what happened to Netscape when they got in the crosshairs of Microsoft, and, I don’t know, it’s probably not a place that I would want to be.

Monte: Well, it’s hard being number one, that’s for sure.

Greg: Yeah. Definitely is. Definitely is.

Monte: That’s for sure. Well, Greg, we really appreciate your time today and for anyone that wants to go check out BestoftheWeb go to their web site botw.org and you can get a little bit more ideas. Is there any other sites that people should visit that are pretty popular?

Greg: Yeah. I would just like to throw out that we just launched yesterday for BestoftheWeb, botw.org, a free trial on advertising for our sponsorships. So basically is breaks down to a 60-day free trial, free direct link to your site, you’re in control of the anchor text, the keywords, the description; and after 60 days, if you like it, you stay on, if you don’t, drop off, no charge.

Monte: That sounds like a great opportunity. I think we’ll sign up tomorrow.

Greg: Yeah. Yeah. It’s great. We launched it to our members. We announced it to our existing members last night and we got slammed. So if you like free advertising, I’d say stop by, but doing it quickly; because good caps are going.

Monte: Oh that’s great. Yeah. Everybody go visit BestoftheWeb, botw.org, and sign up for the free trial, get 60 days, don’t pay a thing, and you’ll see how fruitful it’ll be for you. So Greg, I guess I’ll see you in a couple hours at our bash.

Greg: You certainly will.

Monte And I appreciate your time today, and glad we were able to have you on the phone.

Greg: My pleasure, thank you.

Monte: Okay, take care.

Greg: Right. Bye bye.

Monte: Well, before I wind up the show here at SES, I just wanted to let everybody know about this At Home Liquidating Trust Sale again; because it hit the news all day today. Again, just two notable, very large sales that you should be aware of is of course the purchase of property.com by Rick Schwartz, one of our customers, the Web Father, purchased property.com for $750,000 this past week to add to his valuable domain inventory. He happens to own erealestate and properties.com, so he’s basically got a lot of the real estate market wrapped up from that purchase. So, I think it was a very strategic and great move on his part to swallow up that name. And another very notable sale, although not as big, but one that’s very strategic in nature for the ecommerce shopping cart community is the purchase of shoppingcart.com by MonsterCommerce, and it’s a domain name that we represented and held safe in Moniker’s account on behalf of the At Home Liquidating Trust. Again, this was the former inventory for the ExciteAtHome merger that went belly-up in 2001. There’s 119 names in this portfolio for sale, and many have expressed a great deal of interest just from the stories today to buy out the whole portfolio. So if there is anyone that is on the line that is interested, just send me an email Monte@Moniker.com; and I will be happy to give you some more information and details about it. I guess the other two big names out of that bunch are home.net and stuff.com. Obviously, stuff.com has a lot of potential, potentially as an eBay competitor to sell stuff and auction. That was the intent actually I believe by the ExciteAtHome group when they first bought it, was to get into the auction site and compete directly with eBay with selling everybody’s stuff. Of course Stuff Magazine is a magazine owned by Maxim, I believe, and they should have some interest in it as well. And then home.net name used to be the end of everybody’s email address for the ExciteAtHome offering, and of course it has lots of potential both from the former ExciteAtHome ISP business for competitors, but even more so for the real estate market, cause it receives literally thousands of type-in visitors every single day. For a .net name, it’s probably one of the most powerful .net names there are on the web. And so, both of those names should drive premium prices in excess of $300,000 to $400,000. It will be interesting to see who will be entering into the auction of those, and I’ll be keeping everybody informed on that. So, again, if anybody is interested in the portfolio, give me an email at Monte@Moniker.com. We have a couple other exciting and interesting sales all in the works right now, and we’ll be happy to give everybody an update at the next broadcast, which will be next Wednesday, at what’s going on with that. Again, next Wednesday’s show I will have Jacqueline Crawford from the At Home Liquidating Trust to talk a little bit about the history of the company and the for sale, and potentially what’s going to be evolving over the next week with the other domain names. I believe we’re going to have Chris McMichael on from Military.com to talk about how important the domain name acquisitions have been for them since both before and after their purchase of or being acquired by Monster.com. And we’ll have them on the air as well. So with that, I’m going to end the show. Get ready for our big bash, our second big search engine bash, we had our first one at Webmaster World and our second one is going to be at SES tonight. And I’ll see you next week live from the Boca Studio or from my office. Have a great week, and we’ll see you when I get back.

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