Victor Pitts with his guest David Allen from UltimateMagazine.com

[Commercials]

Victor: Hello, everybody. This is Victor Pitts. I'm the Sales Director over at Moniker, and I'm subbing for Monte Cahn. Monte can't be on the show, so I appreciate your indulgences as I do the show for him.

We have a great guest on tonight. Our special guest tonight is a gentleman by the name of David Allen. David Allen is the owner and CEO of both UltimateMagazine.com and ChooseDomain.com. And we're going to have David on the air in just a few minutes. We're also going to talk a little bit about the upcoming T.R.A.F.F.I.C. show, which is coming up next week and some things that we'd like to tell you about the show that's going to make it a very distinguished show in the industry and think that you'll all enjoy it and Monte will be back on the air next week, and this is something that I appreciate – the opportunity to fill in for him and as I had mentioned, I'm the Sales Director over at Moniker. I'd like to say hello to all of our listeners out there and on the actual Chat Line that's going on simultaneously on the show. My name is “Hey Vick” – you may have seen me on here before. If you have any questions, this is an interactive show. The show is put out for you. So if you have any questions that you'd like to ask our guest or myself, you know, feel free to go ahead and post it in there. And any kind of suggestions on making the show a better show and providing more information that you're looking for, we'd always appreciate your suggestions, so they always would be welcome.

And a little bit about the gentleman that's going to be coming on after me. This guy has been in the industry; he's a domainer. He has quite a collection of domains, both in specialty magazine area as well as some more mainstream type of names, and he has, also, a very interesting background and where he got his start – its not the conventional path, certainly, if there is a conventional path in this particular industry but he actually has some celebrities and so forth that he's come into contact with many, many times over his life and as a photographer in the Rock and Roll industry. So, I look forward to David's, a little bit about his background and try to explain to us how you go from doing that to becoming a domainer and running a couple of successful online shows

Alright, guys. We'll be back in just a moment.

[Commercials]

Victor: Well, good evening everyone. Once again, this is Victor Pitts. I'm subbing for Monte Cahn, so yes, you do have the right station. This is Domain Masters, hosted at WebMasterRadio.fm.

It's my pleasure to substitute for Monte tonight. He will be back on the air at his regularly scheduled time next week. But for right now, as far as who I am, I am the Sales Director over at Moniker. I've been with them now going on two years, and prior to that I had a background in the web development business and search engine optimization and you know, basically come from the same field as many of you had, and prior to that was in the data communication industry, going back quite some time ago and helped to sell some of the equipment and engineer some of the equipment that actually went into the internet in the early days as it was being delivered commercially to the marketplace.

So things have changed a lot since I've gotten involved in the industry. And speaking of things that have changed a lot, I'd like to introduce a special guest here tonight. This is a gentleman by the name of David Allen. And David is a domainer. He has a large collection of domains. He has some interesting ways in which he's using it and we're going to go into it a little more in just a minute. He also has a very interesting background and I'd like to welcome, first of all, David; are you on the air?

David: I'm here.

Victor: Alright. Well, hey, listen, I appreciate you coming on the show here tonight.

David: Thanks for having me.

Victor: And what we'd like to do, David, if you could just kind of give us a little bit of a background of your experience prior to the internet and please do explain how in the world did you get the place you are right now.

David: Well, I've been a journalist my whole life. I started out as a music Rock photographer when I was 14. And since then, I worked with thousands of magazines with photos and stories. And when day, in the early stages of the internet, I realized that when you put a magazine story together and you put all these great photos and stories together, and you have to throw it away the next week and start all fresh in a magazine, so the internet came along where you could put unlimited photos and animation and all kinds of special effects and it could be on forever and it could reach a much broader audience. And so I created a magazine and that's where I started in 1999 with a magazine called 2000Magazine.com and since then I bought up magazine.com names, which I now have 1100 of them, which steer either to the front or interior section and that's my magazine project. At the same time, I bought another 5,000 dot com names at the same time that are my favorite, all sorts of categories that are media-related.

Victor: Okay. How did you . . . you mentioned that you were a photojournalist before; can you tell us a little about that? What kind of photojournalist, what was your specialty?

David: Well, I started out when I was 14 just playing first-row-center for the Rolling Stones and The Who and Led Zeppelin and shooting shows day and night at CB-Jeebies and Grateful Dead across California and all around the United States and building up this huge collection of Rock and Roll photos, and moved into celebrity photos and basically just worked for thousands of magazines all those years and just became a photographer-journalist.

Victor: Wow. And how did you translate that back exactly to the magazine business? Because I assume you had a bunch, a collection of photos under your rights and the magazine, online magazine was a forum for publishing some of that?

David: Yeah, basically, I just wanted to hit a much broader audience instead of like Hampton Magazines in The Hamptons or New York Magazine in New York; realized it's a very big world out there and everybody likes celebrity photos and so you can hit Japan and China and Germany and everything on the internet and just decided to start this thing that I think one day will be one of the biggest magazines in the world.

Victor: And I notice you have a . . . I've been to UltimateMagazines.com, which is the site that's your magazine site and I notice you have a pretty interesting way as you go through the different categories and so forth, you have some stickiness that's applied to each of the sites and some things that make the site interesting to people all around. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

David: Well, when you go into the magazine, there's 2,500 opening pages you'll get, so you'll never go in and see the opening page different. There's a QuickTime movie that opens up for a short period of time. There's a couple hundred different ones of those, so the thing is always changing with variety and I'm not a conservative kind of guy so there's a lot there's a lot of color and a lot of effects and I think it keeps people's attention when you have a lot of variety going on, on a lot of subjects.

Victor: Right. Is this something you do yourself? Do you dabble in the video web development aspect as well?

David: Ah, yep; I did it all myself.

Victor: Okay; alright. I imagine its pretty time consuming?

David: Yes. I work on it 10, 15 hours a day for many, many years. You have to experiment and see what kind of scripts are out there that you can put in that do all these special things and test them out and see if you like them and you move on and you learn everyday by your experimenting in that kind of way, too.

Victor: Now, how does a potential buyer for one of your magazine sites, from your experience, how do they generally approach you for, you know, with interest to purchase one of the sites, or one of the domains?

David: Well, my domain, ChooseDomain.com, that's my domain store, and in there it has 6,000 domains that are for sale, at different prices; the price is not in there. And they would just email me the one they're interested in, and if we come across a price that we both agree upon, then we just sign it right over and they can have it for their use within the hour.

Victor: Right. How's the . . . so it's a pretty quick turnaround time, then, to do something that fast.

David: It's pretty quick. You just do a Paypal and when the money's received, you sign the domain over with, you know, I use RegisterFly, which is a very reliable company and you just sign it right over and they start an account and they can direct it to their website, you know, within, within minutes, really.

Victor: Okay. Gotcha. And you mention you have quite a big collection, then, of non-magazine sites; and how did you, you mentioned that you started off with the magazine focus; how was it that you started collecting these other types of sites, ‘cause that's a pretty big collection by comparison.

David: Well, you can't live on just magazine dot names alone; as I'm looking for them day and night, I always look for my keywords, and so people have what they're favorite keywords are in this, whether its “domain” or “traffic” or “cellular” or; and they'll put it in different ways to search for it and basically you buy whatever you think is good, instead of . . .

Victor: Okay.

David: With my magazine thing, I'm always looking for magazine names, day and night, and so that's how I got 1,100 of them.

Victor: Right.

David: A lot.

Victor: Right. And how is it you come up with some of these names? You just spin ‘em or do you, what is the thought process that goes in one's mind for . . . with combining it with a magazine? Because its an interest that's certainly on the internet certainly has made it possible to have so many very special, focused, you know, type of magazines, ‘cause there's a lot of special interest groups that now have or are able to network and access information that is readily available on a world wide basis and so there's . . . there internet's certainly the premier medium for the niche type of organization. How is it you go about choosing these domain names for the magazines and what is the basis of that?

David: Well, I started out creating my own names, what I thought sounded good, in the beginning but then I got into this whole thing where I would look for a domain name the second it expired in the world, and that's where my main amount of names are, is I know when something is a great name and its going to be expired and [inaudible] deleted and given up in that particular moment and the trick is just grabbing it at that second by whatever services that you use. So I don't really think of the names now, I just kind of play it by ear and see and decide, well, that's a great name, I'm going to buy it when its deleted . . . [inaudible]

Victor: Okay. So the majority of the names you're getting today, you're getting from the drop services, then, as opposed to like a new registration.

David: Right. Yeah, that's why I never know how long the name has been in existence. People ask, well, how much traffic does it have, how long, when was it registered first and I never know because I get so many and I get ‘em from people who already had ‘em and it's a hard question to answer when people ask me.

Victor: Right. I know that you and I had had a conversation here the other day and I just would like to go back to it because I think it would be interesting, you know, for our listening audience. A lot of people these days are buying domain names based up the, you know, their plans are to monetize the traffic and you know, what they look for when they inquire about a domain name is, you know, what kind of traffic it has produced and how it monetizes and then, you know, they'll base their bid price based upon that. Are you approached by people asking for that type of information from the names that you own?

David: Yes. People all the time they ask how much traffic a name is getting because they want to point it to a Pay Per Click page. But I tried that. I don't really like the look of those pages. I mean, its good for a domain owner to get the money generated from somebody clicking on those pages but as a person surfing the internet, you don't really like to come across these link pages and you know you tend to leave them pretty quick, usually, you don't want to click on any of these mortgage links or whatever; you're just not looking for it. So, I decided instead of doing some of these Pay Per Click pages, I send all my name either into my ChooseDomain.com or my UltimateMagazine.com and then I submitted, all my 6,000 names are submitted twice a month to 60 search engines. So its continually making the project more and more powerful by sending the names into my own project there instead of sending it to somebody else's store.

Victor: Okay. Alright. You and I met the first time, I think it was about this time last year and you were down here in Florida and was at the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. show, the inaugural T.R.A.F.F.I.C. show, and you were there attending it. I believe you mentioned your schedule that you couldn't make it this year. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, from what your impression of the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. show, ‘cause that's coming up next week and I know that many in our listening audience will be attending the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. show; can you talk a little bit about your impressions, some of the information that you, ah, the things that stood out in your mind from the show, and maybe any other shows also that you have attended that helps you in your selection of names, or running of your business?

David: Um, sure. I attended last year's show and it was an incredible experience. I learned so much there that my thoughts have completely changed since last year, just with all the different lectures there. I didn't know as much about Pay Per Click in those days and how it all worked and all the different companies involved with it. Going down there was just fascinating, I just, it was just an incredible show. It should be opened up to more than, I think its 250 people this year and last year it was 125 . . .

Victor: Yeah, its really grown . . .

David: . . . there's so many people but I guess they want to keep a limited amount of people just to be able to invite the people that they want to attend so it can grow to the right levels but it was just an amazing show.

Victor: Yeah, it is unique. . . go ahead . . .

David: No, I learned a lot there, that's for sure.

Victor: Okay. Yeah, its definitely a unique show in that its driven by the domainers themselves as opposed to, you know, by the industry, if you will, you know, projecting, you know, what it is they want you to learn and what they want you to know. It's kind of like, you know, the reversal of it being pulled down as opposed to push out. And the guys that put on the show do a great job of, you know, lining up the speakers and sponsors and so forth, its just done in a different way and it really is driven by the domainers and it makes it a different show and you can get the questions answered that you want to have answered.

You're also active, I think, on the, those boards, is that correct? In some of the forums and that you participate in some of those?

David: Yeah. There fun to check out. Me and my wife, we take a look and observe what people are asking and answer different requests, here and there . . . fun to do if you have time.

Victor: And lets see, your wife's name is Maya, is that correct?

David: Right . . .

Victor: And you have, how many children is it?

David: I have one great boy, a twelve-year old . . .

Victor: And how old are your children?

David: Justin is twelve, great kid, into sports and keeps me busy [laughs].

Victor: [laughs] Alright. And, now, how long have you been married?

David: Ah, twelve years.

Victor: Twelve years. And how long have you been out of the Rock photography business? [laughs]

David: Well, I started when I was 14, in 1974 . . .

Victor: Okay . . .

David: . . . and since then I've probably acquired one of the biggest Rock and Roll photo collections in the world, and celebrities, too, and I have a lot of content. This magazine I'm putting together will not be short of content. It'll always stay interesting. And I hopefully will be looking for a buyer for part of it, you know. I'll always keep 15% but its going to take a hundred people working on it to do what I really want – put it out in all languages and put every category made and its got every section, every kind of thing in it, like in the travel section, you'll have like a Mexico section and that's called Mexico Magazine; the Hawaii section's called Hawaii Magazine; I have every Caribbean Island Magazine; sports, like Yankees Magazine; Knicks Magazine; Nets Magazine. That's the concept of it; its directed into sections, but they have their own power of being put into a search engine independently.

Victor: Right, right. We've got some people, I think they're checking out your site, some of the people that are [. . . tending] into tonight's show and like you said, you're definitely not conservative in your look. It's definitely an interesting approach of building out the site. You had mentioned, also, in your little bio that I took a look at, and something that personally fascinates me because I was a Grateful Dead fan, that you were friends with these guys and that you've done 175 photo shoots.

David: Ah, I saw 175 shows across the United States . . .

Victor: Wow.

David: . . . and getting a photo pass and getting back stage and in the recording studios and places like that, you become pretty friendly with the people.

Victor: Wow.

David: I wasn't just a Dead Head, though; I also was working for Led Zeppelin doing their promotional shots and I was house photographer at CB Jeebies in the Punk days and through a wide variety of changing attitudes.

Victor: Wow. Wow, that is fascinating.

David: It was a lot of fun.

Victor: And are you still doing some of the photo shoots?

David: I do. I do more of a journalist in New York working for a newspaper and so I go to the parties more. Instead of doing Rock n' Roll as much, I'll do, go to like movie premier parties and stuff like that just for fun.

Victor: Wow.

David: Okay? But my main thing is my internet stuff.

Victor: You're living the good life, man. You got the best of both worlds. [laughs]

David: Devoted to my projects.

Victor: Well, where do you see some of the changes coming down the road as far as the internet? You got any kind of predictions on that based upon the progress that you've seen over the last 12 years?

David: Well, I like that the internet, everybody's getting faster and faster connections. When I started, I used to have like this movie going and the flash going and it would just be, you know, it would blow some people's computers to have all that stuff going on but now everybody's got these fast connections and they're going into live, like what's going on now, live radio on the internet to live television. It's great that everybody's getting these fast connections, gets you more special effects, more, its just incredible the way gadgets are progressing. I love it.

Victor: It's amazing, absolutely amazing and pod casting and everything else; I just saw that iPod just came out with a brand new product and it makes, what, like the third new product that's come out with in the last 60 days or so? With the video.

David: I got to get into that. I need to get into some pod casting.

Victor: Yeah. Oh, my God. Well, let me see here. There's some, you also today mentioned that you had a little bit of an issue, that, is there anything that you'd like to discuss about that? Did you ever get that problem resolved regarding the domain names that you think you had . . . .?

David: I actually don't really want to bring it up. It's something to do with the dot name of extension that a group of people decided to take all my domain names and make dot names out of them, when they're dot coms, without even telling me for a couple months, and directing it into a Pay Per Click page. So it's kind of like, its strange, its sort of a shocking thing but I really don't want to get into the whole effect of it but you never know what's going to happen next.

Victor: Right. Now do you do any names besides the dot com names?

David: A few here and there, but not really. I do mainly dot com, 99%. I have few that I've acquired from different places but I don't look for them. When I do searches, with things that I want its all dot com. I just, I think the value is there more, than the other ones.

Victor: For some of our listeners, they may not know, you know, that you mentioned that you played the drop services and you look at the names just about the time that they're going to drop. Can you just kind of go through the, you know, how do you get that list? Where is it that you go to get the list to get the names that are dropped so that, again, because not all listeners know where they can go to access that information?

David: Well, there's many places that I get names from. I might, drop thing, pool.com is very good. They'll tell you, you put you're specific word in and they'll tell you when something's going to be deleted, and usually a dot com is deleted around 2:00 o'clock in the afternoon, 2:00 – 2:30; and the way to grab it is going to be hard, there's a lot of techniques to grab that name that becomes deleted between 2:00 and 2:30. Then Pool also has some people who are selling names there; sometimes I grab a few of those; they go down in price, gradually – they can go down all the way to $8. Sometimes there's a few in there. Sometimes eBay, people don't see the value in some of the names there and I'll get a few there which turn out to be pretty good. My favorite one is called “justdropped.com”, that's a very good one.

Victor: What is it that you like about it?

David: Ah, well, you put in a keyword and it'll tell you what was deleted in the last 4 hours or the last 24 hours, and I find that no matter how much you can prepare yourself for a name is going to be deleted, most places, the thing that would surprise you is that most names are deleted without any kind of notice. You know, you'll look at it and say, wow, that was deleted 10 minutes ago or a half hour ago and do that and you just got to keep looking and all of a sudden, you get surprised, all the time. It could be 5 in the morning when you happen to wake up and put in “magazine” as your keyword and go, wow, that was deleted. Some people, well, most people don't see the value as much in the magazine names, but like say, luxury or cellular or you never know what, you know, people like as their domain names but you'd be surprised what gets deleted, all of a sudden, at the last second.

Victor: Wow.

David: I'm in shock sometimes which ones I grab, at all hours.

Victor: You know, its amazing sometimes just the ones that are picked up.

David: Yeah, I know [laughs].

Victor: So you look at them and you wonder what they see in that but there's some techniques and processes that you can look and see, you know, if the name has some traffic on it. That's a big component these days for, you know, what names are grabbed. You know, ‘cause some people will buy the names to build out a brand or to protect a brand; other ones are buying the name for future speculation, like some of your names, the magazine names, you know, for when the demand is right and the value is right and you make a sale. And other people are aggregating the traffic to their main websites, like what you're doing also with the 5,000 names or so that you're pointing back to your main sites. Then there's the whole monetization aspect, which is relatively new and just fascinating how much that generates the domain economy these days with the actual traffic monetization. So its just amazing.

David: [inaudible] paper [inaudible] like stuff.

Victor: Well, I know that years ago when I first got involved in the internet and I started my own web development company and ran it for about 8 years. At that time, my whole perception of what was a lot of domain names was far different that what it is now, ‘cause I couldn't imagine why anyone would need hundreds of domain names, let alone thousands or ten thousands or in some cases, hundreds of thousands but its just created this entire industry and there's just so many ways that a person can make a decent living on it and create such companies as yours, for example, and many others. We have many others that we've had on the show, you know, in the past.

David: It's an incredible world out there in domaining. It's a lot of fun and it's really at an early stage.

Victor: Now, does your wife help you out with some of the choosing of the names? Or is she involved in the business?

David: Ah, sometimes. She used to do it more. She does more of the selling of the names, but, yeah, she's great. She works with me on everything.

Victor: Awesome. Awesome. Well, listen, David, I appreciate you participating on the show here tonight and you've been a great guest, and I know its been interesting for the people that are listening in. Many of them, I'm sure, can relate to some aspect of your background, whether it be from the domain perspective or the “I went to a Grateful Dead concert, also”, but they didn't get front row seats. [laughs]

So I certainly do appreciate you being on the show, and you know, there'll be, well, did you ever get your connection issue with the Apple resolved, where you could tune into it?

David: Ah, no, I didn't. I'm having a little trouble getting it on a Mac. I'm a Mac fan, being a photographer forever, so, I love my Mac.

Victor: That's most of the photography and Art world is on the Mac and so we need to get that issue resolved. But for anyone who didn't get to listen to the show, you know, tonight you can spread the word that there will be an archive of the show, as there is an archive of all the Domain Master's shows at Moniker.com. If you got to the front page of Moniker.com, on the right hand side of the home page, there is a link that will take you to the Domain Master archive section and every show that we've ever had on, we put back in there on archive and you can listen to it at your convenience. In addition, many of the shows actually have a text transcript that you can download, too. Domain Masters has many different guests time and from the domain industry and legal experts from the domain industry, SEO people, search engine people, its just quite a mix of people that make up this industry and all the different directions that it goes in and we appreciate certainly your participation here on the show tonight.

David: That's great. Thank you very much for having me.

Victor: Alright, David. Have a good night.

David: Okay, thanks. Good night.

Victor: Okay, folks, we want to remind everyone also that next week is the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. show that's going to be down in Del Ray Beach in Florida. The show is, again, very unique in that its driven from the marketplace; its actually put together by domainers and they call the shots in terms of the type of people that they want to come to it, the types of subjects that they want to talk about. Its an interactive type of format. If you haven't been to it, I know that, I think they're already closed out this year in terms of there's limited seating available. You can check, I'll try to get you a link here in a few minutes, and see if we can try and check if there's any more seats available for the show but I think that they're actually booked. It is, again, driven by domainers. The show is very interactive. Its not a typical seminar type of thing. It's more you stand up in the audience and you ask the kind of questions from a panel that you want to ask and there's a lot of give and take, a lot of good information. There's no holds barred. Rick Schwartz is one of the organizers of this event and the brainchild behind putting this show on. Just a tremendous show. And certainly encourage you to check it out.

Moniker will be there and we're going to be participating in a few different levels. One of them is my understanding and when Monte listens to this show, he can correct it if I got this wrong, but we're actually going to have some microphones and we're going to be walking around doing interviews of people at the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. show. So if you want to be on the radio, if you want to be on WebMasterRadio and you see us coming with the microphones, then come on over and talk to us. If you don't want to be on the show, then run and run very fast, because if we catch you, we're going to try to get an interview out of you and put you on to the show. So, it'll be an interesting perspective in that we're going to have some big time domainers and try to get some live interviews and try to get some information on a real time basis.

In addition to that, there's going to be an auction that's going to be held. On the auction, there will be a, ah, it's going to be a live auction with a live auctioneer and you have to be present in order to participate in the auction. But there's going to be some great names that are going to have real value associated with the names. In other words, we're trying to make it a good deal for everybody for when they come, so you know, going to have some great domains and actually do a live auction there on the spot.

So, if you're going, you going to have a great time and you're going to learn a lot. If you're not going, you'll get to hear about the show and we'll be passing out information, you know, not only through this radio station but also through many of the forums and DNJournal and shows such as that.

So I believe we're coming up here real soon on a commercial break and then we'll come back and do a wrap on the show. If you have any kind of questions, you know, please do throw ‘em at me here on the forums or on the chat and I'll do my best to respond back to you and if I don't know the answer myself then I'll make sure I get back in touch with you. Again, my name is Victor Pitts with Domain Masters and you can see me on the chat as “Hey Vic” and I'm subbing for Monte Cahn for tonight and for tonight only. He'll be back on the air next week. So, if you guys will stay tuned I think we're going to be going to a commercial break here real soon.

[Commercials]

Victor: . . . . we'll do a rerun, he asks that I sell it for him and I appreciate the opportunity and I appreciate your indulgences as I went through the show. I certainly thank our guest tonight, David Allen. David from UltimateMagazine was on the show and certainly appreciate the time that he spent with us and hopefully you got some good information out of it.

Next week we'll be doing the [inaudible] . . . . if you're coming down, there's a live auction. Make sure that you participate; got some great domain names that we're going to be putting up for auction and it's a first of its kind that [inaudible] that there's actually a live auctioneer auction off domain names. So this is going to be a first of its time and of course its happening at a any sort of business over at Moniker or anything within the industry . . . [inaudible] I'll be on the air for another 15, 30 minutes and again, I appreciate your indulgences tonight. So without further ado, thank you all for listening in and you know, be the master of your domain. Tune into DomainMaster next week at the same time, Wednesday, at 7 p.m.

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