Victor Pitts chats with Steve Scott and Monte Live From SES San Jose
08/09/2006 - Victor Pitts
Victor H. Pitts will fill in for Monte Cahn while Monte is at the Search Engine Strategies show in San Jose, California. Victor interviews Steve Scott, a highly respected domainer from the big island of Hawaii. Afterwards, Victor gets an update from Monte Cahn direct from SES San Jose. Monte and Victor will provide an update on what is happening in a busy week for the domain industry.
[Commercials]
Victor: Hello, everyone, this is Victor Pitts. I am hosting Domain Masters tonight for Monte Cahn. Monte Cahn is in San Jose, California for the Search Engine Strategy Show and he will actually be joining us in the second half of the show so we’ll be saying hello to Monte a little bit later on and Monte’s got some information; I’m sure you all have questions and interests in what’s been going on in the domain industry for this last week and Monte’ll be able to give you all an update as well as tell you what’s going on at the SES show.
The first part of the hour, though, we’re going to be interviewing a domainer from Hawaii, the Big Island of Hawaii, a guy by the name of Steve Scott and a real interesting guy. He is living at large, as they say. He is living the good life and its made possible by the Internet and he’s going to tell us little bit about what’s going on with him and how he got started in the industry. He’s got some interesting opinions about the domain industry as well. So with that being said, we’re going to break for a commercial and then when we come back from commercial, we’ll have Steve Scott from Hawaii.
[Commercials]
Victor: Welcome back, everyone. Again, this Victor Pitts. This is . . . the show is Domain Masters, where we help you become the master of your domain. As mentioned, we’re going to have Monte Cahn on the show the second half of our program. He’s going to be coming live from the Search Engine Strategy show out in San Jose, California. He’s going to give us an update on the show as well some information on the industry in general. It’s been a busy week in the domain industry and I’m sure you guys want to hear from Monte directly. So again, we’ll have him on the back end of this show.
But, first of all, I’d like to welcome our guest tonight, Steve Scott. Steve is living large, living the good life, living a life that has me a little bit envious in that he is in Hawaii. He quit his nine-to-five job. He is living a few miles south of Hilo on the Big Island of Hawaii and he’s in a rural area; his nearest neighbors a few miles away. He has a couple of acres of property and a big lush tropical garden all around him and this is all made possible by the Internet and his involvement in the Internet. He’s got quite a few domains; I won’t say explicitly how much. But its quite a bit of them and they’re all good. And he has a knack for picking some real winners. And, Steve, do we have you on the air?
Steve: Sure do.
Victor: Okay. Well, welcome to Domain Masters. Appreciate you coming onto the show tonight. So how was things in Hawaii today?
Steve: Oh, its wonderful. Even when it’s raining – and it rains here a lot; its like 300 inches a year and a lot of people don’t like living here – but even when its raining, it’s just gorgeous and wonderful.
Victor: Well, a lot of people when they think of Hawaii they think automatically of you know, Waikiki and Honolulu but they’re on the Big Island. I understand you’ve got quite a variety of climates there.
Steve: We have every climate you can imagine. When I first started looking about 7 years ago, 8 years ago, to live in Hawaii, I went to all the islands and I was just stunned. The east side of each island, the side that doesn’t get the wind, doesn’t get the rain, so its dry and the . . . that’s on the west side . . . the east side that I live on, that’s were the rain comes in from the wind and it just . . . we get 250 inches here. But we’re about 2,300 feet up the volcano – the active volcano, yes, in my backyard, right down, 15 miles down the hill into Hilo, they only get about 100 inches of rain. It can be raining like crazy here and we go down into Hilo and its T-shirt, 85-90 degree weather.
Victor: Now, do you get many rumblings or anything from the volcano?
Steve: We get a little. It’s like Los Angeles. I came from Southern California. It’s nothing new to me. We get little rumblings all the time. But you barely feel and maybe once every three or four months, we’ll get a 3 or a 3.5 and it’s just a little shaking and nothing to it. Luckily, its one of the most active . . I think it’s the most active volcano in the world. It’s been spewing molten lava for like 18 – 20 years and its . . . doesn’t want to blow up. It’s just venting its stuff out so that’s cool – or hot, excuse me.
Victor: So, how long have you live there in Hawaii?
Steve: 4 years now.
Victor: 4 years? And . . .
Steve: Well, actually, 5 or 6. I came over here many, many trips, looking for a place that I could afford and found that there was a bottom in the market in Hawaii and I bought 2 acres and a 4,000 SF house for less than I sold my 1,200 foot townhouse/condominium in Van Nuys, California. I really, really, really got lucky.
Victor: [laughs] Now, I know that you have kind of gone through a kind of transition in life in terms of the types of jobs that you were doing and work that you had done before now and as we had talked about in the past, as living there, you’re in pretty much a rural area of Hawaii and you haven’t always had the best access to technology and so forth, is that right?
Steve: Oh, it was terrible. The first three years were excruciating. We’re about 5 miles from the telephone center, the CO Central office, so I couldn’t get any DSL and we’re about a mile past the cable. But they would have extended it for $34,000, which just wasn’t in my budget. So I was stuck with 28K and I mean, at the fastest, 28K dial-up for about 3 years and anything that should have taken an hour to do, literally took me 10 hours to do. It was excruciating. I finally worked a deal out with a company that’s expanding and we put a big antennae on top of my roof and I’m now the access point for the neighborhood and we have wireless up and wow, is it nice.
Victor: Oh man. Well, I know you’ve got quite a few domains that you have to manage, so doing that on a 28K modem had to have been excruciating . . .
Steve: Oh, you don’t know. Just waiting for things to come down. And worse, it rains so much here, the lines are terrible and 28K sometimes would be in effect 9 . . .
Victor: Wow.
Steve: You have to resend packets so often, so its really, really nice. It took 3 or 4 months just to get the wireless working properly with the number of trees between here and the coast and there’s just a lot of things that needed to be ironed out before we got it working. But it works well . . . I still have my 28K as back up.
Victor: Well, you never know. [inaudible]
Steve: [inaudible]
Victor: . . . 28K will still work.
Steve: Yeah.
Victor: Let me ask you a question, Steve. When did you start collecting domain names? Or better yet, tell us a little about what you were doing just before that and kind of transition it in to where you first got into the domain industry as a domainer.
Steve: Well, I went to work for a friend of mine years ago as a consultant, about, it was about 25 years ago now or 20, as a consultant to help him with his business which was growing really, really fast. And it just . . . we worked together so well that I ended up hiring myself as general manager and stayed there. It was supposed to be for a couple years and it ended being 16 years. And the first ten . . . five, ten years were just fun, because we were developing exciting things; he’s a real brainiac. But then it got to be just a job and I was delegated to just “Steve, our distributor in Germany has a problem.” “Steve, the computer’s aren’t working.” “Steve, we have a site out in the factory.” You know, it was just terrible. So I wanted to do my own thing again. I had been self-employed for many, many years and I registered a few domain names long ago and I lost them to a . . . a very unpleasant situation with a registrar that wasn’t very nice and that made me decide I wanted to learn about domain names and how to protect my domain names and in doing so I realized at that time I could get domain names and work anywhere in the world by making websites to get advertisements, my own advertisements from companies and put them on there or get paid a commission. At the time, Amazon.com had just started and a few others had started like that. I wish I had had the time then, because I would have been a millionaire now. But I’m a real loyal guy and as long as I was still . . . and it wasn’t a 9 to 5 job, it was a 6 in the morning 'til 10 o’clock at night, 10 days a week kind of job.
Victor: Wow.
Steve: Being general manager, you get stuck with everything.
Victor: So, at some point, you decided that you could make enough money off of the domains that you were acquiring and developing and selling and so forth. What as it like going through that transition? Leaving the security of that excruciating hours but you know, steady paycheck nevertheless. And going into something . . .
Steve: Well, I always had the belief that I could do something with them and I knew where I was headed. I didn’t want to spend any time developing them so I didn’t do anything with them, which really bothered me because of the registrars who have parking pages and don’t get your permission and park you r domain and they get the money and they don’t share it with you and that really pissed me off, excuse me on the air, sorry, and it really, really, really infuriated me and finally a point of about 4 or 5 years ago, I just searched and searched and search and finally, came upon . . . I didn’t have any friends in the industry. It was just me starting out by myself. I came upon Pay Per Click and started frantically converting all of my names over to Pay Per Click. I had several thousand names at that point. And within a couple of months, because I was doing that, I got excited and I just . . . every time I would read anything, go anywhere, people would just laugh at me because I’d be reading a menu, even, at Circle Something, reading a newspaper at Circle Something, some natural phrase that would make a good domain name, a good website and especially planning to move to Hawaii, I have hundreds of names that are Hawaii – Hawaii accommodations, Hawaii travel related and it was just a natural and I’m just now at the point after spending a couple of years moving from California to Hawaii, that I’m just now getting ready to start developing them. They’re all right now just being monetized with fabulous Google, Traffic Club, of course, I just started with you guys a few months ago and I’m real pleased with the testing that I’ve been doing.
Victor: Appreciate that. When you first got involved in the industry, did . . . have things changed in terms of your vision of how the domains are being used and how the industry has transitioned? Is it pretty much as you predicted? Expected? Or is it . . . any surprises?
Steve: Its very much as I thought. But for the first time in my life (and this brings up a very important point to anybody listening who hasn’t been to any conferences) one of the most important thing you can do is go to the conferences, learn things in the sessions, meet people, network, exchange ideas. I was still too busy and too away . . . I’m still way far behind from trying to catch up with being stuck with 28K dial-up. I wasn’t going to go to any of them until next year, as I told you. And, I have a lot of names . . . I have over 20,000 names, lets just leave it at that. Somehow, Google heard about it and contacted me and invited me to come there and become a partner and that kind of stuff. And I . . . they said if you’re coming to the TRAFFIC conference in February, they had a VIP session, they had a time where they were discussing the industry with important people (which is wonderful), asking questions and just throwing ideas back and forth. It was really good. That’s where I met Monte for the first time. They asked me if I was attending, would I like to go to that. And I said, Well, I’m not going to TRAFFIC but I will now since you invited me. And then they said, How many of your staff are coming? Huh? I mean, I had no idea I was that overworked. [laughs] I don’t have a staff; I work out of my home, which is good and bad. Its wonderful being able to work anytime I want and having this view and its nice not having to worry about employees anymore. But going to there and finding out that I am at what is really the start – even though domain name industry started many years ago, it died off and people just figured, oh, you can buy a domain name for 50 bucks – buy, I don’t mean register; you can buy a domain name from somebody for 50 bucks – you can still do that, but those days are gone and its really transitioned into as some of the venture capitalists and bankers who were there on the panels and the sessions saying that the domain name industry is one of the fastest growing, most dynamic industries in the histories of commerce. That this all of world commerce will (if not already) will be conducted on the Internet and domain names are the real estate of the Internet. You don’t have a domain name that’s right, you know, you got a problem. Although you can spend a lot of money and brand your own domain name, come up with just some crazy domain name and make it something, but its so much nicer if you have an intuitive sounding word. Like I just sold a domain name a couple of weeks ago for poker – StraightFlush.net for $10,000. And that’s perfect. Perfect just type that in and that’s going to go to their site. They’re going to make a lot of money. They’ll make that money back in no time.
Victor: Yeah. Right. Right. What are you opinions on some of the names that have dashes in it?
Steve: Well, I didn’t think . . . in fact, I regrettably let a lot of them go, because I thought they weren’t much of an in and they weren’t making much money at all. They weren’t paying for themselves. And Matt from SEDO in France (I guess he’s from France) was in one of the sessions in February at TRAFFIC in Santa Clara and that just opened my eyes, because he showed all of . . . showed statistics as to how the names with dashes in Europe have grown in popularity and grown in resale phenomenally over the last 3 or 4 years because its easy for people in other languages to . . . to . . . English to delineate . . . not delineate . . . see the words. The dashes, to me, are just as good now.
Victor: Well, there are actually also there’s some advantages to it from a search engine positioning as well . . .
Steve: Right!
Victor: . . . where it treats them as different . . . it treats them . . . for instance, it uses the dash and it looks at them as key words within the domain name.
Steve: Right, you don’t get mistakes. I’m constantly working with my rep at Google and other places to correct misread and misinterpreted domain names and how they’re being . . . the landing pages just have totally ridiculous results.
Victor: Mm-hm. How, all 20,000 or so of your domain names, they’re not all dot coms, correct?
Steve: They’re probably 70% dot coms and 30% dot nets. I have maybe 100 dot US and a couple of hundred dot INFO and a couple of hundred dot Biz. I let a lot of dot Infos go – sorry, dot Info guys. They just don’t do anything for me. They’re excellent for somebody who has a business or a service and the common .Net are gone. Its great to be able to get your name and not have to pay too much for it. Same thing with .Org. They have their place. I have a couple of .Orgs that make really good money. And I’ve sold a couple of .Orgs for good money.
Victor: Mm-hmm. Do you see a transition of more demand these days for domain TLDs other than the .Coms?
Steve: Well, I’m not into that but from what I heard at the conferences and logically, sure, there’s just so many names to go around. The other extensions are becoming much more popular and I know a couple of guys, that’s all they do and they do extremely well.
Victor: What about country codes and so forth? Do you see much activity of that? Maybe a little bit in Hawaii, which is a very International city? Do you see much demand for the ccTLDs?
Steve: I’m not into it, again. I just have to go by what I heard at the seminars and what the people I met at the lunches afterwards, the meals afterwards, that two or three of them are into those and doing really, really well. I have too much to do just with my .Coms, .Nets and other things. I don’t have any others and I don’t want to get into it ‘cause I might get excited and I just have enough to cover as it is.
Victor: Gotcha. Well, I’ve seen pictures of your home – beautiful home, by the way. And beautiful wife and living in a gorgeous place like in Hawaii, on the Big Island. You left the stress and hectic schedule of the previous employment. Let’s take a little myth buster type of approach. Is it any different now, in real life? Are you working any less hours now as a domainer? Or is it pretty much the same, just a different location?
Steve: Well, with the number of names I have, I’m working far more hours than I was before but its gradually getting less and less and less as I set everything up to auto-renew and I’m building templates to do my own pages for each segment and as time goes on, hopefully by the middle of . . . my target is for the middle of next year to work a couple of hours a week and make a lot of money.
Victor: Awesome. You have any last tips? I know you’ve thrown a couple of them out there but any additional tips that you would like to give our listening audience. Maybe someone that’s just getting into the industry?
Steve: Well, the most . . . maybe a couple of really important ones, and I keep reminding myself of this because I keep goofing up. If you have . . . if you come up with a name and you check it and its good and its available, register it right then. Don’t wait, even a couple of hours. I’ve gone through lists of names and ideas and I said, oh, that’s available and I go back a couple hours later when I’ve finished with all the list and its gone! Don’t wait, period. Next, and I think even possibly more important for your long term betterment is if you don’t go to the conferences, GO! Go to TRAFFIC, go to Domain Roundtable. A perfect example is the Internet is wonderful but email doesn’t work all the time and there were a couple of mistakes (not mistakes), things that went wrong and I thought that Victor Pitts and Monte Cahn were creepy guys that didn’t care and it was just a misunderstanding and because I went to TRAFFIC and met you guys, I realized that couldn’t possibly be. I mean, meeting people in person is so much different than doing things on the Internet. I am so thrilled to learn what guys like you are like and all the other people that I’ve met in the industry. What you learn and who you meet and the ties you make are far, far, far more important than anything else you could be doing.
Victor: Right. That’s great words and great tips and I do appreciate also the kind things that you said. I have one question, though. We have been online chat at the same time as the show’s on, ah, live on the radio, and one of the people on the chat room asks, Do you buy any misspellings and such? Do you do anything with misspellings?
Steve: Yes, I do. I didn’t . . . I used to say, oh, this is a mistake, this is spelled wrong and I’d let go. And a couple of years ago, I realized, wait a minute, they’re good. When I started paying more . .. when I was able to pay more attention and wasn’t in the move and everything . . . I have quite a few; several hundred misspellings that do extremely well and one of the highest, ah, what was it, like three months ago? Voyeur spelled wrong went for $130,000 on like NameWinner or SnapNames or one of those as it was dropping. And there’s nothing wrong with misspellings provided you do your research and you saddle up on it and analyze it and make sure its getting the traffic, the misspelled traffic. I now have a list of words that I know I misspell and that I see are doing well that are misspellings and when I register new names, I also try to remember to tag those on and check those versions also. And I register them, yes.
Victor: Yeah. Excellent. Do appreciate. Well, listen, Steve, I do appreciate you being on the show. I know that you and your wife have some plans for the rest of the day and what time is it there in Hawaii?
Steve: Yeah, that’s funny. It’s 7:30 on the East Coast and gee, we haven’t had lunch yet. It’s 1:30 here.
Victor: [laughs]
Steve: It’s a little odd. At times its awkward but other times its wonderful because I can just ignore the Mainland.
Victor: Right, right. It’s, ah . . . I used to go out there many years ago when I was at Motorola and I had one of my clients, GTE, required me to travel out there at least three times a year and it was quite an adjustment having a six hour time difference between the East Coast and Hawaii. Anyway, listen, I do appreciate you being on the show. Thank you very much. And you’ve been a great guest and good interview and I’m sure that a lot of people would love to be trading places with you, doing the same thing.
Steve: Well, thank you very much for having me on. And thank you, personally, to you and Monte for the assistance you’ve given me. I’ve been at it for several years and I know what I’m doing, but you never know enough. It’s what you know after you learn it all that counts and it takes networking with people who care, like you guys, people you meet at the conferences, to really make this a wonderful experience.
Victor: I do appreciate it, Steve. Take care. We’re going to be breaking now for a commercial. When we come back from the commercial, we’re going to have Monte Cahn on the radio. He’s going to be broadcasting live or on the phone, actually, live from SES out in San Jose and give us an update on, you know, the exciting changes in the industry this week. He’s also going to give us an update on the show itself and some of the things that have happened on the show. So again when we come back from the commercial, we have Monte Cahn on. And thank you so much again, Steve and you guys stay tuned for Domain Masters; we’ll be returning right after this commercial.
[Commercials]
Victor: Welcome back everyone. This is Victor Pitts. I’m guest hosting Domain Masters, where you learn to be the master of your domain. First part of the hour, we had Steve Scott from Hawaii, big domainer there in Hawaii and we really enjoyed the interview and Steve giving us his time here today. But the second half of the hour, we’re going to have Monte Cahn. Monte’s actually out at Search Engine Strategy Show in San Jose, California, where he and our sales team has been out there for the better part of the week. And Monte’s going to be giving us a bit of an update on the SES show, as well as bring you all up to date on some of the happenings in the industry. And, Monte, are you on the air?
Monte: I sure am, Vic. How’re you doing?
Victor: I’m doing great. And how ‘bout yourself?
Monte: Oh, pretty worn out, busy, between the daily activities and the sessions and the booth activity and then the parties, every night; it certainly wears you down.
Victor: Would you say about 4 hours sleep pretty much hits it? Or is that a bit of a stretch?
Monte: Yeah, yeah, that; plus you’re all thrown off because of the timing of the West Coast and East Coast thing, so, but it’s a great conference of . . . as everybody knows, we had the very first domain related panel. It was a really good panel. Those of you that have been here, I’ve received a lot of good feedback that its going to continue. I had a talk with Danny Sullivan afterwards and he was mobbed and I was mobbed after the panel and everybody just thinks it’s a big opportunity to talk about the domaining industry and how it can coincide with search and search engine optimization. So we had a really good panel and I’ll go over some of the highlights on that. The conference, obviously, started on Monday and it ends tomorrow. Today, Eric Schmidt from Google was the keynote speaker and talked about some of the Google innovations and some really neat things coming from Google. We went to the Google dance last night and Vic, you remember the Google dance and you were dancing on the tables last year?
Victor: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. I still do the Google dance every couple of nights at home.
Monte: [laughs] Yeah, so we went to the Google dance last night and they had a kick-ass blues-soul band called Soul Live and some great food, you know, from their chefs and the place and the campus and they set up a really cool Google lab area where they’re showing all the innovative stuff that they’re doing with Google Earth, a new AdSense products; some of . . . a new system called Base, which is part of the Froogle offering and some of the other new innovative products. So you’re going to see a lot of cool stuff coming out from Google. They have a whole building just dedicated to research and development and coming out with new tools and new ideas. The first night we were here, we went to the Ask.Com party and Ask is really going after Google’s market share. Ask is doing a great job. If anybody hasn’t used Maps from Ask.com, you ought to. It’s a . . . they’re really cool. I like them better than like MapQuest or even Google Maps, any of those. And they’re coming out with some really unique products and services as well.
The first day, we did a panel of domaining and address forward driven traffic. And I was the lead speaker on the panel and we covered, you know, domaining in general, what it means to people and what it meant to the room. There was about 300 to 400 people in the room and it also competed with about 4 other sessions. But it was very good turn out. I was on the panel; Josh Meyers from Yahoo! was on the panel; we had John Lisbon, from Poignant, he was the “against” side of domain traffic and I‘ll talk a little bit about why; and we had Andrew Beckman on the panel from Search Ad Network; and we had Hal . . . somebody came in and replace Eton to do the panel discussion, for Google. But anyway, the good news is that there was a really positive feeling in the room about the presentation and about domaining. I opened up a presentation and talked about how . . . what people were doing with domain names today versus yesterday; how the market has changed quite a bit; the fact that there was $850 million in annual advertising and domain name sale dollars going into our industry right now, that we’re responsible for it; 10% to 15% of all ad revenue generated at Google and at Yahoo! now are from direct type in domain names or direct navigation. So we talked a little bit about that. We talked about the big portfolios and how the increase in portfolio ownership has changed from about 2004 to now, 2006. There was only about 4 or 10 large portfolios . . . 4 or 6 large portfolios back in 2004 of over 100,000 domain names. And now there’s more than 20 portfolios that people own that have more than 100,000 domain names each. And, the reason why these portfolios are being purchased is because of the success and revenue generation and traffic monetization from direct navigation. So, we talked about the different uses of domain names. I showed examples and case studies of some of the parking pages we have on our Traffic Club system. Some of the CPA programs that are now coming back to life on using domain names, and some of the mixed approach of using partial content, partial, like, Google ad words mixed in and you know, really looking at which ones perform better and do they? And the big question here at the conference that’s being debated is, does a fully developed website, with content, perform any better than a parking page with links? And the answer is, absolutely not. There is no study or correlation that shows that a fully developed website, with content, is actually performing better than a ad link site or ad link pages from a parking page.
Victor: Which intuitively is going to have more [inaudible] associated to it, because of the development and so forth.
Monte: Yeah. And it doesn’t mean that in a particular niche that a developed site is not going to perform better in particular niches. But on average, trying to determine and predict what somebody’s coming in and typing in on and trying to get to once they get to a website, is unpredictable and there’s no way to really determine it. It’s based off of any hour of the given day from any region around the world at any season, you know, it’s all based on seasonality, geographical particular location, timing and so forth. So it’s a hard thing to predict and the good thing that what people are doing, what we talked about at the conference, was that there’s good mixed approach, to take some of your developed properties and develop them fully out and utilize search engine optimization and really good linking strategies between relevant websites and then use a second tier approach, which is taking domain names, joining affiliate programs, putting up partial content and then seeding it with links; and then the third approach is any of the undeveloped domain names leave on parking pages so that they establish a baseline value and then you can determine from that data what domain names you should be building out next. Where they’re coming from, how many people are visiting them every day and then build them out. Interestingly enough, I rode in the car to the Google dance with Dan Paul Crano, from . . . he’s part of the Associated Cities Network, you know, with the geo-domain group. He owns SanJose.com, LosAngeles.com, SanFrancisco.com – three thousand geo-targeted related names. Really kick-ass city names and geo-targeted domain names. He’s been building a micro-site strategy and watched his revenue drop 75% off of parking pages when he launches his micro-site strategy and so of course, he relates it to, you know, people being stuck in content and not necessarily clicking on the links or the ads that he used to have on the pages. So he believes that some of the pages will turn out to perform as good or better in the long run, but that overall, you’re going to probably take a hit from have four or five related advertising payment links on a page to developing a site and putting content around it and then watching that start to get aggregation and traffic and popularity once it catches onto the search engines and gets linked and everything, then that’s hopefully yet to be seen and a good thing.
Victor: Right.
Monte: Some of the other things we discussed was the new Webside story of domain type-in, domain study. Four years ago, Webside Story, which is the research firm based out of San Diego, did a study that demonstrated that 57% of online users actually type in their end destination, their domain name destination into the address bar rather than going to a search engine. And they ultimately get to that website by typing it into the URL line. Well, you would think with the popularity of Google and Yahoo! and all the search engines and the secondary search engines, that that would actually decrease, that more people would be going to search engines, try to find out where they want to go and clicking from there to get there. Well, quite the contrary. The new study that just came out shows 70% of all Internet surfers type in a domain name at the address bar to reach their destination, and that’s an incredible increase of traffic, especially since the domain industry or the online population has increased dramatically and to have 70% of online type in direct navigation names into your URL and address bar is quite significant. What that does is it has a correlation effect to the type in traffic or the misspells of any given domain name; or the opportunities for direct type in navigation names that are more descriptive, longer in words and characters. Maybe phrases and multiple words put together to try to get to where they want to go. And its really paying off in a big way. So, the direct navigation market, the direct type in domain market is actually expanding and booming and the studies are showing that more and more people are even typing it into the URL, the address bar.
Victor: Mm-hmm.
Monte: So, that’s a very significant piece of data that everybody should keep in mind when you’re looking at domain names and Steve Scott brought up some great points about, you know, if you see something that’s available that you really thought you wanted to buy, buy it then and its okay if it’s a little bit longer, because what’s happening in the search engine world, which was demonstrated in several panels today and yesterday, is that more descriptive searches are getting to very targeted landing pages and conversions are going up. The same is true for domain names. The longer and more descriptive the domain name, the more targeted its going to be. It may not be trafficked as much or have as much traffic, but once they get to an end destination site, they’re going to probably see what they want and buy it. So if you have, Autos.com compared to NewJerseyAutoSales.com – Autos.com is shorter and more general and you know you’re probably going get auto-related information but if you go to NewJerseyAutoSales.com or a city within New Jersey, like HobokenAutoSales, you’re going to get probably information you’re looking to get to, to buy a car.
Victor: Absolutely. It’s a lot more targeted than the other one is and which can be a lot more productive and results in a lot more conversions or sales as a result of pulling in just the right kind of person.
Monte: Yeah, that is correct. So, after I gave my talk on domaining and address bar driven traffic, then Andrew Beckman spoke and he spoke about specific keyword strategies that his company’s been very successful with, with registering domain names. And then doing conversion comparisons on backing up [inaudible] extreme and keyword buying with direct type in names and how its dramatically decreased the cost to serve particular ads and convert better by having domain names as a back up strategy. And so Edie brought some pretty good interesting information about some micro-portals that they’ve done with studies and how they’ve decreased advertising costs for their clients and increased conversion rates by using the combination of key word buying and domain names that match those key words. John [inaudible] from Poignant came in and basically was on the negative side. He had some studies that showed that the domain related traffic was a conversion rate that was extremely . . . was much higher than that of key word and ad word buying and that he felt that there needed to be more tools and more information to derive, you know, that kind of data to make sure that you made the right decision. But later on, after he heard the other three speakers speak, from Google and Yahoo! he actually changed on the panel and basically said that he didn’t think that domain . . direct navigation strategy was a bad thing and that his clients would still probably buy their key word domain names as a back up strategy, even though the cost to serve on his particular study was a lot higher than they were on, you know, Andrew Beckman’s study, because its all about getting customers and getting revenue and getting traffic anyway, and so, he basically admitted that they would still continue to buy domain names even if the cost per click was higher than it was for traditional ad word. So it was pretty interesting how he kind of flipped 180 during that panel discussion.
Victor: What was the attendance like on this year’s show?
Monte: the attendance is packed. It’s probably the most crowded I’ve seen it out of any of the SES shows that I’ve attended and I think I’ve been to 8 so far. The . . . our booth was packed, the floor was packed, the conferences were packed. I think that the party that we sponsoring, the Search Bash, is going to be, like, twice as many people as last year . . .
Victor: Wow.
Monte: There’s a lot of good, positive buzz on the street, on domaining, on domains, on keyword buying, on the advertising strategies and what’s going on with search engine optimization, and so, there’s a lot of buzz in the air. It’s very, very positive.
Victor: Right. Speaking of some of the buzz in the air, I know there’s been a lot of things happening in the industry this week as well. You care to dabble a little bit into that?
Monte: Yeah. We just found out this morning, or maybe it was late yesterday, that GoDaddy pulled their IPO off the market, so for various reasons, I guess, that are yet to be determined, people feel that maybe it was because Bob Parsons, their CEO, decided that he didn’t want to stay quiet in the quite period and he’s a pretty boisterous guy, and you’re mandated to stay quiet in a quiet period and not have an opinion or anything that could influence your share price before you open. So he pulled out his IPO. You know, I think it’s a combination of maybe the IPO environment and market, and maybe what’s going on with some of the other acquisitions that have occurred recently and so he pulled their IPO off the market. Rumor has it, it cost about $1.2 million in just costs to do that move, to try to go IPO and then pull out, so they just threw some money away, which wasn’t probably too good of a decision, but I’m sure he make it for the right reasons. Uh, they also showed quite a bit of loss on their books and I’m not sure if that was going to be picked up positively in kind of a mutual IPO market. I feel he’ll quickly turn that around to a positive revenue and even out the situation but that was a big surprise that they pulled out. Another big acquisition that was announced yesterday (actually, 2 days ago) was the purchase of PRWeb for quite a bit of money and our friends at PRWeb, who we’ve worked with quite a lot, as you know, Victor –they have all their domain names with us and they did very good. They got purchased by Voneck Communications, which is a, I guess, a PR delivery based foundation system that big corporations use and they’re going to be expanding their products and services and offerings to their customers and still delivering the great service and support they have. So that went down a couple days ago, or yesterday, or 2 days ago. Everybody, I think, heard over the last couple weeks about the purchase of BuyDomains by eNom and we announced a little merger yesterday as well, that’s been in workings for awhile . . .
Victor: BulkRegister by eNom – you said BuyDomains; you meant BulkRegister?
Monte: I mean, yes . . . I’m sorry. eNom bought BulkRegister, right [laughs].
Victor: Oh, okay.
Monte: Rumor has it on the street I’m hearing the buzz that Register.com is going to be taken out by someone in the next two weeks, as well. So, we don’t know who it is but there’s some rumor on the street about that. Some other bit of news is that we announced a partnership, part of a strategic move yesterday. Moniker has become part of a holding company call SeeVast. And SeeVast holds three independent operations – one is Moniker.com for its online domain asset management focus; Canoodle.com, which is the contextual advertising and search company; and Pulse360, which is the link, the sponsored link business of the old Kanoodle that has been spun out into its own entity and really kicking ass and taking names in the financial, healthcare, and sports-related industry. And so, we’re not part of an organization that give us some breadth and strength to really still deliver the great service and support and customer focus that we always have and then be able to leverage resources across all three organizations and offer some more products and services to our customers. So its pretty cool and both Eric and I and our whole team, including you Victor, are all in it for the long haul and we’re not going anywhere and we’re more excited than ever to deliver great products and services to our customers.
Victor: Absolutely. We’re staying in Florida, we’re going to continue to do the shows and continue to work the forums and continue to do the radio show and everything else where we can interact with our clientele, so nothing’s changing.
Monte: Yep, nothing’s changing at all, except for the better. We’re working on some very exciting products and services. Everybody that’s listening should be ready for the TRAFFIC conference that’s October 24th through the 27th. If you haven’t gone and signed up and you’re a domainer, or you want to be a domainer or you want to serve any of the domain industry at all, go to TargetedTraffic.com and sign up for the TRAFFIC conference in Hollywood, Florida, at the wonderful, beautiful Diplomat Hotel. Its one of the kick-ass hotels, probably one of the Top 5 hotels in the entire country, I would say and probably situated as the #1 hotel in the State of Florida.
Victor: Excellent. Now, tell people what they’re going to be missing tonight, if they’re not actually there at SES. What’s going to be going on with the party that you’re throwing tonight?
Monte: Tonight, we are throwing our 5th or 6th Search Bash and last year, we did such a great job, we’re having it in the same venue – it’s at Studio 8, which is an old bank building that has 40 foot ceilings and columns inside and a kick-ass bar and we have some go-go dancers coming and a little Sumo wrestling is going to be happening tonight. So its going to be kind of fun and we’re going to give away the poker table at that venue. We have, probably, 600 or 700 business cards already and so the drawings are getting bigger and we’re going to be giving away a poker table. We’re co-sponsoring the event with WebMasterRadio, obviously who’s kicking ass here at the show and covering all the different panel discussions. And by the way, we were one of the sponsors of pod casting the keynote today, from Eric Schmidt from Google and so we’ll be able to offer that podcast on our website and of course at WebMasterRadio. We did a great job partnering with them on that.
So, Search Bash is going to be rockin’ tonight. It starts at 7:30 in San Jose, downtown at Studio 8 and going to run ‘til . . . whenever . . . whenever they kick our asses out [laughs].
Victor: [laughs] Wish I could be there. I’m sure its going to be a great time and sounds like you guys have had an incredibly busy week out there in San Jose and we look forward to having come back down in here to Florida and join us . . .
Monte: Yeah. I’m actually adding tomorrow . . . I’m going to a couple of the panels and conferences. I’m actually having a meeting with Benjamin Eggland from Business Week tomorrow morning at 9:00. He’s very interested in writing a story on the domain industry and so, we’re going to have breakfast together and I think that’s going to be the start of a very big story that’s going to be published in Business Week about the domain industry. So stay tuned for that. And then tomorrow afternoon I’m going to head to our good friends at MarketLeap and go to a barbecue that Norman Michaels’ holding at this house and meeting some customers there. And then from there, Friday I’m heading up to Seattle to meet our friends at MarchX who just came out with a couple big news items here at the show. MarchX launched a 100 really key websites. They picked some of the domain names they purchased back last year and decided to build out very cool websites, micro-sites, with good content and just came out with their annual report and basically have said much of their success and their positive earnings have come from their domain acquisitions and so they decided to build out 100 sites and they also are starting to launch the 75,000 zip codes that they purchased all with .Com names. They have all . . . 75,000 zip codes all around the United States that they purchased to launch a local search strategy. That should be pretty interesting. So I’m going to meet with them, take them to dinner on Friday and also we have a little visit with Microsoft.
Victor: Excellent. Now, do you know who the #1, what the #1 domain sell was of the last week, as reported by DNJournal?
Monte: I certainly do. It is HomeImprovement.com. It actually was the #1 sale for $166,000 and it was also considered the steal for the entire year, for sure. Our good friend and kick ass domainer, Keith Levinson of Acme, purchased HomeImprovement and utilized our services to get the deal done and close the deal up and it was a great acquisition. That by far, is a 7-figure domain name, obviously has a history to it from a previous television show. He got the rights and the trademark along with the domain name and he’s going to be building out a big strategy that’s going to probably make Home Depot and Lowes and a bunch of other people jealous as hell.
Victor: I was with him a little bit last weekend and he actually showed me – he’s already got content on the site. So he’s already moving on it, so wasted no time whatsoever.
Monte: He has a great portfolio now, too. He purchased Audio.com last year and building out a great online strategy for the audio and music industry; audio, visual and music industry. And also owns Vibrator.com; crosses the adult area a little bit. And so he’s got some great names in his portfolio and we’re glad to help him out.
Victor: Excellent.
Monte: How were some of the other sales that were reported?
Victor: Ah, let’s see. #2 on the list (and of course, these are the reported sales; I understand there was another big one that can’t go on here) but the #2 reported sale was ComputerLearning.com, which is $32,250 by SnapNames; #3 was Refinance.org, sold by Moniker, $34,980. And then we go down to $18,054 for 8eclp.org by SnapNames. The rest of them in the $17,000 on down to the $10,000 range. The big one, of course, being the $166,000 for HomeImprovement.
Monte: Yep. Yeah, that was a great steal of the year. That tells everybody who’s listening that you can still get a great domain name at a good price and they’re out there, they’re available. And I met tons of people over the last 3 days out here that have domain names that are just sitting dormant, that aren’t even going to parking pages that are single-word, key word domain names and so there’s still a lot of opportunities to dig in deep.
Victor: Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Well, listen, Monte, any final words here before we call it a night on the show and let you go ahead and get ready to go to the Search Bash?
Monte: Yeah, we’re going to do a little company dinner tonight and then head over to the Search Bash and get things rockin’ and rollin’. Just want to make sure that everybody understands how important it is and just want to re-emphasize what Steve Scott said about attending the conferences and the shows. You know, those of you who were debating whether to come to SES or go to WebMaster World or even the TRAFFIC conference: definitely come, meet us in person, meet your peers, your associates, the people that you may be doing business with, those introductions could be your future and your life going forward for years to come and so its really important key to be out there interfacing and meeting and doing deals and looking the people in the eyes that you’re going to be doing business with and those that are protecting your assets and helping to build them. We, again, are the only registrar here at SES. We’re the only ones focused in on this industry on the entire segment of that market of the Internet, and so we spend a lot of time and energy and money trying to educate and then making sure that people understand the value of their domain names and that they’re not just a $7 or $10 purchase every year, but that they become worth tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars when positioned properly.
Victor: Alright. And I’d like to congratulate the people from PRWeb for the sell of their company. You know, a great job. It’s been fun working with you and I want to thank WebMasterRadio for getting Monte on the line here all from the show. I know you guys have had a busy week here as well and you’re going to have a busy night tonight at the Search Bash. I’d like to thank Steve Scott from Hawaii for being on the show the first part of the hour and spent some time with us and he’s a heck of a personality, if you ever get a chance to meet him face-to-face, you’ll enjoy the moments you get to spend with him, and he is very knowledgeable about the industry and he’s living the big life as a result of his involvement with the Internet and with domain names particularly. So, with that being said, I’d like to go ahead and close the show. I thank you for tuning in to Domain Masters, where you learn to be the master of your domain. Next week, Monte will be back in his regularly scheduled time.
Monte: Thank you.
Victor: Have a good night.
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