Domaining and Address Bar Driven Traffic
Domaining and Address Bar Driven Traffic
01/24/2007 Monte Cahn
We replay back a presentation that Monte gave to the attendees of the Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas. The presentation is titled “Domaining and Address Bar Driven Traffic”. In his talk, Monte will be covering topics such as: how monetization helped the creation of portfolios, the health of the domain industry, what makes a good domain, types of monetization, creating your own portfolio and how brand is impacted by domains.
[Commercials]
Johnny: Good evening, everybody. Welcome to another edition of Domain Masters here on WebMasterRadio.fm. I’m Johnny Brasco, filling in for Monte Cahn. So here’s what we have for you. What Monte did for us tonight was that he had a seminar that he held in front of a lot of attendees at the Affiliate Summit; it was a presentation that he had. The presentation was “Domaining and Address Bar Driven Traffic.” Now, today’s show will feature one of Monte’s popular presentations. In his talk, Monte talks about several topics, including how monetization helps the creation of portfolios and helps the domain industry and what makes a good domain. Also, he talks about types of monetization, creating your own portfolio and how brand is impacted by domain. So, without further ado, we’d like to bring you Part I of Monte’s presentation to the Affiliate Summit, which he calls “Domaining and Address Bar Driven Traffic.”
Monte: . . . as domaining and address bar driven traffic, or better known as direct navigation. My name is Monte Cahn and I’m the CEO of Moniker.com. We’re an ICANN-accredited registrar and also a domain asset management company. We help our customers increase the value of their domain name assets by monetizing traffic, buying and selling domain names, securing them as a registrar, being the “Fort Knox” of registrars to make sure their domain names are safely held and then looking for opportunities to help them grow in value. How many in the room have more than 10 domain names in their portfolio? Great. How many have more than a hundred? A lot. How many have more than a thousand? Ten thousand? Alright. So, for those of you who are just getting yourself familiar with the domain market, I ‘m going to do kind of a what’s-hot-what’s-not-why-is-the-industry-getting-so-incredibily-vibrating-and-increasing-in-value-(the domain names that are increasing in value)-and-why. Some of the interesting statistics in the market and then some of the great opportunities for the future. We’re going to do a couple . . . go through a couple case studies of what some of the corporations are now looking at, and then we’re going to open up for discussion and really talk about some of the scenarios that you all are all in and how we may be able to help you increase the value of your portfolio as well. So, just a little bit about myself and my company. Uhm, we’ve been in the domain name business, I have personally, since 1995. I started investing in domain names in 1995 myself, spending tens of thousands of dollars, thinking that this was going to be like real estate. Some of you have probably done the same thing, and stayed up all night long, you know, registering domain names, uhm, all kinds of different brand names, all kinds of different ideas, looking out for the future and wondering, you know, what kind of return on investment this is going to bring. And so, I did the same thing, hardly got any sleep, did all kinds of domain names, spent $70,000 on domain names and then tried to figure out a way to get money back and help monetize them. So, we were actually one of the first company – or the first company – to actually start a whole resale channel of domain names and actually resell a domain name in the aftermarket. So we’ve been responsible for several thousands of domain name resells. Some of the most interesting ones are the domain name that ever sold for a million dollars, which was WallStreet.com, and the first domain name that ever sold for $2 million, which was Autos.com, which we sold to Cars Direct back in 1999.
Since then we’ve been involved in thousands of domain transactions, created/invented the appraisal system that is now used across the industry for evaluating domain names and their value; started and invented the whole appraisal and escrow process in terms of changing ownership of domain names. So we’ve gotten a lot of views of both domain name owners and now we’ve an ICANN-accredited registrar. I have been since 1999. But managing portfolios of domain names for some very valuable companies and their assets. We manage 1.9 million domain names under management and we own and operate 12 ICANN registrars. We participate in the expired domain market and help customers get domain names for their brands and identities. We provide self-acquisition services to help corporations get domain names that are important to their brand and their products and services without revealing their identity so that prices don’t artificially inflate; we can do that for anybody. And, the main focus is treating domain names like assets, which they truly are. Many of you would not be in the room, would not be in this conference unless your domain names were actively working for you and increasing in value and generating revenue and profit. It’s the most important thing in your business, probably. There’s a big argument: is it more important to have the content and the other things inside the website or is it important to have your domain name? After this session, I think you’ll find that direct navigation, or type-in domain names, are extremely important, extremely valuable, and why. For those of you who don’t know about, you know, the regulatory avenue of domain names, ICANN, which is the regulatory body for the Internet, they regulate the domain name industry. They were empowered by the U.S. Dept. of Commerce and after dot com and dot net and dot org became a registered entity to register domain names, a lot of entrepreneurs like myself went out and registered domain names thinking that it was going to be like real estate, that these are virtual real estate properties that will increase in value. And many people invested a lot of money and time securing those assets.
Initially, domain revenue sources weren’t known. When I registered domain names back in 1995, there was nothing called type-in traffic or any kind of PPC monetization, no real affiliate programs. It was simply buying the domain name and establishing a brand or identity and possibly making it available for resale. And that was basically the only channel. But now this equates to many different sources of revenue and there’s lot’s of opportunity: Pay-Per-Click, CPA programs (which is more the affiliates programs), affiliate sites, micro sites, selling and buying domain names, obviously, selling traffic directly to advertisers. It’s a huge business now and growing. It’s $850 million in annual advertising revenue. It’s predicted to increase to $2 billion by 2010. And for those of you who don’t know, type in domain names, direct navigation domain names, make up 15% of all revenue generated by Google and Yahoo! – so they’re very significant, uhm, source of revenue for these companies. And, uhm, out of the 120 million domain names that are registered globally, six to eight million of these domain names make up this particular revenue-driving channel for the industry, currently; and it’s fastly growing. Just a little example of how large portfolios have increased over time: from 2004, you can see names, ah, portfolios over 100,000, 10,000 to 100,000, 1,000 to 10,000 have grown significantly. These are pretty accurate estimates to the middle of 2006. These have grown exponentially a little bit further now. But, just an example, a company like BuyDomains and Fabulous, they own five, six hundred thousand domain names apiece and monetize traffic and aggregate traffic that way. And many of the folks in the room also aggregate traffic by utilizing their domain names and putting them on park pages and taking advantage of linguistically driving customers and end users to directly, ah, direct navigation leads through PPC advertising and direct navigation. This is a 30% increase over the previous year in terms of number of registrations. There were new . . . 9.4 million new domain names registered in the 3rd quarter of 2006. It’s the highest quarter ever in terms of number of registrations. 86% of these domain names are live. [inaudible] parked pages are live sites. This is a huge difference to five years ago, when only about 50% were live. 40 million of them are ccTLDs. So country code TLDs. And, 77% of all domain names are now renewed. And then five years ago it was about 42%. So the whole market is starting to see a lot of value and benefit in terms of their domain related assets. Uhm, aftermarket sales that we discussed earlier have increased quite a bit – 58% - and generates hundreds of millions of dollars right now buying and selling domain names. And although it may not seem like a significant statistic, but 57 known (this is now in the public sectior) known domain names have sold twice within a 12 month period of time with an average increase in value of 288%. So this is now a lot bigger of course. But it gives you an idea of . . . it’s not only a resale market but it’s starting to turn into a buying domain names, increasing them in value and then flipping them strategy; kind of like what you do with real estate.
So what are the things that make up a good domain name? And obviously, you know some of these, but it’s important that when you look at domain names you look at a lot of different things, or any one of these things, and you focus in on them. So, obviously, natural and generic branding, things that are single word generic dictionary terms are very good domain names to register because they’re naturally typed in by end users. Things that are easy to remember; clear, concise and descriptive; commercially oriented; how often do they have active search bids in the key words; those types of things. The industry segment is very important now. So if you have something that’s really hot in terms of, you know, music downloads and healthcare, things that are going more virtual than they did in the past. Buying and selling products and services; auctions and those types of things; versus things that aren’t still, you know, active online as they will be in the future or have been in the past. And is the industry old or new? Is it something that’s been well established that is now starting to get on the Internet or not? Existing type in traffic – obviously, if you can buy a domain name or acquire a domain name or register a domain name that’s automatically being typed in, you have an advantage, you have a head start, because those domain names are being naturally typed in by end users and therefore you have a head start without having to spend money on advertising and marketing, and that’s one of the reasons why many of the domain names are bought and sold today. Does the domain name have back links, link popularity, page rank, ALEXA rating; all these things are now being analyzed before you’re investing in these properties. And then there’s the big issue with mis-types. Is it okay to type in a domain name or register a mis-type of a major brand? Probably not. But is it okay to register a mis-type of a domain name that’s more generic in nature? Probably so. One little easy piece of advice that everybody should do for their business is have ten of your employees, friends, family, whatever – take your key brand name and type in, through the computer, a hundred times as fast as you can, log all the mistypes and then register those domain names. If any customer end user is using your domain name to get to you, chances are they’re using one of those mistypes and missing your site and if somebody else has it, including a competitor or another individual, or it hasn’t been registered yet, you’re potentially losing thousands of dollars and a potential customer. So it’s an easy exercise to follow and for seven or eight buck a year for a domain name, you can acquire and have a number of mistypes of your key brands, your key services, your key products and protect your brand and identity; so use that as a good easy way to protect your brand and identity.
We discussed earlier how domain names are generating revenue. Uhm, direct navigation is now responsible for, you know, generating ad revenue through CPC, you know, CPA (cost per acquisition), CPM; selling traffic directly to companies or advertisers is now becoming a lot more popular than it was several years ago where you’d have a very targeted domain name in an industry, such as Autos, and you can target that particular traffic to maybe a Ford or GM dealer, or a resell of cars, those types of things. So this is now becoming a more popular way to generate revenue and advertising revenue for your domaining properties.
Johnny: And right now we’re going to take a moment to go ahead and take ourselves to a commercial break, so we can go ahead and thank our wonderful sponsors. So what we’ll do when we come back, we’ll continue Monte’s session here with the audience at Affiliate Summit. We’re going to go to a break and when we come back we’ll go ahead and continue the session right here on Domain Masters.
[Commercials]
Johnny: Welcome back once again to Domain Masters. Johnny Brasco filling in for Monte Cahn. Today we’re here to play back for you a session, a seminar that Monte held at Affiliate Summit. Now we’re just in the middle of his presentation and we’re going to take you to the second part of that presentation here on Domain Masters, here on WebMasterRadio.fm. Here we go.
Monte: . . . offering products and services, supplementing some of those products and services with maybe some Google Adsense or some other advertising links. To dominate a particular vertical by registering every single name or as many names as you can around that vertical or that particular niche and then you capture that traffic from all angles and be able to monetize it and then force those people into the particular website or portal or one of your own web presence sites that you have. And then of course, now domain names are being treated like real estate; we’re loaning money against domain names, similar to mortages; and domain names are deductible for donation purposes, so you can actually receive and get an appraisal for a domain name and donate it to a charity or a non-profit organization and receive a tax credit. So this is now becoming a very popular use of these particular assets to be able to take advantage of all angles of monetization.
Some of the recent studies that we talked about earlier: 70% of all Internet users actually type in where they want to go into the URL line, versus them going to a search engine. So if you think about this, whether you’re sophisticated, educated or not, most people actually go to the URL line to type in where they want to go; including places like eBay and Amazon and you’re bank and all kinds of stuff. But, what happens is (and I’m sure that everybody in the room has experienced this) when you go to Google or you go to Yahoo! and you have your ten different selections and you get to one of the links and it doesn’t happen to be to the link you that you want or the site that you want, you always back page it, and then go to the next link and then back page it to the next link. The reason why this is so . . . this is increasing is because people are naturally geared towards trying to take shortcuts to where they want to go. So they type into the URL line; the URL line takes them either to a site, a dead page or a PPC page that has linguistically driven ads on that page that mean something about the domain name that you typed in. And so this is actually growing as the Internet’s growing, not decreasing. Even with the popularity of Yahoo! and Google, most people still go to the URL line, then go to a search engine to get to their ultimate destination. There’s far many more searches on search engines than there are type in domain names but the ultimate destination is achieved by going to the URL line instead. So this is from WebSite Story. They did this study in 2003 and that study showed that 46% or 47% of people did that; now its 70% even with hundreds of millions of more users on the Internet. So it’s a pretty incredible stat.
We talked about the business in terms of what this means to the search market. It controls 8% to 10% of all U.S. and U.K. base search advertising revenue. 10% of all registrations now are now going to PPC landing pages and generating advertising revenue for, you know, advertisers through PPC landing pages. Values have increased by 20% because of direct navigation being able to track revenue and performance, and there’s a lot of public companies now that are staking their . . . putting their stakes in the ground with their domain portfolios. I’m sure some of you have heard about Marchex, LiveDoor, ValueClick, uhm, there’s new entities, such as IREIT, DemandMedia, NameMedia – they’re all scheduled to go public this year, all based around the value of their domain name inventory. Direct navigation – the amount of money generates for them monthly, annually and the revenue it’s throwing off – so those are important stats for you as you’re looking at domain names for your own businesses. And the good part of all this is that when you’re domain names are registered and you have them on a PPC landing page when you’re not doing anything with them and you have them parked, it helps increase the value by just sitting, instead of having them go to dead pages. So it’s just a very basic foundation value; it’s at the very bottom of the value chain. And then it just increases from there as you develop or as you find new uses for your domain name. So you want to definitely not have any of your names ever sitting around, you know, not doing something. You want them to always be monetizing, going to a page, a landing page, a parking page forwarding to your main site. Make sure you 301 direct your domain names to your website. Don’t do it any other way otherwise it hurts your search engine rankings and so you want to make sure you’re utilizing that traffic and the benefit of those domain names.
So here’s a couple of examples that most of you have seen or that maybe you all use in terms of PPC landing pages. So, the domain name is SalingTerminology.com and it’s, you know, it’s a linguistically driven term that brings up sailing results in a double click PPC landing page. So a customer, an end user, if they, you know, type this domain name in for some reason, they would get to linguistically driven links and ads in the center of the page and on the right hand side. Here’s another example: Tax.net. This is a one-click landing page, so if somebody clicks any one of the links in the middle, they go directly to a website, the publisher gets paid; any of the links on the left hand side are double click pages, so you can try to drill down to where you want to go. So if you’re really typing in Tax.net, chances are you’re going to find where you want to go if you’re an end user on a page like this. This is a PPC landing page. A double click page looks like this, where you have a number of different advertising links related to the domain name that was typed in and then on the second click (you don’t get paid on the first click) but the second click you get then to a single click page that gets much more drilled down in terms of its relevance to where you want to go. Believe it or not, many double click pages actually monetize better than single click pages do. So it’s just behavioral – it’s about what people are looking for, about what their expectations are. And you can’t really guesstimate it by having fancy colors or content on your page or anything. You’re dealing with people all over the world typing in things 24 hours a day; there’s seasons and all different times of the day and stress points in people’s lives and it depends on what they were doing and what they’re looking for and where they want to go to how these pages all monetize and convert for you. It’s definitely true that search revenue and search volume on type in visitors all kind of correspond with each other, so the amount of annual uniques definitely correlates the amount of search volume that there is on all search engines. So, the unique visitor count and search volume is pretty relevant. So lots of people type in a domain name with a dot com right into the search engine and see what the results are, and so, uh, instead of going to the URL line.
We talked a little bit about the domain sales, but one of the most popular vehicles for selling and buying domain names is now the live and silent domain auctions. We’ve now conducted four domain auctions, most recently, some of the more famous auctions have been at TRAFFIC, which is the domain conference that’s held three times a year. If anybody’s interested in going to the TRAFFIC conference, I’ll have the link up there on one of my last pages. But we sold $5.5 million of domain names in a live auction where buyers and sellers were in a room and market value was actually determined right there in front of everybody with a live auctioneer. A Christie’s and Sotheby’s type auction format and it was very . . . its very, uhm, ah, you know, revealing to see that these intellectual pieces of property that you can’t physically touch or see are actually trading on a floor for values based off of previous domain income and traffic monetization statistics and everything that’s going on and they’re getting sold and bought this way. And its establishing a market for these types of auctions. Most recently we then segmented off and did a very targeted auction in the adult industry and just sold $1.9 million worth of domain names that was very targeted to the adult sector, so these are opportunities to very niche market, these domain names in a live auction format and establish values right on the floor. So this is an example of some of the sales we’ve recently had.
So how do you create a portfolio? When and where and why and how and what do you need to look for? So, anyone with any kind of moderate capital can create a domain portfolio. It costs you $7.95 a year to register a domain name. It’s a very low risk and high reward type business. There’s all kinds of aftermarket sites and all kinds of places you can go and register domain names. Obviously, Moniker.com is one of them. But there’s all kinds of registrars that offer all kinds of services for you to try to find and acquire the domain name that is right for you or if you’re trying to build a niche or a market, there’s lots of examples. The growth is incredible. There’s a high return on capital. As I stated, the domain name asset values have increased 10% annually each year over the last 3 years, just by having domain name properties. And then with the monetization characteristics of domain names you can actually make money on your purchase while the domain name’s even sitting dormant or idle. So these are very good opportunities for you. You want to look up search phrases that define your market segment. You want to identify domain names that are commercial or rare or new niches that are about to come. Back four or five years ago I had customers registering nano-type names and you know, nanotechnology is just now coming out into the market today. And now those particular properties are extremely valuable and they’re increasing in value and increasing transaction activity for domain name sales. But five years ago, you know, some of the name that were being registered, you know, a lot of other people thought people were crazy for registering these domain names. So, you have to look out three or four years in technology and look at some of the niches and some of the opportunities. And there’s lots of opportunities still out there, so it’s not too late. You can register domain names that are still available; you can register domain names that have just been recently let go. You can put reservations on expired domain names that are about to drop and you can buy domain names in the aftermarket and buy them from other people and use a stealth service or contact the owner directly and try to negotiate a deal. Or you can buy them in live or silent domain auctions. So there’s lots of ways you can do that. And you want to look at your return on investment and how long you’re going to be in business and really look at the domain values today versus what you’re going to be doing with it one and five and ten years from now. So use your wallet that way and your concept in terms of what you’re going to invest for those purposes.
One of the most important things is to execute immediately. Like, don’t wait around, because everyday there’s thousands and thousands of new domain names being registered and new domain transactions happening. So if you have an idea or concept, jump on it; and then you’ll be thankful that you did in the future.
This is just some of the correlation between online advertising and then the amount of revenue that’s generated in the search market that we talked about earlier. So it’s about 10% compared to the online advertising dollars that are going on into the marketplace.
So here’s a couple case studies. I concentrated on healthcare because I was in the healthcare industry for 15 years. But these are some good examples of why some of the corporations are starting to get it. So, you know, some of the big corporations don’t get buying a generic domain name for their business yet. So, names like Candy.com, for example, are owned by, you know, some famous domainers when maybe the largest confection company should own it, you know, and drive all that traffic and direct customers to their particular brand and their services and their products, you know, for years. So here’s an example that will focus in on just the healthcare industry because it’s a huge market and now some of the pharmaceutical companies and healthcare companies are starting to get it. And they’re getting it because the pharmaceutical industry is huge; a lot of the affiliate systems that you guys have currently are around selling and reselling drugs and pharmaceuticals and all kinds of other stuff; but the reason why a company like Glaxo-Smith-Kline purchased Asthma.com is because they actually now own this disease. They’ve prevented their competitors from ever getting this property; they control all the traffic to this disease and they control all the content. And even though they don’t blatantly advertise their drugs on this page, they do gear people towards getting their, of course, prescriptions and their particular drugs and their drug brands out in front of the public and actually become a resource, a medical resource for families for generations and generations, because they went out and spent money and bought this domain name. So, as we’re in a new generation and we’re using the Internet quite commonly, our kids and our children’s children are going to be on the Internet even sooner than we were. I think I got on the Internet when I was 26 or 27 years old; now we’re carrying around PDAs and looking for resources all the time on our cell phones and carrying around micro-computers and mini-devices and tapping into cyber-café’s and all kinds of stuff. My son, who’s in kindergarten, is on a computer two or three days a week now and they’re going to be doing websites and stuff in junior high school and high school; it’s a curriculum now. So, you want to think about this stuff now before its too late.
Here’s a good example of a physician that registered a heart disease, TexasHeartSurgeon.com. And now he’s able to channel all the particular patient’s information for people looking up Texas Heart Surgeon on the Internet, through direct navigation to his particular website, selling his services, and this domain name, or the domain name that he got, which is MiamiHeartSurgeon, or whatever, was registered only in 2006; but he bought his domain name for $8. You know, he was able to register his domain name for $8 and now he generates, you know, tens of thousands of dollars in revenue from online web traffic through the use of his direct navigation domain name.
Here’s a very granular search for gastric-bypass surgery and this is a highly search term in Google; it’s something that people would look up and now it gets very targeted and a hospital and a clinic actually have owned this domain name to drive traffic and drive customers to their website. And these examples continue. HealthInsurance.com is another great example where they teamed up with a web development company and were able to establish one of the largest online health insurance lead generation sites in the entire world, off of this . . . off of a direct navigation domain name called HealthcareInsurance, or HealthInsurance.com.
This Hispanic market is the fastest growing market in the entire world; uh, in the United States, anyway. And so getting even very targeted to foreign words and Spanish words and directly navigating those people to those particular websites are also great examples of where you can take advantage of market opportunities for names that aren’t commonly registered. But its very targeted, it focuses on a particular market, one of the fastest growing markets in the country and the place where a lot of people are spending time and energy and money.
So here’s some of the things you need to look out for in terms of beware things or things to be conscious of when you’re looking for your domain name inventory. Always do a trademark search to make sure that whatever domain name you’re registering doesn’t violate somebody elses trademark. It doesn’t mean you don’t have the right to use it but you might as well know up front if (I’ll have the resource page on one of my last pages) but if you go to USPTO.gov, that is the online trademark search site for you to search on trademarks before you go to register a domain name. Many trademarks can be registered as domain names if you use them in different ways. So you always want to consult an attorney if you have a different use for a particular name to make sure you’re not going to get into trouble. Also, if you’ve established a domain name registration prior to a trademark filing, you also have a chance to have good defense to keep that particular domain name and be able to use for what you want to use it for. You might actually have some cases against the trademark filer for squatting on your particular brand and identity if they do something that’s copying what you’re idea has been.
Consider having an evaluation done. In the past, domain appraisals were used just as a kind of litmus test. Today they’re actually correlating to sales and so if want . . . if you’re not sure what to pay for a domain name in the market or the aftermarket, go get a domain appraisal, just like you would a property appraisal so you know you’re paying a fair amount. Also, if you’re going to offer your domain name for sale, you’d want to see what its worth. And so, we invented the domain appraisal system back in 1998 and then we’ve done over half a million of these things now and they’re definitely correlating around 20% to what domain names are selling for, so they’re very valuable.
Whenever you’re going to do a domain name transaction, always use an escrow service. I don’t recommend doing direct negotiations and doing, you know, putting money in Paypal unless you get that domain name in escrow and you’re funds in escrow. Use an escrow service that actually provides protection for the domain name and for your funds and then true escrow changes ownership and releases funds at the same time.
Make sure that you look at financing opportunities. As I mentioned, we now offer domain financing, just like mortgages. You can get a 5-year mortgage on a domain name, pay it off over time. Use the proceeds or use the revenue generation to help pay the monthly payments and you may want to use your funds, you know, wisely so you can keep investing in the market and leverage somebody else’s money while you’re developing your site or reinvesting in your own inventory. Or you can refinance your current properties and get money back so you can develop the sites or do things that you never got to do before. There’s these vehicles now available to you.
If you’re checking domain statistics, make sure you don’t always trust in terms of what people are telling you in terms of stats. Make sure you test it yourself. If you’re going to test domain stats and test traffic. Ask to borrow the domain name DNS for 7 days and make sure that your own PPC monetization system is reporting the same types of stats and no red flags are being thrown up in terms of artificially generated traffic or mechanical traffic, those types of things, before you buy a domain name that says it has a thousand unique visitors a day on it.
If a company or an individual knows what you do when you contact them, chances are they would artificially inflate the value of that domain name for you to purchase it, so you may want to use a stealth acquisition or contact somebody on your behalf or act in stealth through another resource or source when you’re making contact with somebody who has a domain name that you want. If they see that you’re Smith Kline, and you’re now going to buy Asthma, of course they’re going to inflate the price of that particular domain name. But if someone else who’s unrelated to the pharmaceutical industry makes contact with a disease related domain name, chances are the domain price would be a lot less.
And then try to find out what other kind of information you can get. Like, what was the previous history of the domain name? Uhm, use the “Way Back Machine,” and check and see if the domain name had a life before. Is it blacklisted? Ironically, my own domain name for our own company, Moniker.com, which was bought by one of my . . . I bought it from one of our customers back in 2001, was actually blacklisted with Google and I didn’t even know it for 12 months. It was blacklisted from the previous owner before that. And so it took me, you know, three or four months to get it not black listed and then it was able to be able to be searched in the search engine. So, do your research before you buy the site so you’re getting a clean bill of health on every domain name. It’s kind of like a title, when you’re taking possession of the house – there’s no liens against it, you know, there’s no debts, it’s not going to be taken away from you, it wasn’t involved in a lawsuit, uhm, there wasn’t a previous cease and desist letter that now someone’s going to come back and sue you on. You know, all these things you have to consider when you’re looking at buying domain names or even registering them new. Take some time and look into that information.
Some of the most useful links in identifying the most valuable domain names, if anybody’s not using Word Tracker, it’s a good source to check out phrase data and find out what phrases are valued at and what they’re worth and how many times they’re searched. Ah, KeyWordDiscovery.com – use the Overture bid tool to find out what kind of bids are on domain names and the estimated type in traffic. Uhm, do a WhoIS look up, obviously. Go and look at previous WhoIS look ups. Ah, DomainTools.com, which is formerly WhoIS.sc, provides a history of WhoIS information so you can see if the domain name was owned by somebody in the past, who it was, see how many times it’s changed hands, if it’s available to you. It’s a great resource. Some of the aftermarket sales services besides Moniker.com is BuyDomains and Sedo; those are also good marketplaces to buy domain names if you’re interested. The expired name services are SnapNames, Pool, and ClubDrop. Those are primarily the main places where you go and get domain names in the aftermarket that are expiring or about to expire. You can actually put a reservation on a domain name that might be coming up for expiration and you’d be the first one to try and get that, but if there’s more than one person interested in that domain name, you’d go into an auction to get that domain name.
We talked about the U.S. Patent and Trademark office – that’s www.uspto.gov. Microsoft has a great research tool to look up former trademarks and phishing sites, which is the Microsoft URL tracer. WIPO is a good place to see if the domain name was ever involved in any kind of arbitration or WIPO – World Intellectual Property Organization claim. If somebody ever made a claim against the domain name, you can look at all the histories, every single domain name arbitration case at WIPO.org. Uhm, I host a radio show every Wednesday called Domain Masters. We talk about all these different subjects and we have top notch guests on and CEOs of big companies and organizations and people that are very successful with their domain names. And we definitely teach everybody that listens something new every single show that maybe you didn’t know about your business or some opportunities that you could, that you can use for your online presence. And so it’s a great show to listen to, as well as a lot of the other shows on the WebMasterRadio network; it’s a really great forum.
Some of the domain forums is: DNForum.com, DomainState, NamePros and DNJournal.com is the #1 news site where people report their domain sales. The newest news in the industry is reported there. You can look at what’s going on in the industry for the domain name industry as a whole on that site. It’s a very . . . its updated every single day and its very informative.
And then some of the conferences that we spoke about: the TRAFFIC Conference is the place where all the main domainers, the people with the largest inventories, gather every single meeting and there’s a lot of networking that’s done; all the traffic monetizers are there; the main registrars that protect these folks’ inventory are there; we hold the live auctions there at the TRAFFIC Conferences; and you can go to TargetedTraffic.com, its an invitation only conference but you can get invited if you fill out the application and qualify and it’s a great conference to attend, as well as Domain Roundtable (if they’re even having a show this year; I’m not sure) but they’ve had a couple shows in the past. WebMaster World and SES are also valuable shows to learn how to develop an SEO and build your site out with SEO concepts and affiliate, you know, information and mind, as well, of course, as the Affiliate Summit . . .
Johnny: You know, it’s really surprising, you know, listening to this presentation by Monte here. You know, right there, at the end, he’s obviously, you know, informing the audience about the many shows that are out there that all of you here listening to WebMasterRadio.fm listen to this radio show, you know about these shows, you attend these shows and you make it a point to get the biggest impact from all these trade shows, which is a very good thing. And its really wonderful that Monte, while he’s using the presentation to really reach people from the bullet points of his presentation, but to take a few moments to mention what the webmasters do, what they do to connect and to network with each other and where they can go to network with each other; whether it’s the radio station, whether it’s the trade shows, whether it’s other publications. But, it’s really nice that he brought that up.
Now, what we’re going to do is we’re going to go and take ourselves another quick commercial break and then coming up here we’re going to bring you another part of the presentation where Monte does a question and answer session with the attendees as right there, he wrapped up this part of the presentation; he went ahead and opened up for a question and answer and what we’re going to do is we’re going to bring that to you in just a moment, here on Domain Masters on WebMasterRadio.fm.
[Commercials]
Johnny: Welcome back to Domain Masters. Johnny Brasco filling in for Monte Cahn tonight. Tonight we’re playing back for you a presentation that Monte did at Affiliate Summit entitled “Domaining and Address Bar Driven Traffic.” Right now we’re going to continue with this presentation that he gave earlier this week at Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas. Right now he gives the audience a little chance to do a question and answer session. Here it is.
Monte: Okay, so we’ll open up for questions and open discussion. Uhm, if anybody has any questions about their domain name inventory or some of the things that we discussed, it’s all yours. You have the floor. So, if you have 5,000 domain names in an inventory, how do you . . .? Well, if you have 5,000 domain names, chances are you’re not using every single one of them or you haven’t built them out, so the best thing you can do is you can get them parked as a very basic way to start monetizing the traffic and learn a lot about what the domain names are doing. So, let’s say out of your 5,000 inventory, you’re focusing on a handful of your domain names that you’re going to develop out, turn into affiliate sites or whatever; have the other sites parked and monetizing every day. The parking solutions like our Traffic Club solution, tells you where traffics coming from, how many clicks you’re getting, what the, you know, the click through conversion rates are. And what you might find is that some of the domain names in your inventory are actually monetizing better as Pay-Per-Click sites than they would as fully built out informational sites or offering sites. Uhm, you know, there are . . . the fact is that 33% of the sites are better at PPC monetization than they are at CPA, for instance, or as fully developed sites. So it’s kind of a mix. The best advice I can give is if you have a large inventory is that you diversify your strategy and your approach and not have all of them parked in one place. Develop some out. Use affiliate site and micro site strategy; and then get the rest of them parked and then analyze them every single month what’s going on with your traffic, what’s converting, what people are really clicking on, what you’re click through rates are and then you can learn on where you can target those particular domain names and what you want to build out in the future.
. . . . gets a domain blacklisted. If a domain name is used for something that’s on the blacklist of Google, like, uh, maybe it was spam or maybe it was a site that had duplicate content on it. So, you know, Google’s very high on unique content on all pages and having one site that’s very unique with lots of content that’s valuable to the industry. So, page rank comes from people that are linking to your site and the type of content that you have on it. So if you’re artificially driving people to pages, trying to get more people inside your, you know, inside your website by having them artificially go through certain channels or if you have links spread out all over the place that aren’t really relevant to your business. So if I . . . if Moniker.com had links on auto sites, that’s no-no with Google. So if you did several of those things, you know, you could become blacklisted and they’d just take you out. Or if you’re in violation of spam or, you know, putting your spam blogging or something like that where you’re putting your brand out on blogs and all kinds of ways to link them back to your site. So I’m not sure what the former owner of Moniker did with our name but to not . . . first of all, to not know it is shame on us and secondly, you know, we learned a big lesson on how to get it out of the blacklisting process and then get it back into a valuable, you know, site position, because it was a really good name. Yes?
Attendee: [inaudible] Google not know [inaudible] California chairs, buffalo chairs and you [inaudible] organic search so that Google [inaudible]
Monte: Well, they won’t lump that . . . Google does not hurt you, or give you bad marks for having multiple domain names that channel into other domain names. You just have to be smart about how you’re directing the traffic.
Attendee: [inaudible] the address [inaudible]
Monte: Whether you’re linking them all back and forth to each other?
Attendee: [inaudible] only one way. [inaudible] because I went to use the [inaudible] too and it’s the same [inaudible] maybe that’s [inaudible]
Monte: Did you just forward them into the main site?
Attendee: [inaudible]
Monte: Okay, but you linked them to each other?
Attendee: [inaudible]
Monte: Okay. So here’s one thing that Google doesn’t like. Google doesn’t like if sites look the same because they’re linked to each other. So I have Moniker, then I have MonikerDomains and one forwards into the other. When somebody clicks on it, it goes to Moniker from MonikerDomains; it looks like the sites have exactly the same content. That’s a no-no with Google. So what you have to do is you have to do a 301 redirect.
Attendee: [inaudible]
Monte: I guess we’d have to see . . . you know, they measure over a hundred things. So I guess we’d have to see what the other things are. But Google is not . . . it’s not . . . you can own like domain names; it’s how you use them with each other that they look at and then what content do you have; you know, are they purposely set up . . . if they’re on the same IP and they’re purposely set up to just link into each other, then you might want to locate things on different IPs – that’s one thing. But you can have same ownership, you can have same, you know, registrant information, even same DNS, but if you’re on the same IP and you are linking to each other that way, it could work against you.
Monte: If anybody’s ever done a real estate transaction, you know that you have a title company that’s involved and the actual money that goes to the title company doesn’t actually go directly to the new owner, unless you’re doing a direct deal with the particular owner of the house, which is rare. So 95%, 98% of all transactions go through a title, change title through an insurance company, writing a check to one place to pay off the bank and then the owner of the house gets their money. We do that. So we take . . .
Attendee: [inaudible]
Monte: We act as both. So we actually become the buyer from seller, the seller to the buyer, act as escrow agent, take the funds in and the domain name actually comes into escrow too. We have a special escrow account at Moniker so that both pieces of property – the funds to buy it and the domain name – are in a safe keeping and then we change ownership and distribute funds at the same time. So, if anybody uses Escrow.com, you’ll know that only one part of that goes into escrow and that’s only the money. It’s between the buyer and the seller to change ownership and sometimes you give the account information, there’s a lot of bad transactions that way. You never actually follow a true escrow service by taking a piece of property that you’re buying and putting it into escrow; you’re just putting funds into escrow. So I do highly recommend that you use a full domain escrow service for that. It’s much smarter to do it that way.
Attendee: [inaudible]
Monte: That’s a good question. It just depends, you know. Some of the names in its singular state actually can mean plural meanings and stuff, so it depends what the name is, what industry it’s in, uhm, so it’s not a known statistic on what’s better. If you do have one and not the other, it’s probably important to try to get the other one or other variations of the other one, because you do lose some portion of your traffic to that particular, other extension, you know, the other version of the name. Another big question that comes up sometimes is you know, the value of dot com versus dot net versus dot org and what traffic goes to each of those segments, so about 75% of all type in traffic go to dot coms; 20% goes to dot net and org, or 25% goes to dot net and dot org. So, and of course, all the other extensions all right behind that. So definitely register your brand or protect your brand in all the other extensions that you can for sure because someone is getting . . . if you get 100 clicks, somebody’s getting 25 clicks, you know, off of the other extensions, which may be meaning it could go to you. And vice versa. So if you need to establish your presence or your dominance in a particular vertical or industry, register those other extensions for sure for the little investment that it is, or try to acquire them because you’re losing some portion of that type in traffic, uh, if you don’t have them.
Attendee: [inaudible]
Monte: Yes, right . . .
Attendee: [inaudible]
Monte: Well, first of all, it doesn’t take 2 hours; you just go to TrafficClub.com, you sign up and then you submit your names online. It’s a five or ten minute process. And you get all your names up on TrafficClub except for the ones you’re using for other sites and then you just let them work for themselves. When domain names are on an active site versus not an active site or not being used at all, they actually become more valuable because they get captured in caches and people’s computers and they become search sites sometimes; people come back to them as resources and what generally happens is if it’s a decent domain name is that it will increase in traffic and monetization over time as they’re sitting parked even without you doing anything. So one of the things that TrafficClub is it’s the only multi-feed PPC system on the market. It actually has five or six competitive feeds all inside one PPC monetization system and then it takes the domain name and analyzes each domain name by domain name, figures out what PPC monetization solution is best, what landing page of that solution is best and then does a test across the entire network. One thing that everybody should know is that if you take all your names and you park them on one solution and you just walk away, the online advertising business changes every single minute, 24 hours a day. There’s deals struck all over the world all the time, between Google and Yahoo! and Microsoft and all these players. So, just to give you an example: If you have all your names on a Yahoo! network or a Google network and the other one strikes a deal with one of the key advertisers and they’re actually paying double the PPC rates during that time and your names are stuck over here – so, an example, let’s say you have auto related names. And Yahoo! is the current highest auto related PPC industry searches. But Google strikes a deal with GM for selling SUVs for 30 days because gas prices are high or whatever and they’re going to pay double the advertising rates, the click through rates, to try to drive people to buy more SUV vehicles in a particular month. You lose all that opportunity by sitting in this one spot without . . . you would never know that there’s a double payout going on in the Google network when you’re on Yahoo! and vice versa. So one thing TrafficClub is it does that. It taps all the different feeds and then determines what names are best for that particular domain name at any given time and measures it and re-measures it every hour and it shifts your traffic around automatically to whatever the highest PPC network. It may even look like it’s a generic page monetizing better than something that’s linguistically driven. So that’s what it does. So you’re never going to want to have any of your names that you’re not using sitting idle. You always want to have it on a TrafficClub, or some kind of PPC monetization system for sure. And it’s easy to set up.
Attendee: [inaudible]
Monte: Well, uhm, we pay 80% of all the revenue that’s generated to our customers. It’s probably one of the highest on average. And the fact that it has multiple feeds in it and it pays that rate, so then it’s continuously always feeding what the best performing feeds are for your particular domain names and puts them there for you automatically so you don’t have to do all the work. It’s probably a better solution but DomainSponsor’s a good solution; that’s a Google network. Scanso’s a good solution; that’s a Google network . . .
Attendee: [inaudible]
Monte: Yeah! Full reporting; you can check out CPC and RPC rates and look at each domain name individually; look at them as a group; measure different months; graph them out. It’s really cool. It tells you where the traffic’s coming from, where it’s going, uhm, how to better monetize them. You know, you can actually select what network you want to put it on if you don’t want the system to do the work itself, so it’s pretty good.
Attendee: [inaudible]
Monte: You don’t have to change registrars. But you do have to change DNS or at least forward the traffic over there. A lot of people like to change registrars because you can take the funds and then fund your domain name registration with the money you make from TrafficClub, and that way you’re hitting a traffic neutral, you know, positive cash flow situation. Then you don’t have to shell out money every month for your domain name renewals. You can say, hey, put my funds in my Moniker account, so it works out well that way.
Monte: Well, how do domain names with dashes and numbers fit into monetization? What are some of the trends? So, most people don’t type in domain names with dashes and numbers in them. The dash in-between a domain name or in a domain name acts as a space in search engines like Microsoft, and it actually doesn’t hurt you; it actually can be used as sort of a feeder domain name to the domain name site. So if you had Domains4Sale.com and I had Domain-4-Sale, it actually acts as a three-term look up in a search engine instead of one term all together. And so it can actually work to your advantage but they’re typical type in domain names because people don’t go domain-for-sale, and PPC monetization works best for type in traffic. If you’re going to feed traffic through affiliate networks and links and other types of things, it wouldn’t matter whether you had a dash in there or not. Anyone else? Any other questions? Sure.
Attendee: [inaudible]
Monte: Okay. So let’s talk about some of those. The second most registered domain name in the entire world is dot DE, which is Germany. It actually has surpassed dot net and dot org, so it’s an extremely valuable domain name. Uhm, dot co.uk is the 4th most registered extension in the world. Uhm, country codes that are restricted, that . . . so dot DE you have to have presence but they’re not really strict about seeing that presence. You could have a German address and be, uhm, and have a German extension. Dot co.uk, you can live anywhere in the world and own them. Dot ca is another really good example of some good dot ca owners here that monetize traffic very well. If you’re living in another country, you’re typical extension that you type out may not be dot com. I mean, let’s face it. Dot com was invented by the United States government as a commerce, an International commerce extension. Even though it’s the most widely known and the top Fortune 1000 companies have their name in dot com, Yahoo!, Google, a lot of eBay, a lot of the really big companies also have the different country code extensions because people of other countries typically type in their country code extension to where they want to go sometimes before they type in dot com. So it is valuable to protect your brand and identity in that country code extension. So it is valuable. Dot AU, which is Australia, is a highly restricted country code that only Australian companies and established entities can be in and use, and so it’s typically not a very popular extension for outside commerce. If you’re in Australia and you’re doing something local, then it’s great, you know, obviously, because you want to do that. But typically, you can’t be outside Australia and own a dot AU name; it’s very difficult, because they do kind of an audit with all their companies and individuals that own dot AU names. So it depends on what country it is and what people are using. One of the biggest fads that I’m sure you guys have heard about is about dot TV, that came out several years ago and was positioned as a dot com alternative for the television and media market and it kind of dived right on its face after Verisign bought the extension along with dot CC. And a lot of people feel its going to have a little bit of a resurgence because of how the online media stuff is going on in the Internet – YouTube, for example; providing online video and stuff. Even though dot TV means nothing more than a country than for Tuvalu, because it has a double meaning and was commercially marketed 10 years ago as a meaning for something else, it has some, you know, inherent value to it and it could have a little bit of a resurgence or rebirth again because of . . . you know, lets face it, one day in the near future we’re going to be sitting in front of our televisions and be able to look at Internet channels, cable channels, local channels and so dot TV has some kind of inherent value around that. One of the newest and most exciting extensions that have come out is dot MOBI. And if anybody hasn’t heard about dot MOBI, it’s not only another extension, it’s a whole new platform so that all of us can see a website on any one of our mobile devices – our cell phone or PDA. And, when you get the domain name, if you are going to do a website with it, you have to implement just two lines of code to your ISP (your hosting company) that allows an end user to see your website in proper format to any screen on your mobile device. So if you look at Moniker.com, for instance, right now, on your mobile device, you have to scroll up and down and find where the registration box is and all that stuff. On a dot MOBI platform, you actually see the website as if you’re looking at your computer screen, on the proper format. It’s not great today for doing commerce yet, but it will be. But if anybody wants to see what one looks like, go to BMW.mobi for example. You can look up any model of their cars, see where your dealers are, you know, get what language you’re operating in, uhm, look at the different models, you know, and then find out where you want to go. You can’t buy the car online yet but uhm, dot MOBI is becoming extremely valuable because of the mobile platform, plus Microsoft, Google, Eriksson, Nokia, the telecommunication company in Italy, have all invested as investors into this platform, so they’re obviously going to be using it, and putting search on it and so you have software and manufacturers and networks all saying, hey, dot MOBI is going to be something in the future as well.
Attendee: [inaudible]
Monte: You can, except the traffic partners, the PPC monetization partners, are – 5 minutes? – are uhm, are just now getting their dot MOBI platform up to try to monetize those. I mean, let’s face it; there’s not a lot of type in traffic on dot MOBIs yet. So it’s not going to monetize that great yet. But, uhm, it would be a good place for you to start if there’s a solution for it. Yes, in the back.
Attendee: [inaudible]
Monte: Yes. Yep, you can go to Moniker.com, register a dot MOBI; it’s 12.95 a year. You have to register for two years initially.
Attendee: [inaudible]
Monte: Again, dot LA is nothing more than a country code rebranded as another use.
Attendee: [inaudible]
Monte: It’s . . . you know . . . it’s a fad, in my opinion. I mean, it could have value. Let’s say you’re in LA and you’re an interior designer in L.A. and you’re market is very segmented to L.A., it has value.
Attendee: [inaudible]
Monte: Yep. Yeah, I mean . . . we’re getting more granular and also more geo-targeted as an Internet community. So if you’re business is just in your community and your customer’s are very centralized and localized, you don’t have to have a dot Com. Dot Com is meant for International commerce. Even though we naturally type in dot com to wherever we want to go . . . if I’m your, you know, your Laundromat or your dry cleaner, I could have dot BIZ or dot INFO and as long as you have my card and my card is sitting on your refrigerator, you’re going to know to type in dot INFO and you’re going to brand yourself that way. You know, if you’re localized or you specialize in something like that and you’re, you know, you’re not serving a local market, yes. If you’re serving something that’s more central and you know, or you know, something that’s much more broad or global or you’re trying to track affiliates from all over the world to do something like that, I would go after at least the key extension, dot COM, dot NET, dot ORG, the things that people have been registering for, you know, 11 years, 12 years, because there’s a lot more . . . you know, there’s 60 million dot COM, NET, and ORG names and then there’s 40 million ccTLDs, so all the rest are all the other extensions. There’s 112 million. So, that gives you an example.
Attendee: [inaudible]
Monte: Uhm, there’s actually. I don’t know what the link is but you can actually go to Google on their back end; well, there’s two different . . . you can go to Google and Yahoo! and find out if they’re blacklisted or not. Inside Google’s site, on one of the resource links, you can put the domain name in and it will tell you if it’s been blacklisted. I just don’t have it right now but if you give me your card, I can get it for you and send it to you.
Attendee: [inaudible]
Monte: Good question. So, let’s say you’re a BMW wheeler-dealer. You know, let’s say that you’re a Coke distributor. This has been a controversy. So let’s say you’re business is to distribute BMW wheels. The best thing you can do is get permission from BMW to use their trademark before you use it. If you’re monetizing that domain name in a fashion that confuses customers, provides competitive information to competitors, damaging the ultimate outcome of that visit, you’re going to get in trouble eventually. The life of a trademark domain name is about 6 months, if you’re not using it properly.
Monte: The three things you have to prove in a WIPO case – and you have to prove all three of them – is that you have no right to use it, at all; that you’re registration of the domain name was with mal-intent, that you maliciously registered the domain name; and that you are confusing an end user customer of what service or product or brand that you’re providing. So if I’m a Coke distributor and I’m pointing people to Coca-cola and that’s my business and they’re coming to me and my customers are commercial customers and they’re taking the orders of their orders online, I probably, as Coca-Cola, may not be able to claim that back in a WIPO case. But if I’m Coke, if I have a Coke distribution domain name and I’m pointing my customers to Pepsi or going to a porn site, you’re going to get smacked, and you’re going to lose your domain.
Okay, well, I hope that this was valuable information session for your guys. Let me know if I can answer anything for you. Monte@Moniker.com. I’ll be happy to address any of your needs.
[Applause]
Johnny: And once again, that’s going to do it for this edition of Domain Masters. Monte right there with a presentation on “Domaining and Address Bar Driven Traffic.” Once again, that was at Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas. Make sure to join us next week, Wednesday, 7 o’clock Eastern, 4 o’clock Pacific, for another edition of Domain Masters. Next week, Monte will obviously give a wrap up of Affiliate Summit and go through what’s going on in the world of domains. But for now, Johnny Brasco saying, So long, everybody, and of course, be the master of your domain. Good night.
[Commercials]
| Back to Index |