Dr. John Berryhill back from ICANN and Andrew Goodman with an SES NY Preview
Dr. John Berryhill back from ICANN and Andrew Goodman with an SES NY Preview
04/04/2007 - Victor Pitts
Victor Pitts speaks first with Dr. John Berryhill following his return from the ICANN conference in New Zealand. Andrew Goodman of Page Zero Media also comes on to preview the upcoming Search Engine Strategies New York show and looks ahead to the next conference stop in Toronto.
[Commercials]
Victor: Welcome everyone to this week’s show of Domain Masters. I’m Victor Pitts; I’m your guest host tonight. Monte Cahn is resting after his well-deserved vacation time.
We have a great line up tonight. Starting off the show we’re going to have John Berryhill, renowned attorney specializing in patents, trademarks and many domain related issues. John is going to be giving us an update of the most recent ICANN meeting that was held in Lisbon, Portugal, and we look forward to having John on. Then on the bottom half of the show we’re going to be joined by Andrew Goldman, who’s the founder of Toronto-based Page Zero Media. It’s a marketing agency which focuses on ROI-driven paid page search. So we look forward to having Andrew on the bottom half of the hour, but we’re going to be kicking off right after this commercial break with John Berryhill. Everyone, stay tuned to Domain Masters where you learn to be the master of your own domain.
[Commercials]
Victor: Alright. Welcome back everyone to Domain Masters. I’m your guest host, Victor Pitts, subbing for Monte Cahn. Recently there was a meeting held in Lisbon, Portugal. ICANN concluded its busy 28th public meeting there at Lisbon. It concluded on the 30th of March. More than 830 people from 81 countries gathered there in Lisbon for ICANN’s 28th public meeting. And a quote from Dr. Vint Serf, chairman of ICANN says, “We’ve just finished one of ICANN’s busiest and issue-intensive meetings, and it helped ICANN to make substantial progress on numerous fronts. We’re being joined tonight by an attendee to ICANN; more than an attendee – a major contributor to some of the ideals and policies of ICANN. And this is Dr. John Berryhill. Dr. Berryhill is an intellectual property attorney out of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He has technical background in electrical engineering. He’s been a long time advocate of the rights of domain name registrants and dispute proceedings concerning domain names and of ICANN policy processes relating to domain names. Are you with us, John?
John: Yes, I am. And I can tell that you’ve been reading the ICANN press release. [laughs]
Victor: [laughs] You had a few points there that sound kind of familiar, huh?
John: Very busy. Oh yes. I just flew in from Lisbon and boy, are my arms tired. [laughs]
Victor: [laughs] [inaudible]
John: [inaudible]
Victor: So, how was it there in Lisbon? From all the press releases coming out it sounds like it was an eventful or a, uhm, kind of an emotional or . . . . ICANN meeting compared to some of the other ones.
John: Well, it was dramatic. It was dramatic. It was, you know, great to meet all the Lisbians.
Victor: [laughs] There’s another one.
John: We won’t be seeing them in Triple X, apparently. But, actually, but if listeners want to get the look, feel and the flavor of what goes on at an ICANN, I have put a video up on Google Videos. If they just go to Video.Google.com, and search on ICANN, it’s about probably the fourth or fifth one down. Oddly enough, ICANN’s not normally very photogenic, so there aren’t many videos with that tag on it. And that will give you the flavor of the proceedings. you know, was it busy? Ah, granted, I would not fly, you know, dozens of people business class from Marina Del Ray, California to Portugal or Brazil or any of the other places that they go to and come back and say, well, you know, nothing much happened.
Victor: [laughs]
John: Though I don’t think that we’ll ever see an ICANN press release that does not refer to a busy ICANN meeting.
Victor: Good point. What were some of the biggest topics that were on the peoples’ minds there at the ICANN meeting?
John: Okay. What made it, I think, a feel-busy for some of the participants there is that ICANN is intended to coordinate certain technical parameters of the domain name system. Mainly what ICANN does is they draft contracts. The domain name system as used by ICANN is a collection of contracts. There are contracts between ICANN and the registries; there are contracts between the registries and the registrars; there are contracts between the registrars and the registrants; and there are contracts between the U.S. government and the ICANN. It’s this web of contractual obligations that constitutes the work of ICANN. And the shock, the horror that has sunk into the realization of many of the ICANN staff and board is that these contracts contain terms which people expect to be enforced. And what ICANN has typically done is to, you know, write these contacts, get people to sign them and then just, you know, collect 25 cents per domain name. But as I’m sure many of your listeners know, and you know, as I can tell for the course of about a year-and-a-half just answering my phone on a daily basis, there is a substantial registrar that had gone through a meltdown and was not complying with its contractual obligations to registrants, nor were they complying with their contractual obligations to ICANN. And what the community learned, and what many of the RegisterFly registrants learned, is that ICANN is nigh onto powerless to do anything about it. And the expectation that for the last seven years ICANN was actually supposed to be doing something about the contracts which it has entered into with all the registrars was a shocker, and it certainly made is a very “busy” meeting in the sense that I don’t believe there was a person there who did not have the “cure for all ills” that will prevent a registrar from ever doing anything naughty again. And I think that unfortunately for domain registrants (who are not participants in this process) . . .
Victor: Mm-hm.
John: . . . the RegisterFly meltdown is sort of a policy hole into which everyone is going to march with their favorite agenda. And that the actual issues that led to RegisterFly’s demise are not going to be addressed in the most straight-forward manner in providing domain registrants with a rational and understandable means of pursuing disputes with registrars. And in typical ICANN fashion, one of the things that ICANN is planning on doing is conducting periodic audits of the registrars operations. And, there are certainly auditable things that a registrar does and these can be checked. These things have utterly nothing to do with the failure mode of RegisterFly or the other poor service that registrants get (I should say those registrants that aren’t enlightened enough to use service-oriented registrars such as Moniker) . . .
Victor: Thank you very much.
John: And the way I put it at one of the meetings was that, you know, while there are things that can be audited at random, I am certain, I am absolutely certain – I’ve never had any doubt on this or any reason not to believe – that every fire extinguisher aboard the Titanic was in perfect working order and that all of the milk was fresh aboard the Hindenburg, and exercising the ability to test certain things or to make sure that certain things are working is not, in my view, a way of making sure that registrants are getting the level of service that they need and expect from the registrar they have selected and whatever level of service that registrar provides.
Victor: What changes, or what role change, do you envision with ICANN as a result of this, you know, registrar meltdown?
John: About the only thing . . . and, and, it’s gone . . . I’ll be very blunt, it’s going to happen again. I didn’t really hear too many rational voices. ICANN is going to do one of the things that it was chartered to do back in 2000: was to provide a repository of data under which the domain registration data collected by registrars would be escrowed on a periodic basis. One of the difficulties with RegisterFly is that as RegisterFly crashes and burns, there may be no effective means to sort out (at least in many, many cases), there may be no effective means to sort out who was the owner of what domain name. I mean, something as basic and simple as that. And you can go back through ICANN mailing lists back to 2001, 2002, where, you know, I had continuously asked, hey, where is the registrar data escrow program. It is the only thing that ICANN ever set out to do or promise to do that was of direct benefit to domain registrants. ICANN has been very effective in providing dispute policies for trademark owners. They’ve been very effective in, you know, providing all sorts of external means of control and monitoring of these wily, dangerous people who register domain names. But really has just done precious little in the way of making sure that you can register a domain name with some security that that domain name will remain registered to you and will remain resolving to your name search. It’s a . . . . ulsh . . . there will be some changes in what ICANN does and I ‘m sure that, you know, they’re scratching their heads trying to figure out how exactly to do those things.
Victor: Exactly. [inaudible] . . . the infrastructure costs . . .
John: [inaudible] . . .
Victor: And add additional costs to, you know, to the domain name in order for them to change their role in such a way where they’re backing up the data.
John: Yeah, uh . . .
Victor: There were some other topics that were discussed there at the ICANN meeting as well. Were you a part of tracking some of that, like the final report on the WhoIS policy, for example?
John: Yes. For several years now, the main policy organ within ICANN, the GNSO, has had a task force studying the problem of what is the purpose of WhoIS data; how should WhoIS data be collected, how should its accuracy be guaranteed, and what data elements should constitute WhoIS data? And, this one is actually somewhat of a surprise. The original impedance of this group was a dissatisfaction among trademark owners and others who wish to stalk domain registrants, uh, that WhoIS data was not uniformly accurate. And in the course of studying this problem, unfortunately, ICANN an international organization, was infected with these notions from European countries and elsewhere, that privacy matters, and that people do have a right to privacy and that there should be limits upon what people should be forced to disclose in a public database. And the WhoIS task force is actually proceding toward a final recommendation where much of the present day WhoIS information would not be made publicly avaialbe to anyone on the street who wants it.
Victor: Hm-mm.
John: And this is of great concern because its dramatic and it certainly makes a lot of people busy when an ICANN task force does not arrive at a preordained result. [laughs]
Victor: [laughs]
John: So, that has caused levels of concern within the community of string pullers at ICANN. Then of course the main purpose, the piece of sand around which the pearl of an ICANN meeting is built, is the board meeting itself, which really only takes a couple of hours; but we pack on a whole week festivities and pomposity around what is basically a scripted event to begin with. But the board does make certain decisions and they had decided, of course, to finally reject the ICM registry application to register .XXX as a top level domain name.
Victor: Hm-mm. Which is what? The third kill, I think it was?
John: [laughs] Yeah; it’s kind of like laughable.
Victor: [laughs]
John: Sometimes the news reporting has not been tremendously accurate that, you know, there have really been three board actions on this application. The first action was to say in principle ‘we approve of this idea and we authorize the staff to go negotiate the contracts to run it.’ Then once that process was done, ah, the ICANN board, heavily influenced by certain government organizations, said that, well, we are not satisfied with certain safeguards in this contract and we’d like to see certain other safeguards written into it and you know, come back to us with another contract. And the process of negotiation that ICM registry went through was kind of interesting. If you could imagine negotiating a contract with someone where every time you asked them for something, they said yes; ICM registry basically did everything that satisfied every objection that was raised; in the meantime, the board composition changed and so ICM registry came back with exactly what the previous board told them to do and this board said, well, no, we don’t like it anyway and don’t come back again. So, the Triple X application, I believe, is effectively killed and part of the concern of the current board was that ICM registry had done what every previous board had asked it to do all along. [laughs]
Victor: Well . . . you show up and you do what they say and you still don’t get it.
John: Right. It’s the time scale of the process itself.
Victor: Right.
John: You know, that is the killer. Because . . . and here’s the ultimate punch line on this: proceeding in parallel with all the ICANN festivity is that we expect by the end of the year that there will be a uniform process for applying for new, generic top level domains. There have been sort of two rounds of beauty pageants that ICANN has conducted since its inception. The first round gave us such winners as .MUSEUM, .COOP, .AERO, .PRO, and you know, these extensions are of course almost as popular as ccTLDs for Western Samoa . . .
Victor: [laughs]
John: . . . you know, combined. [laughs] But not quite. And, you know, in order to limit cyber squatting, in order to, of course . . . both of ICANN is concerned with making sure people don’t register domain names. . .
Victor: [laughs]
John: In order for people to not register domain names, ah, it was believed after that round that all new TLDs should be sponsored or chartered TLDS; that is, they should have rules for who should be eligible to register domain names and what conditions should these domain registrants comply with; you know, you have to be a five foot tall limbo dancer and jump through a hoop of fire and after you do that, yes, well, maybe you’ll be entitled to register a domain name. And Triple X, you know, it was . . . the idea basically was to have a name space that intentionally had a lot of rules. And people that have all sorts of superstitions about what the intent was, actually the intent was that adult webmasters in general find that they can get people to visit and they can get people, about halfway through the sign up form, but when it comes to entering your credit card information at some dot com website, ah, people balked. There’s a lack of confidence there. And it was believed that if there was a space for this which was more tightly regulated and controlled and in which the registry maintained the means to enforce contractual compliance, that there would be heightened consumer confidence in this. Now, yeah, there’s all sorts of other things that get tacked on there and ICM registry had agreed to work with organizations such as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to, you know, develop rules and to police this place. But here’s the crazy thing. At the end of the year, ICANN is going to set forth a policy for new generic TLDs; that is, top level domain names that are every bit as open as dot com . . .
Victor: Okay.
John: . . . and ostensibly people are going to be able to line up and say, here’s my top level domain, here’s the, you know, registry I intend to run it with, here’s my expertise in running a registry and these things are going to be granted on an objective basis. So, you know, within 12 months, it is guaranteed that there will be applications for such things as .PORN, .SEX, .XXX, .GAY, .BI, you know, whatever you can put after a dot.
Victor: All through this new process.
John: Pardon?
Victor: All through the new process.
John: Yeah. And, you know, that there will eventually be a top level domain that, you know, while it is somehow suggestive of adult content but won’t have, you know, the various rules and restrictions that ICM registry was proposing. And you know, I understand, you know, that people have opinions about this one way or the other and you know, I don’t think that there’s a correct opinion or a right opinion but you know, it always struck me as odd that, you know, basically what we have in .COM is that we got a swimming pool with no lifeguards and if someone wanted to build a swimming pool in the same town that had a lifeguard and uhm, you know, people were complaining, well, kids might drown in that pool even though it has a lifeguard . . .
Victor: [laughs]
John: . . . Well, you know, yeah, that’s true, but you know, the shocking discovery that someone might use the Internet to distribute, you know, pornography is just, I imagine, too hard for people to bear.
Victor: I know; where do they get that from? Hey, John, I read [inaudible] . . .
John: [inaudible] . . . I always thought that pornography was probably invented within about ten minutes of photography . . .
Victor: [laughs] Exactly. I read on the CNET news that ICANN may be looking for immunity from U.S. law and it references in here that a few years ago the question was whether United Nations would take over ICANN. Today it looks sort of like ICANN would try to mimic the United Nations. Any discussion or anything about this while at the Lisbon show?
John: Uhm . . . no. That’s . . . that’s . . . probably not going to be much of a public discussion at all. ICANN, for good reason, wants immunity from U.S. law or from any law at all, because it’s much easier to make, you know, arbitrary decisions when one is not accountable to anyone for making those discussions. I think its pretty sad that, you know, Western Civilization, or I should say human civilization, took a long time to reach the point where, you know, we understood that. What works is our representative structures, which are based upon the rule of law, but one of my favorite canards is, well, the Internet changed all that. You know, it’s sort of like the mantra that 9/11 changed everything. I do not believe it is a step forward in the advancement of human self governance to say that, oh well, there’s something really important; we need to seal it off from democratic processes and rational application of the rule of law. I don’t think that’s a good idea. I also don’t think, and the bottom line to all of those discussions, is that at the end of the day, ICANN operates under contract with the United States government to run the Internet root service system. And the U.S. government is not going to voluntarily relinquish its sole veto power over that resource, you know, as long as . . . and that’s not even a left wing or right wing or Democratic or Republican position; its more of a “why should they” give it up. . .
Victor: Exactly. Why would they?
John: . . . give it up; why would they? And, to a marginal degree, there is a certain intelligence value associated with having access to root server queries. But I just . . . I don’t see it happening. I can’t see . . . if you thought that having an international board ruling on, you know, .XXX was you know, interesting, you know, I don’t think that people are going to want to give veto power to certain other political entities in the world that perhaps don’t subscribe to the same notions of governments that we do.
Victor: John, I’ve got two more questions for you; then we’re going to have to take a break with some commercials and come on with our next guest.
John: Okay.
Victor: The first question is: I know that you attend these things on a regular basis. Are the ICANN meetings open to the public?
John: Oh, yeah. It’s the greatest show in town. The next one will be in Puerto Rico in June and you can go to ICANN.org, click on the meeting agenda; you can sign up; you can attend it for free. If you get there early enough there’s typically during the week there’s what’s called the Host Event; it’s usually some lavish dinner and interesting cultural entertainment. And, it’s a worthwhile thing. The . . . probably if anyone shows up at an ICANN meeting, it’s kind of like a hall of mirrors. There’s doors opening and closing and things going on. And first timers can be very disoriented. Typically on Sunday there’s a first timers reception and lunch where the process is explained and if anybody shows up at an ICANN meeting at random and wants to know, hey, where’s the real interesting stuff going on, grab me in a hallway and I’ll point you in the direction that’s appropriate to whatever it is you’re interested in.
Victor: And why is it that ICANN always meets in such exotic places? I’ve heard Morocco; I’ve heard a number of places around the world and so how is it that they’ve come to choose these particular locations?
John: Yeah; I keep a collection of flags on my lawn [laughs].
Victor: [laughs]
John: The ICANN universe is divided up into five global regions, because ICANN is more than, you know, just a collection of the same old people pushing the same old policies. It is an organization that is informed by international ideals and dialogue. So the same old people actually have to pack their bags, you know, three times, four times a year to run off to these places. And its, you know, it’s a great question, because it’s somewhat pathetic. I mean, of course, what is an exotic place depends upon where you are in the world. But, you know, even if a meeting is going to be held in Europe, holding it in a place like, say, Frankfurt or London, that is accessible to a large international hub, would still make it easier for participants from different regions of the world to meet. But the amazing thing after the last two (the previous one was in Sao Paulo, Brazil; this one was in Lisbon, Portugal) is that ICANN managed to meet successively in two countries that both speak Portuguese . . .
Victor: [laughs]
John: Think about it. Think about it.
Victor: There has to be something to it.
John: That’s a really tough thing to do. Although I have been informed by a Portuguese friend of mine that Portuguese is the sixth most popular language in the world, and I was surprised to find that out. But that’s primarily because of Brazil.
Victor: Well, John, I appreciate you being on tonight’s show, on behalf of Monte and the entire Domain Masters team. I know they appreciate it and I know that [inaudible] . . .
John: Alright. Well, tell Monte to take care of his back . . .
Victor: [inaudible] . . . You’re always informative and always current with your information. We really appreciate you being on tonight’s show.
John: Alright. Thank you.
Victor: Alright. Folks, we’re going to take a quick commercial break and when we come back from it we’re going to be joined by Andrew Goodman. He’s the founder of Toronto-based Page Zero Media, a marketing agency. And we’re going to talk a little bit with Andrew when we return from these commercial breaks. Stay tuned for Domain Masters.
[Commercials]
Victor: Welcome back, folks. This is Victor Pitts, your in tune right now to Domain Masters. Monte Cahn is the regular host of the show and Monte has got the night off, so I’m subbing for him.
Just in case you’re listening to this, the Podcaster’s show is coming out on April the 5th, so if you’re listening to it right now, you’re listening to it live.
I’d like to tell you a little bit about our next guest. His name is Andrew Goodman. He’s the founder of Toronto-based Page Zero Media, a marketing agency which focuses on ROI-driven page search. He’s also the co-founder of Traffic.com, an award winning industry commentary site. He’s the author of “Winning Results with Google Adwords” which is a McGraw-Hill publication from 2007; actually 2005. And he’s frequently quoted in business press. Most recently, he made it into The Wall Street Journal article about Topics.net domain name woes and name changes, where he also managed to mention a start up he works closely with, a homeowner-oriented, user-generated review site called HomeStars.ca. Andrew has spoken and moderated at some 20-plus search engine strategies conferences around the world and is now the chair of the upcoming Search Engine Strategies – Toronto, which is scheduled for June 12th and 13. Andrew will be speaking at the upcoming SES show in New York next week. We will be attending with our Moniker staff. And he’s going to be moderating several panels there. Andy, it’s appropriate to mention, he’s a program chair for the SES in Toronto, which is the June SES event. Andrew, are you with us?
Andrew: Yeah, I’m here.
Victor: Yeah; is there anything I left out from that introduction, Andrew, that I should note?
Andrew: Ah, you know, I think that was good. [laughs] let’s move on.
Victor: Well, listen, I do appreciate you joining us. Now, how long have you been working with SES?
Andrew: So, yeah, you know, I just did a little research on the history of all of this and it is . . . it takes me down memory lane, but it’s just now coming up five years, I think. I think I spoke in 2002 at SES San Jose in the summer and that was my first ever talk there. But, kind of, that’s one of those weird things because I felt like I knew Danny and Chris a little bit through virtual communication. I attended my first SES in 2001 at Boston . . .
Victor: Wow.
Andrew: I was looking at the old program and you look at those names – a few of them haven’t gone anywhere. It’s six years down the road but we have the Dana Todds and the Detleds and the Sherry Thoreau’s are all still going strong.
Victor: Well, you’ve seen the shows grow and expand a bit. What’s the biggest difference of the shows now versus the early days?
Andrew: You know, it’s not as different as you might think. I think the, you know, it’s just bigger. The size has increased. New York, you know, that’s what people forget is that Boston was the East Coast stop in those days, so the move to New York was a huge change. Boston was kind of a medium sized show and New York this year was just massive; the Hilton bursting at the seams. Ah, yeah, so you know, the changes are not as shocking as we might expect. I think there’s actually been a lot of commonalities and what’s really changed, I guess, from the perspective of the whole community is that, you know, pretty much everyone in business now buys into it. So, all businesses, large and small and especially big business, now feel its important to have someone at these conferences than in the past; you know, it looked like a bit of a rebels club and now it’s a bit of both.
Victor: What are some of the topics that you’re going to be discussing in New York?
Andrew: Yeah, so, uhm, I hope to attend a lot of sessions, too; but I’m moderating a few panels. Some of them on topics that I want to learn about myself, but the one I’m mainly speaking on is on, as usual for me, is page search on the ad and of late, we’ve had just some major complexity in how ads are ranked on page search programs, so that one’s called “Ads in Equality Score World” and Google introduced what they call “Quality Based Bidding” in 2005, in the summer of 2005. And its gone through a few, you know, a few iterations and really ads and keywords and advertisers’ sites and landing pages on all these things are being assessed to determine whether your ads show up at all and where they rank, so there’s a lot of complexity to that and so we’re going to explore some of those nitty-grittys.
Victor: Right. Besides your session, what are some of the other highlights of the New York show? I know its busy when you’re planning on speaking on panels or working on a panel and trying to get to the other shows, because sometimes they’re in conflict with your schedule. But what are some of the other highlights in the New York show?
Andrew: Yeah, I mean, the highlight is tough to pin down because it literally offers everything and sometimes everything times two if you miss a session on paid ads; there’ll be another one you can attend. But, one of my favorites is the contextual . . . I’m sorry . . . the conversion rate improvement stuff. There’s just so many ways to take a stab at that but when you have someone like Brian Isenburg speaking on that panel, absolutely phenomenal, uhm, conversion rate, you know, I (and this is something that I’ve been trying to sort out since I had a chapter on it in my book that, you know, I’m not the world’s leading expert on it, but I had to have a chapter on it) one thing that I found useful was to talk about conversion rates as being partly just plumbing and very practical things about testing and how users interact with pages. But then if you take a step back and look at the broader area of persuasion, I think that’s where Isenburg shines. You have to look at segmenting users, sending them to the correct place but taking a look at really the research that goes into how you, you know, target your offering in the first place.
Victor: Hm-mm.
Andrew: It’s just something companies don’t seem to understand, so some of the myths that people come to a conference like this with will involve certain myths about how users interact with websites; like, someone might just tell you, you know, its really important not to put too much copy on your page, or people don’t want to read a lot of information. They can hear directly from an Isenburg, specifically why that’s incorrect and how to read the analytics.
Victor: The programs’ taking it really to a new level, but its not just about getting the traffic to the site and understanding the search engines and the methodologies and the ways, and optimization techniques and tools for doing that; but really how to, you know, let’s get right to the business, you know, converting a visitor to a customer. So, it sounds like its transitioning in terms of its content, actually broadening the content.
Andrew: Yeah, well, that’s the beauty of . . . looks like there’s 75 sessions total at New York, so within the old traditional areas of search optimization, you have specialties. You know, people just need to come up to speed on one aspect of it and you know, one of my favorite developments of late has been the fact that both search engines (the two leading search engines) now have better webmaster tools, communication tools and consoles that will help you. In Google’s case, you know, Google’s Webmaster Central and Yahoo!’s Site Explorer (I think it’s called – I get the names mixed up). But the point being with those kinds of things, you know, there are old methods of getting around indexing problems or conveying to the search engines what you’re site map was or whatever, as we see more standardization on things like. That’s a whole kind of community outreach piece that the search engines have done that makes a real difference and people do need to understand what’s available.
Victor: Right. Now you’re taking on this task of the program chair for the Toronto SES show, which is, again, held in June. So what is that like? Is this the first time you’ve chaired a show like this?
Andrew: It’s definitely the first time I’ve chaired a show like this. It’s, ah, I thought it was hard until I looked at [laughs] Danny’s program for New York. It’s two days, so I’ve had to be quite brutal in cutting out some things that I would rather see in the show. But, uhm, I mixed up the content to include what I think are some of the fundamentals with some of the newer cutting edge topics and I’ve added a couple experiments in there. So, there’s the additional focus on some new concepts in local search; some talk about social media; as well as redoubling on some of the basics. I think I even got more basic on one of the search engine optimization sessions for the very new attendees. Over half of SES Toronto attendees will probably be first timers, so [inaudible]. . .
Victor: That’s outstanding . . . [inaudible]
Andrew: [inaudible] . . . dos and don’ts, because even the myths and scams and the things that you shouldn’t do change every few years. It’s not just the same old scams [laughs] . . .
Victor: Right, right . . .
Andrew: For new people it’s even more basic than maybe some of the sessions in the past. And then at the same time we have some advanced sessions that are even more on the cutting edge than in the past. So we kind of broadened it on both ends.
Victor: Uhm, tell me just a little bit about your marketing agency. It’s Page Zero Media?
Andrew: Yeah. [inaudible] . . .
Victor: [inaudible] . . . so tell us a little bit . . . [inaudible]
Andrew: . . . our clients are, you know, that’s the core of what we do and my colleagues and I do. We, starting in 2002, decided to focus on optimizing that page search ad spin for clients, so we don’t really do much SEO, although, you know, for our long term clients, we do just about anything [laughs]; we’ll do some PR for them if they want. But, by and large we have a service that gets people better results, you know, in 90 days from a paid search program and then from there, we can broaden out and start working on additional things, such as multi-variant landing page testing and a whole lot of related services. So, it’s, yeah, its, uhm, any type of client is welcome to work with us; we don’t have any verticals that we specialize in, etc., and we’re certainly willing to work with not the tiniest companies but we like small companies that are growing.
Victor: Right. And with your book that you wrote, “Winning with Google Adwords” – is this the first time in the publication? Or have you done this before?
Andrew: Well, I did start out with an e-book, and that was called “The Google Adword Handbook,” although I think it was called “21 Ways to Maximize ROI on Google Adwords.” [laughs] But, that was spat out quickly in 2002 as an e-book and it was very timely and people were quite confused about the new program that Google had come out with. So that really, frankly, put me on the map and got me in touch with a lot of advertisers and so on and I kept on writing and just non-stop from there. So the print book came along, opportunity came along, I guess, in December of 2003 (I believe it was or was it 2004?) . . .
Victor: Did you enjoy writing the book enough that you’re going to be writing another one?
Andrew: So, ah, I didn’t enjoy it. [laughs]
Victor: [laughs] [inaudible]
Andrew: . . . [inaudible] love the part; halfway through I was having a good time and then it really hit the wall in terms of trying to run a business and do it at the same time. So, there’s no question, if you talk to any author, you know, they’re looking longingly out the window at people barbecuing in the summer while they’re in there still revising their chapters. But, uhm, I am doing the . . . the revisions aren’t as hard and two years later, so much has changed that I’m really actually thankful that I can . . . that McGraw-Hill has seconded me to update it for a 2nd edition that comes out in October. It’s just, even the way Google ranks ads has of course changed and has even changed in the last 8 weeks; so I’m glad to be able to update it.
Victor: Okay. Tell us a little bit about your start up now – the homeowner-oriented, user-generated review site. What is it, HomeStars.ca?
Andrew: Yeah . . .
Victor: . . . tell our listeners a little bit about what it’s about?
Andrew: Sure. Well, HomeStars was basically a client for awhile and in a way it was one of those friendly jobs where you see an interesting company and they didn’t really fit really that well into our service model at Page Zero. I figured I’d just give them some ongoing advise. And at the time it was already quite good. You know, it was very localized but it was taking consumers opinions of all of the, you know, the name of the guy who did your drywall, installed your, you know, or put together your reno, whether it be a bathroom or landscaping or whatever. So it’s all those contractors, renovators, and it’s kind of that long tail of service providers that’s so difficult, you know, for homeowners to go beyond the word of mouth of the immediate people they to actually get good information on which contractors are appropriate and which ones are shady. Turns out to be fairly difficult to find so just in two cities for now, we managed to get a hold of quite a lot of homeowners who were good enough to begin sharing their information with their neighbors. We do have a plan and we actually have been working on and closing a round of investment for the last couple of months. We do hope that the completely revamped Web 2.0 enabled site and city roll out plan happens. So, basically, that whole field of renos will be subject to homeowner scrutiny.
Victor: If someone is thinking about attending this show, they’re in Toronto (the SES show), what should they know about Toronto if they’re coming up there at that time of the year?
Andrew: Yeah, well, we’re so happy that it’s in June.
Victor: [laughs]
Andrew: The show is in its fourth year. Everybody says the buzz is growing around the Toronto SES and I think part of that is just the community and the fun aspect of after hours as well. But that is one good thing about a slightly smaller SES; you can get a lot more time with speakers and with other attendees kind of after the sessions are over and in the parties and so on. Uhm, so, you know, Toronto is about as nice as it gets in June. We had in May; we had it in April; and they were going to put it back to March and we all said we’d quit if it was in March, so . . .
Victor: [laughs] I know June is a beautiful time up there.
Andrew: [inaudible]
Victor: So, interestingly enough, I understand it’s the fourth biggest media market in North America.
Andrew: Right. So that’s been something that for a lot of the U.S. attendees in the past, they were probably pleasantly surprised that this was just basically another SES and it was just as good as any other . . . like, my whole concern is that we don’t just, just to have a lot of Canada-only content; we are a North American market and a cosmopolitan market. And I think I’ve pretty found that at any SES around the world. You can go to, whether it be London or even a smaller market like Stockholm, a lot of the people attending, certainly in Sweden, the people attending were not just coming there, you know, to be told about Sweden. They know about Sweden. So they really wanted global experts on search marketing to come and share information that, you know, they would at any other SES.
Victor: Right. I understand you’ve got a great keynote speaker – can you tell us who that is and a little bit about his background?
Andrew: Yeah. So I feel a little bit sheepish about kind of previewing this in a sense that he has said yes, but the ink’s not quite dry, so I hope . . . if he turns around and says no, he’ll probably be mad about me for promoting it [laughs] [inaudible] . . .
Victor: Okay, folks, you’ve heard the disclaimer, so if he says no, don’t be mad at Andrew. [laughs]
Andrew: [laughs] Pardon me?
Victor: I said, so if he says no to you after we make the announcement, then he can’t be mad. Uhm, but you do have a great keynote speaker; we’ll just leave it at that.
Andrew: Yeah, a great keynote speaker and if you look hard at TRAFFIC.com on the last couple of posts, you may get a hint as to who it might be. [laughs]
Victor: Fantastic. Fantastic. Well, listen, Andrew, we really do appreciate you being on the show tonight and we at Moniker love the SES shows. We’ve been attending them now since about 2002, I think it is. But we really enjoy attending the shows and we get a lot out of it also. So, any of you folks that are listening that have not yet made your plans, you know, go check it out. As far as the SES show, I’ll go ahead and post this on the chat line in a few minutes as far as the website of where to go to. But, Andrew, we do appreciate you being on Domain Masters tonight. We enjoyed having you. We look forward to seeing you next week. And we also look forward to the Toronto show. And I’m sure that it will be a tremendous success.
Andrew: Look forward to seeing you.
Victor: Alright, folks, well listen. I appreciate you tuning in to Domain Masters as I’m filling in for Monte Cahn. Monte will be back next week at the regularly scheduled time and in fact I believe he’s actually going to be doing a Domain Masters live there at the SES show up in New York. So you’re in for a real treat and again to appreciate it. Appreciate our first guest tonight we had which was John Berryhill, renowned lawyer that came back from the ICANN meeting in Portugal. Gave us a real good understanding about what went down there and some of the significance of it. We also were joined by Andrew Goodman, founder of Toronto-based Page Zero Media, and he’s also going to chairing the program chair for the Toronto SES show and one of the panelists of the . . . on several panels, actually on the SES New York show. We enjoyed both of our guests tonight. Appreciate you tuning in to Domain Masters. Again, stay tuned next week, next Wednesday at 7:00 p.m. eastern time for the return of Domain Masters and Monte Cahn, your regular host. My name is Victor Pitts and I appreciate you listening in. Have a good night, folks.
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