Namemon - Domain Market Monitoring Blog
Tuesday, 15 September 2009 06:26
Most people are familiar with Google's standard logo and generally consider it a staple of their daily search routine. Google has in the past, replaced this logo with festive logos on Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Year's, Halloween and other US holidays. However, this change used to be simply a change of the logo itself. Over the past few months, this change has included a search result when clicked, sending the user into Google's search results with the top results for the term associated with the logo displayed. Most domainers and webmasters are familiar with this, and perhaps have even attempted to get a piece of the search traffic.
I have noticed that on Wikipedia, if the entry is highly-ranked for that result, it will receive what we call "ip vandalism" which is essentially users not logged in adding their links to the entry for some spillover traffic and revenue. We then request an IP lock on the page and this vandalism stops for the day. However, lately I have noticed a much more disturbing trend.
Bloggers with backends into news organizations have begun taking advantage of this result simply to generate traffic to their site. Since Google automatically shows news results first in a relevant search, any news website that posts about Google's logo is instantly awarded with about one million clicks. This is very enticing and we can see that this trend is creating its own type of unedited blogger.
For instance, last week Google's logo displayed a UFO as a logo with "unexplained phenomenon" as the search click. Harold Nolte at The Examiner clearly got very excited about this and posted "Google logo: is it an unexplained phenomenon?", which instantly drove millions of clicks, and hundreds of snide remarks, to the Examiner. Today, the new logo is also a UFO, over a field, with the search term set as "crop circles". Wikipedia is again the first result but above that we have various news articles. Early this morning, it was a ZDnet community article which has since been purged from ZD which pulled it off the front page in due time. But we still have 18 other articles, proving that everyone has realized that this show-stopper act is worth getting in on.
Who doesn't want a million clicks in one day? But clearly journalism is sinking to a new low - most notably by its lack of good editors. The only thing that is certain is this miniature explosion of fake search result articles at newsrooms is that it is going to explode in popularity and competition.
Tuesday, 08 September 2009 14:22
Topping off the Labor Day weekend at Namejet we saw one decent and one very large domain sale.
BridgeLoan.com - $27,101 - Definitely the week's biggest blockbuster sale. 132 Bidders entered and one man left. Winning bid was placed by Homer just edging out JBiz. The bidding war lasted over an hour as each upped the bid by a few hundred each minute. Other bidders who were willing to take this into the thousands before walking away included:
| Bidder | Amount | Date |
|---|---|---|
| homer | $27,101 | Sep. 7, 2009 3:24 PM PT |
| jbiz | $27,001 | Sep. 7, 2009 3:23 PM PT |
| hoofhearted | $15,001 | Sep. 7, 2009 2:09 PM PT |
| kishy | $8,500 | Sep. 7, 2009 11:36 AM PT |
| whypark | $4,900 | Sep. 4, 2009 12:00 PM PT |
| alesia7 | $3,700 | Sep. 4, 2009 11:33 AM PT |
Another large item on the auction list was GarageDoorOpener.com, another premium generic with heavy search volume.
| Bidder | Amount | Date |
|---|---|---|
| vik22 | $2,545 | Sep. 7, 2009 1:46 PM PT |
| newgroup | $2,445 | Sep. 7, 2009 12:25 PM PT |
| li1o0xjlwcv01qt03qw6 | $2,345 | Sep. 7, 2009 12:25 PM PT |
| hiphop | $1,025 | Sep. 7, 2009 10:53 AM PT |
44 Bidders pushed the price to close out at $2,545 by vik22
This week's big pre-release auction will be THE.ORG. Already at $1,000 it is sure to reach $25,000 with nearly 200 bidders.
Tuesday, 08 September 2009 07:29
Here are some auctions you might have missed at GoDaddy this Labor Day weekend. Hopefully you enjoyed the good weather and the changeover from summer fun to work, school and autumn.
DATZ.com - Nice LLLL, pronouncable and even brandable despite the "Z". 95 bids brought this one to $4,000
Clippoo.com - A strong traffic domain (71k hits estiamted) with some brandability, $8,893 with 63 bids
FDA.net - Three premium letters and lots of search volume. $2,007
WhiteFang.com - A great Jack London novel and made into a movie in 1991. $1,011 with 75 bids
Diameter.org - A nice generic disctionary .org with 28 bids for $505
DiscountLasers.com - Simple generic with search volume, $628 with 50 bids
Upcoming Auctions - The following domains look like they will be the heavy hitters this week:
IGII.com - Another nice LLLL with triple repeating "I", already at $230
WEA.net - Premium 3L .net with bidding at $557 with 6 hours to go
Written by Ed Muller Monday, 07 September 2009 13:50
GMH.com is on Namejet with 1 day to go. Bidding is already at $12,000 and certain to go higher with almost 200 bidders in the mix.
As three key letters, GMH is very strong and worth its valuation in the open market. But this post is not about price, its about poor domain management.
GMH has been the property of Hughes Electronics Corporation since 1997. Archive.org shows the domain has been forward to Hughes.com since 2000, a fairly typical waste of a domain by a corporation. Nameservers are set to HAC.com, another Hughes property, and domain administration emails are set to tom@gmh and ebm3@gmh. Clearly these have been overlooked for some time. Only two domains appear with these antiquated entries - GMH.com and C79.net. Obviously someone did not document what these email addresses were for and how they were forwarded. Using some HAC.com forwarding servers, it appears that other domains hosted on these servers also no longer resolve.
While it is possible Network Solutions might take pity on an entity like Hughes to avoid litigation, if this error is not caught in the next two months it is unlikely to ever be resolved without multi-party lawsuits in which each entity asserts its right to the expired name.
This will still continue to underscore the lack of use of domains at large corporations. Forwarding, poor management and lack of monitors will continue to plague failed companies until they learn that if they don't hire someone to clean up their act for them, the domain name system will do it for them in due time.
Ed Muller is a registrant specialist and provides consulting and litigation expertise in both Domains and DNS.
Post-Auction Update
GMH.com was won for a top bid of $13,600 on September 8th 2009
Written by Ed Muller
This post is a follow up to Elliot's "Why I Didn't Bid on .CM Domains" and Chad Kettner's DomainNameNews editorial "What are these domains really worth?"
When .CM was announced, I grabbed my resources and started looking for something that could be an earner. I decided to forgo the normal process of buying a domain - evaluation based on keyword + traffic, and instead turned to raw dynamics: traffic only.
To me, it appeared that .CM had no real value as a WORD+Extension purchase. The starting price was too high and the players were too big. With Namejet as Enom's bidding platform I couldn't see costs staying below a cool several grand for even the most innocuous names. So what's a guy like me with a short budget to do?
First I pulled up the Alexa 100 and shuffled through it for domains that might convert well into clicks if traffic was misdirected. Generic names like Gmail (Google was unable to secure this term in other ccTLDs), Amazon, MSN, etc., are all frequently typed into browsers and can easily support very generic ad space. So I applied for top domains in this list that I felt were worth a shot.
What was the result of this application?
amazon.cm Enom Rejected gmail.cm Enom Rejected
So I tried another route.
I own a few typos myself of generic terms that do well - and some are odd enough that they would escape any scrutiny from a simple advisory panel and I felt they were also worth a shot, despite the high price.
I sent in my application for these terms. Result? Rejected again (I won't post those because they are my personal private stash)
At this point it's a week to go, so I decided to try a final route: Alexa's list for .CM domains (yes, Alexa is able to track even typos with bad extensions). At the top were three unregisterables: Ringo.CM (Cameroon ISP), Gmail.CM (I was already rejected), and Google.CM (That is TM territory where I won't tread). Further down the list was the CM Government and CM Registrar, along with a few other terms, including Weather.CM. Well, I thought Weather must surely be worth a shot?
weather.cm Enom Rejected
So what does this tell us about the .CM process?
- You didn't have a chance to begin with
- What is being sold was already proven by Kevin Ham to be worthless
- What remains is worth Keyword value only, and can only be resold for keyword value
- The domains that you should really want are still making someone else money
In the old con man's game we call this the bait and switch. Hold out a gold watch and give them a rotten apple before they can trade it in or ask for a refund. Then run away. Hide in some far away region where no one would ever look for you.
Like for instance, Cameroon.
Written by Ed Muller Wednesday, 02 September 2009 06:46
As Rick posted on his blog titled The Coming Fall Boom, he believes that this season will bring two things: A stock market dip and an explosion of internet marketing prices. While I can't comment on the first I would like to make some observations on the latter.
I have accounts at Commission Junction, Linkshare, Clickbank, Connect Commerce, Google Adsense and many others. Over the past two months I have been seeing more aggressive rate changes in advertising through some of the vendors. Each company you sign up to be an affiliate for sends updates on new commission rates, program changes, new programs available, etc. Lately these have been coming in steadily as advertisers bump up their rates. My CD Storage website has gone from $.40 per click to $.70 per click. Another site, Latex Mattress Reviews jumped from $.60 per click to $1 per click - and those are just my payouts per click. Clearly those advertisers are paying at least double those rates to get listed on my site. Search volume on all fronts seems to be rising, and everyone from mom and pop to major marketing firms are competing for the same customers again, driving up rates. I believe that this will be a period of very solid statistics for most who use affiliate or high-quality click programs. Not to mention the potential for Ebay's channel switch from per sale to per click which I am already testing on a few sites.
Ultimately if you look at the trail of commissions they all have to do the same thing. For each click that is converted to a sale, you get a small piece but all your traffic is likely lost. You have probably not created something for the visitor to return to, just a search engine ranked series of pages destined to earn you some cash. This works fine for the domainer and is in fact, a great way to supplement income that comes in spurts through sales.
However, more often I am leaning towards creating sites with real marketing deals for actual product, where I am the reseller with the order form - not just another ranked page for content without product. If this season is really going to see growth in leaps and bounds, the true beneficiaries will be the ones selling the actual item which is being marketed.
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