Patents.com - Case Study in Innovative Domain Development
How www.Patents.com went from a premium parked domain to the largest
database of translated patents online worth 10x the domain price.
Overview: Patents.com is a premium domain and new corporation developed
by Domain Strategies in conjunction with Internet Real Estate Group, the owners
of the Patents.com domain. Rob Monster led the creation of the new corporation
and the assembly of critical pieces of content, technology and infrastructure
to take Patents.com from a simple parked page to the Internets premier source
of patent data in multiple languages.
The new Patents.com is built on a technology platform that was acquired through
the purchase of PatentMonkey.com. This platform was strengthened and expanded
through a business relationship with WorldLingo, the top machine translation
service in the world (utilized by Microsoft with MS Word) and relationships
with US and European patent offices. The fully functional Patents.com will
host 450+ million source patent documents in 15 languages, that are highly
optimized for search engines and monetized through advertising, a community
platform, and through various premium services.
The combination of technology, worldwide accessibility and unparalleled domain
strategy make Patents.com the Internet's premier source of patent data.
Challenges: Forming a significant business on a premium domain is dependent on
several variables. As PatentMonkey.com proved, having a superior technological
platform isn't the sole factor to which success is attributable. When such a
technology is used alongside strategic marketing and product development,
however, it has a much greater chance of reaching viability.
In the case of Patents.com, these practices have been applied in a rigorous
three tiered initiative that combines technology, strategy and partnerships to
create a company with a pre-money value 10x greater than the original valuation
of the domain itself. As a parked domain, Patents.com would have taken 100s of
years to generate the value created through the visionary assembly of key
business assets such as the WorldLingo translations technology and the
PatentMonkey.com foundational technology.
Relationships: Although the presence of WorldLingo is a seamless one, its value
is clear. Providing content in multiple languages is a sure way to expand the
base of a business without having to generate new content. Patents.com by
itself represented only potential, but when paired with the technology of
PatentMonkey.com and the international vision of Mr. Monster, that potential
became kinetic.
Lessons: As with all examples of synergy, the whole is greater than the
sum of its parts. While high quality domains maintain increasingly discernible
values, it can be demonstrated repeatedly that their values increased
exponentially when fixed upon their natural business paths. While Patents.com
and PatentMonkey.com commanded some worth individually, those values were
minimal when compared to the combined weight of the entities when rolled
together.
This exponential value creation is the primary objective of Domain Strategies.
Patents.com is just one early example of what a combination of a highly
brandable domain, a worldwide business vision and working capital can achieve.
Other early examples of this model include HealthCare.com and WiFi.com.
If you have a premium domain that youd like to launch to the next level,
please contact us.