We’ve just added six new premium domains from a variety of categories:
Contact us to discuss your interest and ideas.
We’ve just added two very high quality two word generic domains to the Domain Strategies portfolio: CyberSpace.com and ConsumerWarranty.com. Both of these domains are available for development and have tremendous potential for building significant businesses.
Cyberspace.com is an excellent domain for social media, an internet development/marketing company, an internet related product or anything having to do with the internet.
ConsumerWarranty.com is a powerful generic two word domain focused on the consumer space. This domain can be used to sell aftermarket warranties or be used as a review and/or opinion site on which consumer warranties are worth getting.
Contact us for partnership discussions on these two premium domains
I wanted to post some thoughts about parking vs development and came across this post by Kevin Leto of BigTicketDomains.com and thought he put the decision in a great context. The following is the full, unedited post.
Parking vs. Development
“When looking at the debate of Parking vs. Development, much depends on the objectives a domainer has for his portfolio and the types and quality of his domains.
A high quality type-in domain will obviously have a higher CTR on a PPC page, usually 30% to 40%, sometimes even higher. Whereas on a web site you’ll see CTR’s of 5% to 10%. So you will see a drop in revenues initially.
The down side to PPC is it doesn’t create traffic growth, nor build a user base, nor offer any other revenue or site feature options. Bottom line you are limited completely. The upside is simplicity, especially if you need a monetization solution for tens of thousands of domains.
The down side to web sites are initial drop in revenues (for type-in domains), initial development costs, and then management of them. The upside is you now have the ability to grow traffic, grow a user base, and have total flexibility for implementation of all sorts of features and revenue generators.
It kills me when domainers say PPC is better. It is ultimately not, and if you sit down and deeply think about how much money you have been leaving on the table you’d fall off your chair when the realization sinks in.
If PPC was indeed better than we wouldn’t have any problems selling our fabulous sounding one word domain names to major corporations all day long. They’d be falling all over themselves to pay any price we ask. It’s not happening and it’s not going to happen, with rare exceptions of course.
Major corporations don’t want to acquire just type-in traffic for 20 years multiples, on an undeveloped domain. They do want to acquire USERS and a branded domain with a site that provides those users with a positive experience that they gain information, products, services, interaction or entertainment from.
Business.com is a fantastic domain as an example. It went from a $150,000 domain acquisition to a $7.5 Million acquisition for development as a search engine with companies paying annual fees of $199 to be included and paying for ad clicks to their directory listing, and just recently to a $345 Million acquisition by the R.H. Donnelly company. Most domainers would have that on a PPC landing page and would be making a ton of money surely. But would they be making $345 Million with that strategy? The answer is no. What surely turned Donnelly on was not just the traffic, but that established advertiser goldmine in Business.com’s databases. Those advertisers could then be further developed as advertisers across their entire ad network.
Web surfers come and either click and go on or just move on instantly when they hit a ppc landing page. There is no customer aquisition for the domain owner. Zippo. The most cherished and valued prize on the Net walks into your store and in seconds is out the back door to someone else’s site. It that smart business? I don’t think anyone could argue it is.
Let’s look at a big domain that has 30,000+ type-ins per day. Let’s say it’s been owned for 10 years. That’s 12 Million visitors a year. 120 Million since registration. Think about that number. 120 MILLION people have come to your store in the past decade. How many are “YOUR CUSTOMERS”? Not a single one. How many of their e-mail addresses do you have in a database? Not a single one. What kinds of stuff are they looking to buy? You don’t know a single drop of info about them. They’ve come and they’ve gone.
Now lets analyze the valuations. Under the PPC model, let’s assume a high 60% CTR paying 15 cents a click ove the life of the domain so far. The math works out to $10.8 Million you’ve earned over the past 10 years. That is great wealth and no one could deny a totally successful business.
Now lets say the site had been developed. After 10 years not only would you have those same 120 Million visitors, you would have captured a percentage of them in some way as repeat visitors, maybe a subscription, maybe just registered, maybe sold them something directly, any number of ways. But the main point is you would have tons of repeat visitors, and they would have provided free word of mouth, which would have brought in even more traffic and users. The revenues could be anything here since there are so many ways to generate cash flow when you have a web site. Surely in that time at a bare minimum you could have earned equal to the PPC and probably many multiples more. But the key point is you have not only an incredibly valuable domain asset at this point, but an even more valuable customer base asset. My guess is after 10 years you’d have at least 10 to 20 million users, probably way more. Now you own an asset worth a fortune, and in the hundreds of millions, and probably even close to a Billion or more.
So both ways make money, but the developed domain model is the true ultimate long term goldmine. And yes, not every developed site works, we’ve seen the dotcom bubble prove that, but the good thing about the Net now is the economies of scale are so efficient you can take down one concept and do another without much investment compared to the early days, and you always have your base type-in traffic. That is not going anywhere. If one building doesn’t work, knock it down and put up another until you get it right. It’s that simple.
Now to the points about mini sites. I personally have found mini sites work especially great for no-traffic domains bought at reg fee. They grow traffic, no if’s ands or buts. You do the math and even doing 1, 2, or 3 figs of revs a month, the numbers get amazing very very fast.
For most domainers I’ve polled, the majority of domains in their portfolio get litle or no traffic. Why did we buy them and why do we continue to then? It’s the expectation we all say that one day they’ll be good for development. What happens is domainers end up having thousands of these no traffic domains and basically get overwhelmed in their minds when they reach the point of saying “ok now how do I get these all developed?”. 99% of domainers aren’t developers. Nor do they want to be. It takes a lot of multitasking type skills and loads of energy to be a developer and even more to then manage it all effectively.
You also don’t want to put simple sites on exceptional domains. Great domains deserve and need great sites. And that doesn’t mean you need to spend an arm and a leg to get that. It certainly costs more to build a more robust site, but Internet technoloy has dramatically reduced the costs to an insignificant number compared to the early days. Over the past couple months I’ve evolved my mini site concept and system structure about 5 times over into something more robust, scaleable, and integrated with lots more features and capabilities than the original mini sites. I’ve now got a system designed to accomodate simple sites for no traffic domains reg fee domains, enhanced sites for moderate traffic domains and full scale sites for the premium type-in domains and have figured a way to still keep the costs in check even on the larger enterprise style sites. So its not just a strategy of instantly doing a zillion mini sites. You have to evaluate each domain and how much potential it has and then deploy a precision developed and custom tailored site on it. Once you do a few, then keep on going and build out more and more and more of them and you’ll soon have an enterprise sized ad network in your portfolio. Since a small number of domainers have the really huge traffic type-in domains, this is a way for the less fortunate domainers to get to that level too by having hundreds and thousands of small sites doing hundreds of visitors each a day and adding up to a big number of visitors network wide. It’s not easy to get small sites into thousands of visitors per day, but it is easy to get double and triple digits of traffic per day on them. You build with the end user in mind and they will come back and they will do word of mouth for you and traffic grows.
I’ve researched all the stuff you hear about SEO inside out, and there are some valid and genuine ways to optimize sites using SEO techniques. There are also many “black hat” ways that SEO wizards do to get high page rankings for clients. Many of these don’t last very long in the SERPS. My position is look at Google’s basic algorithm mantra. It’s as simple as their home page is. Sites that provide users with the best experience go to the top of the SERPS for the long term. You don’t need all sorts of fancy SEO stuff to accomplish that, nor be an SEO rocket scientist. You just need to do basic SEO optimizing and provide the highest quality site experience you can. Not only will you get good rankings, but users will tell other users, users will bookmark and come back again and again.
As I’ve indicated above when you place a high traffic domain on a site you’ll see an initial rev drop, but you will begin the process of solid traffic and user growth that will take you to the real treasure of dollars.
And here is where you have to really open your eyes wide and see exactly where the trove of money is. It is not doing thousands of bulk basic sites with Google AdSense on them. There is nothing wrong with AdSense. It works. It makes money. But it is NOT the treasure trove when you begin developing. It’s just the first step of the advertising monetization process. The gold rush comes when you enter Phase 2 of development and have traffic built across many sites with well targeted niches and users and can then sell impression based long term advertising deals directly to major corporate advertisers. This is where major major money can be made from advertising on developed sites. Plus at this point you now have the ability to implement premium subscription based type services and products to users to create additional revenue flows, do lead generators, and all sorts of exciting moneymakers.
Let’s go back to the 10 year domain example above. Let’s say after 10 years and your several hundred million visitors you had developed a site and out of all those surfers you grabbed 1/2 of 1% for a subscription of some kind. Not even taking into consideration the millions of extra visitors that would have been grown by a site on the domain, and just using the native type-in volume during that decade for the base factoring, you’d have roughly 500,000 subscribers paying you a fee every month. Or maybe just 500,000 subscribers with no fee but who you could then sell premium rate advertising on, such as in a newsletter. What’s 500,000 subscribers paying you $9.95 /month? That’s $5 Million per month, over 10 years thats $600 Million. So what’s better? $10 Million or 10 to 20x that number by having a web site asset to sell one day along with a great domain.
And think how much you could sell that asset for with 500,000 and up subscribers, with major corporate advertisers, and a huge income stream. Now you own a domain really worth the hundreds of millions of dollars we all say our domains are worth.
Cha-ching $$$. Once you look at domains with this understanding and vision, I think most domainers will quickly see the light, sit down with a calculator and know the future much more clearly and without hesitation, determine the wealth building strategy to aim for in the years ahead.”
Kevin Leto
Decemebr 11th 2007
The news today of ICANN’s unanimous passing of a recommendation to the budget committe to remove an exclusion of registration fees for domains returned to the registrar during the Add Grace Period (AGP - Five Days) on top of Google’s announcement earlier this week to not monetize any domain if it is less than 5 days old (the exact span of the AGP) effectively means the death of the practice of Domain Tasting and Domain Kiting as we know it. While I won’t go into detail on what Domain Tasting is (you can get a full description here), I did want to think through what the repercussions to the domain industry might be.
Domain Tasting has evolved into a practice that requires a high level of investment in technology and knowledge to do it effectively. Think about the numbers involved to be successful in domain tasting:
Clearly this is an automated, technology and math intensive exercise executed by sophisticated organizations with direct access to the domain drops and registrars. By definition, this leaves out the small domainers who are trying to find domains at the retail level.
According to the Domain Tools blog, Domain Tasting rakes in ~$3 million per month in click fees for the big players. No small amount of money. So, what will be the effect?
The big companies with a significant position in Domain Tasting will either forgo the money from this practice (doubtful) OR get much smarter about evaluating the domain at the point of purchase. If you can predict the value of a domain in a parked state through instant keyword analysis vs relying on 4 or 5 days of actual traffic, domain tasting can still exist. The 5 day grace period is nothing more than a trial run for the long term value of the domain.
I believe this will put more value into the companies like Trellian that have a database of keyword traffic (Keyword Discovery tool) and an API to access that data. If the Keyword Discovery database can be scaled and accessed fast enough to provide instant analysis of the keywords in a parsed domains, there is no reason to believe that efficient Domain Buying at the bulk level can’t continue to happen. The registration fee makes it more expensive, but not impossible to do.
The other option is that the large domain management companies will create their own keyword database systems for understanding search and type-in value of parsed keyword domains. As long as larger, more sophisticated companies have first crack at dropped domains - regardless of whether they can get them for 5 days free or not - they will have first pick of the better domains.
This leaves out the smaller domainers who operate at the wholesale level or the end users who want to buy a domain at retail. There will just be more lower quality domains available on the market at anyone point in time (the domains that were returned). There is too much money in domain parking to let the passage of Domain Tasting effect their business models.
I may be totally off base here, but it seems like the death of domain tasting won’t have a major structural impact on the availability of dropped domains to a wider audience. The best domains that get dropped will continue to be scooped up by top tier wholesale domainers and the less attractive domains will be available to the rest of us a little bit sooner. If the goal is to allow a wider audience equal access to the entire spectrum of domains at drop (which would maximize the value the domains due to more competition) then there needs to be a structural adjustment with how the domains are allocated and assigned as they are dropped.
Thoughts?
A New Model of Domain Development via Partnership is Born
I really enjoyed the DomainFest 2008 conference. I thought the program was well put together, a nice facility (although better weather would have been appreciated!), high quality networking events, mostly solid presentations and adequate vendor participation. I wanted to tack on some additional thoughts of the conference and industry to my Day 1 thoughts from a newbie blog post based on the sessions and interactions with the people from the industry.
That’s all for now. Please leave a note or send us an email if you’d like to chat further.
I’ve been building online businesses for my employers, clients and myself for over 12 years so I was excited to get to my first DomainFest to meet people, talk to vendors and learn about the industry. Below is a random list of thoughts from the first day:
Thanks for reading, post some comments if you have some and now it’s time to head back to the event.
I just read a great article on www.DailyDomainer.com showing that only 24 of the top 105 domains sold in 2007 have been developed. Most are parked and generating PPC income. While I understand that sites like Porn.com can generate a significant amount of type-in traffic and referral fees, it is still amazing to me why more of these high quality names have not been developed.
One of the explanations in the post for this is that why develop a domain when you can turn around and sell it at a profit a few months later. My response is that by doing so, you are leaving a lot of money on the table. For example, investment.com sold for $900,000 in 2007. It may be worth $1.1 or $1.2m in 2008 if the right buyer comes along. But, if you put 6 months of work and $250k into the site in the form of original content, design, development and marketing - it could be an advertising and cost per lead based site that would be cash flow positive and worth $10m in 2008.
Super affiliates build high performance sites that generate positive cash all the time. However, they don’t normally have access to the premium domains. It would be easy for a super affiliate who knows search, content and design to put a legitimate business on a premium domain like investment.com and create a positive cash flow business.
True, there is a risk that the time and effort you put into the site won’t pay off due to poor execution or bad business model, but that’s where an experienced domain development team like DomainStrategies.com comes in. We are proving the this model currently with Healthcare.com, Patents.com and soon WiFi.com.
It takes vision, capital and internet business know how - of which we have all three. We’ll be at DomainFest Jan 21-23 if you’d like to discuss development of your premium domains - look for Scott Fasser or Rob Monster.
ClassyOrTrashy.com is one of the best pop culture domains in Domain Strategies portfolio. Given the amount of attention celebrity fashion receives, ClassyOrTrashy.com is the perfect domain to build a high traffic vote for your favorite outfit or attitude site.
Just think about it - Britney Spears photographs of her latest trip to the clubs or re-hab - you can then have a vote on whether the outfit she is wearing is Classy or Trashy! How about Tony Romo’s trip to Mexico with Jessica Simpson? Was that trip Classy or Trashy? Remember Jennifer Lopez’s green dress that was missing the front? Classy Or Trashy?
The options for the things you can vote classy or trashy is limitless!
I’ve been involved in marketing for over 20 years. There are a lot of challenges involved - finding the right customers, creating the right messages, spending media dollars smartly and efficiently, getting PR hits, etc. However, one task stands out as the most difficult - Naming a company or a product.
Why naming is the hardest task in marketing:
As the last bullet points out, the domain is critical in the naming of a business, the hardest task in marketing. This is one of the reasons Domain Strategies is focused on building an internet business based on the domain name vs building a business and then finding a name that fits. There are many generic, solid, domain names that are parked or have an extremely weak business. There is no reason - other than time and effort - that a good domain name should not have a legitimate business built on it.
If you provide the domain, we will build the business - contact us to discuss and have a great day.
