Oversee Looking to Hire Product Manager

A listing for a job opening at Oversee.net hit my inbox via Google Alerts this morning, and I wanted to pass the information along to anyone that might be looking for more of a corporate job in the domain space.

The company is looking to hire a Product Manager for its Monetization Domain Services division. The responsibilities this job entails includes the following: “defining product strategy, product requirements, product positioning, competitive intelligence, & defining and tracking product and business success metrics for the next generation of revenue drivers for the division. This position requires an individual that can work closely and collaboratively with a cross-functional team that includes product & engineering team, business, sales, marketing, analytics, legal and finance.”

Oversee.net is one of the most well-rounded domain companies, and the company operates in just about all verticals of the domain space. The person who is hired will work out of the company’s Los Angeles office.

You can see the Craigslist listing here, and that has information about the job requirements as well as applying for the job.

Go Ahead… Ask Your Domain Questions

As a result of having a blog, I receive ALOT of emails asking every kind of domain related question you can probably imagine. Some questions are simple and require just a one word reply, while others are more complicated and thought provoking.

I haven’t always had time to answer all the questions that come in, especially when they require a more complicated answer or when I just don’t know the answer. I enjoy being able to help people, and it sucks to not be able to assist sometimes.

With that in mind, I decided to launch DomainQuestions.com, a new website where people can post questions and answers related to anything in the domain industry. Since many of the people who email me aren’t familiar with the domain industry, I felt that they wouldn’t necessarily want to join a forum, and they could easily sign up to post a question on DomainQuestions.com.

I intend to send people who ask me questions to this website to post them. On the site, I will do my best to answer the questions, and I hope others will contribute as well. I also plan to reach out to friends and colleagues when I see a question that I can’t (or shouldn’t answer).

One of the nice things is that I will have a place to send people when questions that were asked in the past are asked in the future. This will allow people to continue to post answers to older questions as well as newer questions. I am hoping this will become a domain knowledgebase, and I hope you will contribute or participate.

I am excited about DomainQuestions.com, and I hope to see you there.

New Unsolicited Emails Received

I bought a domain name this morning at Moniker, and this evening I received the unsolicited email below. It’s kinda crazy that they are sending out these emails the same day as the domain registration. I wonder how many people are getting the same crap.

Ironically, I got a similar email last week under similar circumstances.  See that one below for something interesting I noticed.  Who else is getting these emails?

Email received 10/24

From: newdomain@inline.me
Subject: xxxxxxx.com purchase

I noticed you just bought xxxxxxxxxxx.com.

Our statistics indicate that your domain’s primary keyword phrase, ‘xxxxxx xxxxxx’, gets around x exact local searches per month and x exact global searches per month. We have many similar domain names available that get a lot more monthly searches and will bring you a lot more traffic.

Here is our list of domains about xxxxxx xxxxxx.
http://adddomainnames.com/?id=xxxxxxxx

We also have a daily premium domain drop list.
Subscribe to our drop list
http://adddomainnames.com/drop_subscribe.php?id=xxxxxxxxx

We can also help you with developing your domains, hosting your websites, and getting your sites to rank high in the search engines.

Now have a look at the previous email that I received last week. Notice the bolded segment, which seems to have been removed, perhaps because of the legal intervention from my registrar.

Email received 10/15

From: newdomain@inline.me
Subject: xxxxxxx.com purchase

I noticed you just bought xxxxxxxxxx.com from one of our partner registrars.

Our statistics indicate that domain’s primary keyword phrase, ‘xxxxxxxx xxxxxxx’, gets around x exact local searches per month and x exact global searches per month. We have many similar domain names available that get a lot more monthly searches and will bring you a lot more traffic.

Here is our list of domains about xxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx.
http://adddomainnames.com/?e=xxxxxxxxxxxx@gmail.com&k=xxxxxxxxx

We also have a daily premium domain drop list.
Subscribe to our drop list
http://adddomainnames.com/drop_subscribe.php?e=xxxxxxxxxxxx@gmail.com&k=xxxxxxxxxxxx

Random premium domains we purchased and pricing.
These are first come first serve. Send an email to newdomain@inline.me
keyword | domain – (exact local searches | exact global searches) – price
motorcycle audio systems | motorcycleaudiosystems.com – (1600 | 1300) – $80
miss swan | missswan.com – (40500 | 90500) – $120
blood sugar levels chart | bloodsugarlevelschart.com – (22200 | 18000) – $200
how to tie your shoes | howtotieyourshoes.com – (2900 | 4400) – $110

We can also help you with developing your domains, hosting your websites, and getting your sites to rank highly in the search engines.

newdomain@inline.me
10765 Reading Road – Cincinnati, Ohio
To Opt out:http://adddomainnames.com/unsubscribe.php?e=xxxxxxxxxx

Traffic Sunday Updates

I am driving down to Miami tomorrow for the Traffic conference. Based on what I am hearing, it sounds like its going to be a pretty big conference. Here are a few things I am looking forward to at the show (on an iPad so my apologies for any typos):

– I hear that somewhere in the ballpark of 300-400 people will be in attendance. This is a great turnout compared to some recent Traffic shows. It will be a good chance to meet with people I don’t see very often. The last big conference I attended was DomainFest in January. Rick and Howard have put a lot into making this a big conference.

– I think the auction is going to see some good results. There are quite a few good names that seem to have reasonable reserves. With some recent underwhelming auctions, I think Rick Latona and his team have been working harder than ever to ensure a successful auction.

– One of my favorite domain names at Rick’s auction is FruitBaskets.com, and it’s not because I received a fruit basket advertising the name. Aside from a company like Harry and David’s and Baskets.com, I don’t know many brands of fruit basket companies. Without a  dominant leader, a company that operates on the generic domain name can become the perceived leading brand. I think 1800-Baskets, which operates Baskets.com (owned by 1800-Flowers) would be a good candidate to buy this name. They should probably make a business case to buy it, so at the very least, they don’t give another company a chance to compete immediately.

– There are quite a few premium .CO domain names like Pizza.co up for auction. This will be a big test for .CO since their closed auctions have been doing great, but there haven’t been many big sales happening outside of these (from my perspective). It will also be interesting to see what companies bid.

– Aftermarket.com has been preparing for a re-launch for a while and has been collecting email addresses on its website. Perhaps some new details about the relaunch will be released during the course of the conference. Thought Convergence is a dynamic company, and it will be exciting to see what the brand will offer its customers and clients.  

Bump.com – VC Funded Startup on DigiMedia Domain Name

DigimediaAnyone that’s been around the domain industry for any length of time has almost certainly come across DigiMedia-owned domain names. You’ve probably also heard about Scott Day, the company’s founder whose previous career before domain names was in the farming field (pun intended).

I read an article in Mashable about a new startup called Bump, operating on Bump.com (via Berkens’ Facebook feed). Bump is a unique social networking startup that wants people to be able to connect using license plates as the primary vehicle (pun intended). It’s a unique concept, and upon checking the Whois for Bump.com, I noticed that DigiMedia is the owner.

Although I don’t have any specifics about this deal/venture, there was an article about Bump’s funding, which mentioned DigiMedia. According to the article,

“Thrower’s brand new association so distant has lifted $1 million in seed funding, from Digimedia, Tal Kerret (chairman of Oberon Media), Christophe Vandaele (chairman of Vandaele Holdings), Charlie Baker (partner with DLA Piper), Bill Hein (former SVP during EMI) as well as Bob Ezrin (music producer). It additionally is in talks to lift the $6 million Series B turn as well as has done an merger in the imaging record space.”

I believe the DigiMedia team embraces partnership opportunities with best of breed companies and entrepreneurs on some of their domain names. You can have a look at FantasyFootball.com as another example of a great domain name in use by the company.

Its nice to see good things happening for this company. As anyone who has met Scott Day and Jay Chapman (DigiMedia President) can tell you, the company principals are great guys.

Labor Day Weekly Update

Hope you’re having a nice, long weekend if you’re in the US and if you’re not US-based, I hope your week gets off to a strong start. Here are a few updates and thoughts from me as the week begins.

– There was an interesting article on Econsultancy this morning.   According to the author, Ian Harris the CEO and founder of Search Laboratory, “Parked domains are generally low quality resources.” I tend to disagree with this, especially on generic domain names that people type-in to their browsers in lieu of using a search engine. If someone wants a personal loan and they end up on PersonalLoans.com, I would imagine these visitors are good prospects for the advertisers whose links they click.

– I was really surprised when Rick Schwartz announced I had 3 TRAFFIC Award nominations.   Thank you to whomever nominated me for the awards. I personally believe Juan Calle is deserving of the Domainer of the Year award for his big successes so far this year with the .CO Registry, not to mention his other Internet companies that operate on great domain names. He knows this business well, and it’s been fun learning about Juan and what he has done.

– It is an honor to be nominated in the Developer of the Year category with several friends. Keith’s primary website, Vibrator.com, has done extraordinarily well, and he’s on the road to success with Rio.com. I’ve mentioned Fred’s projects several times, and we’re obviously close with his company building out Burbank.com for my company. Rob Grant’s portfolio of real estate and Adirondacks-related domain names and websites is unmatchable. Rob Monster’s Epik platform is helping domain investors earn money with their underperforming domain names, and his Epik conference is going to help a whole lot of domain investors. Finally, Shaun’s Kelowna.com design was an inspiration for two of my geodomain names, not to mention his recently launched TorontoJobs.com website. There are a lot of successful developers working in the domain space these days, and it is cool even to be considered.

– I continue to receive emails and blog comments offering names for sale that need to be sold “urgently.” I assure you that this isn’t the right way to go about things, unless you either have great domain names or I know you well. If you are urgently trying to sell domain names, you should either hire a broker, post on forums (not spamming blogs), or seek out end users rather than domain investors.

– I heard a horrible story this weekend. A fraternity brother of mine (two years older than me) was fishing with his father on Lake Oswego in New York a couple of weeks ago. They weren’t wearing life jackets and their boat capsized a couple miles from shore. My fraternity brother was able to hang on to the boat until help arrived but his father couldn’t and drowned. They were both experienced boaters and fishermen. Makes you realize the importance of life jackets when you’re on the water.