Domain Industry News

Quick Hits for the Weekend

Some quick (and informal) hits from the last week.

On Thursday, I was thisclose to buying a ticket to fly to Las Vegas for the Domain Madness finale. If it wasn’t for a trip to New Hampshire in a week, a cross country trip in 3 weeks, followed by a trip to Michigan right after, I would be at The Palms with the Domain Consultant crew.

SES is a great show with a lot of information for developers. If you can make one of the many shows, it’s worth attending. If you can’t afford to pay for the actual show (or if you don’t want to pay), get a free exhibition floor pass and meet with some of the companies that exhibit.

There have been more times in the past 2 weeks than I can ever remember where I started to respond to an ignorant/misinformed/stupid post on a domain forum and ended up deleting my post before hitting submit.

If you own a geodomain – especially if it’s a city, state, or country domain name, you NEED to be in San Diego for the GeoDomain Expo at the end of April. If you want to develop it, there are no better mentors and advisors than those who will be at the Expo (ie Dan, David/Mike, Skip, Jess, Fred, Mark, Sara, Josh, Shaun, Nat). If you are looking to partner (or maybe even sell), these people are your primary targets. I mean, who else are you going to turn to – newspapers? LOL. The agenda should be posted in the next few days, but no matter what the panels are, it’s the informal events that are best.

I am not investing in any .tel domain names. I simply don’t get the concept behind why I would want or need to have a .tel domain name, and if people don’t want/need them, investing in them will probably be a fruitless activity. If I want people to have all of my contact information, I make sure they have it. If someone can’t find my phone number or other contact information quickly, chances are very good that I don’t want that person to have it.

Speaking of .tel, have you noticed that most of the people who talk about alternative TLDs like these (ie mobi, asia, tv…etc) have significant investments in them? I don’t want to be an ambassador for an extension. It shouldn’t be the job of registrants to pump a particular extension.

I was very surprised to hear about Monster Venture Partners closing its doors. This is big news that will impact domainers in more of a trickle down affect, as the company invested in domain names and partnered with companies that own great domain names.

ComWired: Helping Domainers & Developers

Sean Stafford is at it again. Every few months, it seems that Sean is building something helpful to domainers, and I think his new service, ComWired.com can help domainers and domain developers.

The DNS service is billed as a way to split up a domain name’s traffic depending on where the traffic originates.   For example, if you have a parked domain name that receives traffic from the US, Mexico, Japan, China and Russia, you can choose where to send traffic from each country, depending on where you find that it can be monetized better.   This is a neat concept for domain investors, but it can similarly work for domain developers, too.

Portland.com is the online guide to Portland, Oregon. Being from New Hampshire, when I hear Portland.com, I immediately think of Portland, Maine. Knowing the brains behind Portland.com, I am sure they analyzed their traffic to know that its looking for information about Portland, Oregon rather than Maine, however, I am sure there is some traffic looking for information about Portland, Maine.

With help from ComWired.com, the owners can detect where the traffic is coming from, and if it’s coming from New England cities, hypothetically, they can send it to Portland.com/Maine, which would theoretically have a site all about the city in Maine. All other traffic can be sent to the main (ha ha) site where they would find information about Portland, Oregon. This could also be effective for country based geodomains.

I should add ComWired.com can only split up traffic by country at the moment, but they expect to be able to split it by city in a few short weeks.   For now, the service is free to use, although that will probably change in the future.

DNJournal’s Ron Jackson Interviewed by ABC News

DNJournal’s Ron Jackson made the mainstream press again, this time in an interview with ABC News regarding the Toys.com sale to Toys R Us in last week’s bankruptcy auction.   It’s good to see mainstream coverage of the domain business, and I am glad news outlets continue to seek out Ron Jackson for his expert opinion.

Good News for Gambling Domain Owners

According to an article appearing in Reuters today, it looks like Democratic lawmakers may be pushing for an end to the ban on Internet gambling to quell anger from the European Union. If this happens, owners of gambling domain names may be more free to monetize them and have higher payouts.

From the article:

“A senior Democratic lawmaker will push legislation this year to repeal a U.S. ban on Internet gambling that has hurt trade ties with the European Union, a congressional aide said.

“The bill introduction should happen in the next month,” a spokesman for House of Representatives Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank said.”

Two New Features I like About Domaining.com

There are two new features I really like about Domaining.com. The first is that I can now filter the blogs and domain news sources I want to read from those that I don’t. There seems to be data overload in the domain space, and it’s annoying when I miss a good article from someone I respect because it got pushed down by articles I avoid.

The second feature I like and could probably create on my own (but don’t) is the Twitter feed with “domain” as the keyword. Any time someone posts a Twitter update and it contains the word “domain,” it is featured on Domaining.com.

There have been a few times where people ask simple domain related questions that can be answered by an industry pro. This can open new doors and lead to new introductions. There have also been plenty of times where people are critical of domain owners, calling them squatters and other uninformed comments. This creates a good opportunity to educate.

As far as Twitter goes, I am just a rookie but am quickly learning about the power it has. People across every walk of life use Twitter, and it gives unparalleled access into places you might never have imagined going.

Marchex Layoffs Announced

Although they don’t consider themselves domainers, Marchex owns thousands of domain names, and the company is one of the few publicly traded domain-related companies. This morning, Marchex announced that the company is laying off 15 employees, about 4% of its workforce.

They also announced a couple of senior management changes, naming Peter Christothoulou Chief Operating Officer and Matthew Berk Executive Vice President of Product Engineering.   In November, Mike Berkens blogged about Marchex and how it’s market cap was just slightly more than the total amount they paid for Yun Yee’s portfolio. While the stock price has increased since Mike’s post, the economy is still taking a toll on the company.

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