A couple of days ago, Domain Holdings published a report about its ability to monetize “wildcard traffic.” Someone asked me if I knew anything about wild card traffic, and I want to share some insight about it and why it might be beneficial that Domain Power is “is now accepting wildcard traffic, which includes leased subdomains, 404 and Under Construction pages.”

Wild card traffic is essentially error traffic to a website that doesn’t land on a content page but would otherwise be sent to a web browser error page and possibly monetized by the user’s Internet Service Provider. If the traffic is not monetized by the ISP or shown an error page and a link to the correct url, the visitor will likely end up on a dead page with no content or information.

For instance, if you visit www.elliotsblog.com, you will make it to my blog. However, if you visit ww.elliotsblog.com or anythingelse.elliotsblog.com where there is no subdomain, you’ll get an error page or dead page, depending on your ISP and your browser settings. Many people will eventually see their error, but they will possibly be redirected elsewhere if the visitor’s ISP monetizes the error page.

Using the example I mentioned above, with this new monetization offer from Domain Power, if someone visits ww.elliotsblog.com, rather than getting a generic 404 page, Domain Power would serve up ads on that page. Additionally, Under Construction pages would also be another type of page the company could monetize for domain owners. They could monetize pages that may have been dead, and apparently the company’s test went well as evidenced by the press release.

I read two domain industry interviews yesterday, and I think you should check them out when you have an opportunity today.

Ron Jackson wrote an interesting article about Bob Olea, a domain investor and commercial airline pilot. I’ve known Bob for several years, have done business with him, and have considerable respect for him and his opinions. Bob recently started his own brokerage, DomainSalesPlus.com,  which is now integrated with Frank Schilling’s Internet Traffic platform.

Also, yesterday, Ray Hackney posted an interview with Brad Mugford  at HybridDomainer.com. Brad, who primarily uses the handle DataCube.com on forums and blogs, has been a successful domain seller. Brad’s focus is on end user sales, and he’s done pretty well in that area during the last few years.

It’s interesting to read interviews to learn about how people got their start in the domain industry. These two articles are well worth a read.

Is there anyone in the domain industry you’d like to know more about?

I asked you to nominate the best domain industry forum moderators, and you guys nominated five, and you then voted on the nominees. After the votes were tallied, there was only a difference of about 30 votes between the top vote getter and the final nominee.

I want to congratulate Donna Mahony of Domain Boardroom (a private domain forum) for receiving the most votes. I will send Donna a check for $200 for winning the vote.

Congratulations to all of the nominees, and a special congratulations to Donna. Being a moderator isn’t easy, but the job they do is appreciated by all of us who participate on domain forums.

If you want to learn more about Donna, you can check out an interview I posted a while ago.

The last cash contest I ran was a pretty big hit, so I am going to run another contest. I’ve said in the past that being a domain forum moderator isn’t an easy job, can cause personal and business conflicts, and it doesn’t generally pay well (if anything).

Forum moderators need to be able to  diffuse  problems effectively and maintain good relationships with people who may question their decisions and be rude to them in response to doing their job. Put simply, domain forum moderators have a difficult job for which they aren’t compensated very well.

I am seeking out your nominations for the best domain industry forum moderator. I will then run a poll with the nominees, and the winner of the vote will receive $200 from me via Paypal or check. No strings attached.

I will post the voting rules once the poll is up in a few days, but you are welcome to nominate a moderator in the comment section below. Feel free to post the person’s user name and the forum to be counted. Someone only needs to be nominated once to be eligible. Please only submit one nomination or your comment will be deleted.

Nominations will close on Friday, July 13th in the evening (my time) and the poll will be posted sometime early next week. I am currently traveling, so comments may take a bit longer to approve than usual.