General Domain Information

Throughout the last several years, the size of my portfolio has ballooned. For many years, I kept somewhere in the ballpark of 400 – 500 domain names in my portfolio. It has now grown to more than 2,000 domain names and counting.

With a larger portfolio, I pay more attention to domain name renewals. When I seek out domain names, there are many things I observe to try and buy commercially viable assets. I look at things like the number of businesses with that could upgrade to this domain name, the size and growth of the industry related to the domain name, the generic nature of the domain name, how the domain name sounds to me, and quite a few other factors that have become second nature to me.

If you use Bodis for PPC parking, the styling on your landing pages will likely be changing in the coming months. Bodis reached out to customers yesterday to let them know of a change that could have an impact on revenue generation.

Bodis’ ad partner (which I believe is Google) will be introducing a new ad styling on 50% of network traffic. The change will take effect today. According to the email I received, Bodis had been testing the new styling on about 20% of network traffic, and it led to “a short-term revenue decline.” Bodis, the email said, believes the styling change will attract more advertisers. The change may be made for all traffic next month depending on the results.

Since this is an ad partner change, I suspect other parking services could also make similar ad styling changes as well.

I don’t park many of my domain names, but I have a handful parked at Bodis. I don’t typically visit my own landing pages, so I have not noticed any ad styling changes there or elsewhere. If you spot a new design or format on a PPC landing page, please feel free to share a screenshot.

Here’s the entire message that was shared by Bodis:

Andrew Allemann wrote about the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) statement about the .com registry extension agreed upon with Verisign. As a domain investor with a couple thousand domain names, the most eye-catching aspect of the statement was seemingly related to the prices charged by domain investors:

“NTIA recognizes concerns about current pricing and believes a reduction in .com prices would be in the best interest of the public. We also recognize that prices at both the wholesale level and downstream, including prices charged by resellers and substantial markups by warehousers, need to be addressed.”

As you know, the United States held its Presidential election yesterday, and Donald Trump won the election. In addition to this win, the Republican party will regain control over the US Senate as well. I am hopeful the new administration and its business policies will be good for domain investors and their domain investments.

One of the things Donald Trump did during this election cycle is reach out to the cryptocurrency community. I think he will continue to embrace that space and there could be growth there. From my perspective, the domain investment space tends to thrive as capital is spent building crypto-related services and products. Continued development and maturity in the crypto space should be good for domain investments.

A colleague emailed to ask me why I am not working with a specific landing page service he has been using. I neither have enough domain names to really give a company a fair shot, nor do I have the desire to set up many accounts at different platforms, giving access to private data to many companies.

The first issue is the primary issue. If I set up an account at a new landing page or parking service and only test 50 domain names, there’s a pretty good chance there will be very minimal impact – either positive or negative. Is that the fault of the service provider? No, of course not. I can’t pass judgment on the performance of a company with a limited number of domain names for a limited amount of time. If the service sucks or is bonkers, I won’t know if it’s the service, the names, seasonality, or a multitude of other factors beyond their control. It would be silly to test out a whole bunch of services when I can’t really determine why a test went well or went poorly.

I came across a job posting on LinkedIn that might be of interest to someone in the domain space. Tucows is looking to hire a Compliance Officer for its domain name business. This is a mission critical role at the Toronto-based company. This job is billed as a remote position, meaning the new hire will not need to work out of the company’s office.

Here’s a summary of the position, extracted from the job listing: