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Quick TRAFFIC Thoughts

Elliot Silver
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16

I spent much of the day catching up on some things that I overlooked during the past few days, and the rest of my day was spent traveling back to New York City… I hate flying in the rain, and it was raining in FLL and at JFK.

AI am not ready (nor awake enough) to post a recap of the Traffic conference tonight, but I want to post something quickly in response to a few articles I caught just now via  Domaining.com.

The quick summary is that I had a great time at the conference and thought it was very well organized and well attended. I didn’t think the auction was very good, which I will discuss more tomorrow, but I think the auction was just a tiny part of the entire conference. I find it peculiar that people are so focused on the results and use it almost as an indictment of Traffic.

I met with a number of people and companies who are in the process of creating very large and exciting projects in the domain space. There were several deals announced during the event, which will help domain investors sell domain names. I met with a few companies that are building products and services that will help domain investors.

The mood was far more jovial than just a couple of years ago, despite the current economic uncertainty. I didn’t go to bed before 2:00am, and I found myself with dozens of attendees hanging out and talking shop each night.

I found it very disappointing to read comments in articles that seem to imply that Traffic wasn’t a good conference. This is especially concerning and frustrating because I am quite sure those commenters were not even in attendance. It’s like reading a Yelp review about a pizza place you’ve never tried and agreeing that the pizza is bad. It makes no sense.

Anyway, I just want to follow up to Mike’s post because I agree with just about everything he posted. I will post a full rundown of my conference takeaways tomorrow, but I had a very good time at the conference. I probably spent more time meeting with people than I did at any other event in the past, and I believe it’s going to lead to increased business for my company.

TRAFFIC Ticket Price Increase Tonight

Elliot Silver
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1

For those of you who are either on the fence about attending TRAFFIC in Ft. Lauderdale in October or are just lazy and haven’t purchased your conference ticket yet, the price will increase tonight. The current rate is $1,595 and it will increase to $1,795 later on today.

If you happen to live in the NYC area, JetBlue is offering some pretty good flight rates. The Ritz Carlton, which is hosting the conference, has rooms for around $250 night at the conference rate. I am not sure if the hotel is close to being sold out, but when I sought out better rates, other travel sites said there were no rooms available at the hotel, although you can still book online with the conference code.

It does seem that most of the nice hotels in the vicinity are around the same rate, so I will likely be staying there and booking it within the next couple of days.

According to Rick Schwartz, there are just over 100 tickets for the conference remaining, although he didn’t say how many were being sold in total. While it’s not going to be the same size as the annual DomainFest conference, I believe most of the people who are fully vested in the domain industry will be in attendance.

Personally, I think attending a domain conference is a very good way to learn more about the domain industry and how to make money, if you are willing to put the time and money into learning. People tend to want to meet with people they already know, but if you make the effort most will be willing to take the time to talk to you. I guess the same can be said about every industry conference and this is no different.

TRAFFIC Auction Will Be Different

Elliot Silver
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3

I received an email via the TRAFFIC conference mailing list with an update on how this year’s TRAFFIC auction will work. The auction will take place on October 18, 2011 at 4pm. In lieu of working with one auction company, TRAFFIC organizers will accept submissions from various aftermarket companies and even individual domain investors. Conference organizers will provide the auctioneer and presumably an online bidding platform.

For those who wish to submit their domain names separately, there is a fee per guaranteed auction submission, and it’s pretty steep. That being said, the commission structure is favorable should the domain name sell. It’s based on a sliding scale, so the higher the reserve, the higher the submission fee, but the lower the commission rate.

One other big change is that all auctions will start at either $1.00 or $1,000 and work their way up. It seems misleading when an auctioneer gets a $2,000,000 bid on a domain name when the reserve price is $2,500,000 and other people talk about that $2 million bid. A bidder who makes the $2 million bid knows his bid won’t be accepted, so it’s not really a true bid. Working towards a higher price should help determine a market value.

The auction list has already started to form, and there are 20 premium .XXX domain names that are scheduled to be auctioned. Additionally, the following domain names have also been scheduled: FortLauderdale.org, Her.CO, Sub.CO, and TrainingSession.com.

A full explanation of how the auction submission process will work as well as the full rate chart can be seen  here. I recommend reading that information before submitting any domain names for auction.

Voting for TRAFFIC Awards Open to Only to TRAFFIC EMail List

Elliot Silver
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8

If you’re wondering when you’ll have the opportunity to vote for this year’s TRAFFIC Awards, it’s likely that you aren’t eligible to vote. To prevent outsiders from casting ballots and influencing the award winners, TRAFFIC organizers decided to only allow votes from people who are on the email listing.

“Ballots will be counted from our email database only. While nominations were open to everyone in the industry, the voting is not. No outside voting is allowed and responses from other emails will not be counted. You must return this email for your vote to be counted,” stated Howard Neu in yesterday’s email.

I think it’s a smart move, since any company or person could have previously “stuffed” the ballot box with votes from people who aren’t related to the domain industry. Similarly, a company with many employees could have voted many times for their own company. Not only would that have influenced their own category, but it also would have had repercussions in other categories in which employees or others would have voted.

If you did receive yesterday’s email, your vote must be returned by 5pm EST this afternoon for it to be tallied.

2011 TRAFFIC Award Nominations Sought

Elliot Silver
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1

Targeted TRAFFICI was honored to win the best domain blog award at last year’s TRAFFIC conference. It was cool to be selected by people in the domain business for this award. Rick Schwartz just announced that he is seeking nominations for the 2011 TRAFFIC Awards. The award ceremony will take place at the Ft. Lauderdale Ritz Carlton on Tuesday, October 18, 2011.

Nominations (and the reason for the nomination) should be sent to trafficawards@earthlink.net, and the nomination period closes this Friday (August 5th) at 6pm. Once all nominations are received, the final ballot will be sent out for people to vote for award winners.

You may nominate people in the following categories:

BEST NEW MONETIZING SOLUTION

I nominate ___________________________________________

Because _________________________________________

BEST OVERALL DOMAIN SOLUTION

I nominate ___________________________________________

Because _________________________________________

THE “WE GET IT” AWARD

I nominate __________________________________________

Because _________________________________________

DEVELOPER OF THE YEAR

I nominate ________________________________________

Because _________________________________________

BEST DOMAIN BLOG

I nominate _______________________________________

Because _______________________________________

SPONSOR OF THE YEAR

I nominate ____________________________________

Because ______________________________________

DOMAINER OF THE YEAR

I nominate ____________________________________

Because ______________________________________

DOMAIN HALL OF FAME

The following have already been inducted to the DOMAIN HALL OF FAME: MONTE CAHN, RICK LATONA, RICK SCHWARTZ, RON JACKSON, MIKE BERKENS, DAVID CASTELLO, MICHAEL CASTELLO, FRANK SHILLING, YUN YI, SCOTT DAY, SAHAR SARID

I nominate _____________________________________

Because _______________________________________

Bill Karamouzis of HallPass Media to Keynote at TRAFFIC

Elliot Silver
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0

Rick Schwartz just announced that the keynote speaker for October’s TRAFFIC conference in Ft. Lauderdale will be Bill Karamouzis, CEO of HallPass Media, The topic of the keynote speech will be “the challenge of developing our domains into businesses.”

Bill’s company has been written up in TechCrunch several times in the last couple of years, most notably to domain investors for its purchase of CookingGames.com for $350,000. While some criticized this purchase as being overpriced, the advantage for a development company like HallPass Media is that it knows conversion metrics and can base it’s acquisition price on actual experiential data. HallPass Media operated hundreds of unique games on it’s websites.

Previously, Bill successfully built and sold another gaming business, Addicting Games, to Atom Games, for an undisclosed sales price. At the time of the sale, it was one of the most trafficked websites in existence.

In April of this year, HallPass Media (which had independently raised $2 million) was acquired by MindJolt for an undisclosed price. The acquiring company is led by the founder of MySpace.

I think this is a wise choice for a keynote speaker at TRAFFIC. Bill clearly knows how to develop a business using strong domain names as the foundation, and I believe he’ll be able to give some practical advice to those of us building our own businesses.  

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