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Why Seamless Acquisition of MenuPages is Exciting to Me

Elliot Silver
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It was announced yesterday that Seamless, the company that recently changed its name from Seamless Web, acquired MenuPages.com from New York Magazine. This news is exciting to me and I want to share why I think it’s exciting.

If you aren’t aware already, MenuPages is a helpful website that lists menus from restaurants in large cities and tourist hubs around the US and the world. The website started out as a resource for people to find menus from restaurants across New York City, and it grew pretty quickly. I’ve used Menu Pages for several years and probably use it more than any local, non-news website.

The reason I find this news exciting is that it shows that hard work and dedication to an online brand can lead to a big payday. If you create something useful to visitors and have them coming back to your site on a regular basis, there will always be someone that wants to pay a premium price for those eyeballs.

I don’t think MenuPages had a great revenue model, aside from Adsense monetization (if they did I missed it). The company probably didn’t make a ton of money. However, they had a huge audience of people that were ready to order dinner or lunch and visited frequently. That’s where Seamless comes in to the picture. Menu Pages didn’t offer the connectivity for people to order food, but Seamless does. I think Seamless will be able to better monetize the traffic than New York Magazine and the founders.

I’ve been asked about selling DogWalker.com a number of times, but I haven’t even considered selling. I don’t need the liquidity, and I do want the  recurring  revenue stream. However, if a large company that was in the industry would pay a premium because they could monetize it more than I could, then I would certainly consider selling. I would bet that within a few years, I will sell my portfolio of pet websites to a company that can better monetize the traffic. I don’t know who the buyer will be or when, but I bet it will happen.

If you are building a business, the current revenue is not necessarily the most important thing. Building something that people find useful should be the key, and the money will come in later if you’ve done that.

As a domain investor speaking to other domain investors though, I must urge you to have a look at Nat’s post from yesterday. It was well written and is something you need to consider.

Tip to See How Your Site Ranks in Google

Elliot Silver
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11

For those of you who develop websites, you know that the Google ranking can be a key to success. Being in the top three results for your target keywords is critical to the success (and monetization) of your website.  Although I generally use Aaron Wall’s (free) Rank Checker Tool for multiple keyword search rankings, there’s an even easier and quicker way to find a site’s ranking.

Obviously doing the search yourself will be much faster, especially when you’re only searching for a few key terms. The problem with this method is that Google tracks your searches and websites you visit (in Chrome), and it’s more likely they will rank your favorite websites higher than others. For instance, DogWalker.com may rank higher for me on some searches than for someone else simply because I visit the site so often.

This is almost too easy of a tip to share, but I use it and figure that I might as well share it with others. When you search Google using an incognito browser in Chrome or the Private Browsing window in Safari, your search won’t be impacted by previous searches or visits. You can get a very good idea where most people will see your site when they search.

Yes, this is a very simple tip, but it’s something that can be helpful to you when you quickly want to see where your website (or someone else’s website) ranks.

Brooklyn Nets Owns Its Domain Name

Elliot Silver
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NBA acquired BrooklynNets.com sometime around March of 2011

It was revealed this morning that the NBA team now known as the New Jersey Nets will retain its team name when it moves to Brooklyn, New York next year. Importantly, the basketball team was able to get its domain name, BrooklynNets.com in advance of its move.

According to my research, it appears the domain name was acquired by the National Basketball Association sometime in March of 2011. As far back as May of 2007, there was a basketball related graphic on the homepage, but there was a note mentioning that the site had no relation to the professional basketball team.

This was a smart purchase by the NBA because neither the team nor the league own the more coveted Nets.com domain name. This name is owned by a computer company in New Mexico.

Although the primary domain name currently forwards to the Barclay Center website, the team has set up a landing page on WelcomeToBrooklyn.BrooklynNets.com.

Alibaba to Spin Off Domain Registrar for IPO, Valuing Company at $500 Million

Elliot Silver
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Alibaba reportedly looking to spin off “Go Daddy of China” in an IPO valuing the popular Chinese domain registrar at $500 million.

Alibaba is a Chinese Internet holding company with a number of popular websites and companies.  Included amongst these companies is a popular Chinese domain registrar and hosting company,  HiChina.

Business Insider is reporting today that Alibaba plans to spin off HiChina for an initial public offering (IPO) in a US stock market. Fox Business is reporting that the IPO would value the domain registrar at $500 million. This would be a great ROI considering Alibaba reportedly bought an 85% stake in the company for $79 million back in 2009.

Prior to reading this news, I hadn’t heard about HiChina before, but the company looks fairly large. According to Business Insider, “has over 2.5 million registered users and more than 2 million domain names. It operates at least 1.7 million enterprise mail accounts and more than 2 million company sites and application. In addition, about 50,000 sites are using HiChina’s web construction service.”

There aren’t too many publicly traded domain registrars. Off the top of my head, I can think of Tucows, Web.com (Register.com and Network Solutions pending approval)  and Enom if you count them as a part of Demand Media. GoDaddy flirted with going public, but ultimately decided against it.

Need Something Done? Get An Executive’s Email Address via Whois

Elliot Silver
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12

The other day, I was putting something together and it scratched because the fit of the brackets were too tight. I looked up the product on the website where we bought it, and I saw that someone recently posted a review with the same comment.

Instead of going through customer service to complain about the problem, I did what every smart domain investor should do when having issues with a product or service: I did a Whois search, found an executive’s email address, and got in touch via email to let him know about the issue. Less than 2 hours later, the issue was in the process of being resolved.

When a company is started, the founder is often the primary registrant of the domain name, unless privacy is used. As companies grow, many will change the registrant information to a domain administrator, but some will keep the CMO or CEO as the registrant. For those who initially had the CEO’s email address listed, I can find it using the Whois history tool.

I am not a big fan of waiting for customer service to respond or dealing with people who don’t really care much about customer service. CEOs and other executives have more skin in the game and are often far more willing to go above and beyond to satisfy a customer’s requests or complaints. Sending an email to a company CEO or executive is a good way to get an issue resolved quickly.

This is also a very good way to make new contacts with executives. You can use a Whois lookup to email an executive to praise the company or make a suggestion.

NY State is Domain Savvy

Elliot Silver
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The State of New York launched a new website to help state residents connect with government officials. Dubbed Citizens Connects, the website aims to  be an “online town hall where you can find everything you need to communicate with New York State Government.”

Although the website sites on a state government url,  http://governor.ny.gov/citizenconnects, the State of NY smartly purchased the matching .com domain name to forward to the website. If you visit CitizenConnects.com, you are forwarded directly to the correct website.

The government is also promoting  CitizenConnects.com instead of the bulky url, making it easier for residents to access the website. I often see organizations and government agencies pushing hard to remember website addresses, but this is one instance where the government agency has done a good job with its domain name selection.

To be honest, I don’t particularly like the “Citizen Connects” branding because it sounds a bit strange. IMO, Citizens Connect sounds like a better option, but that domain name was registered.

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