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Types of GeoDomains

Elliot Silver
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8

I just arrived in San Diego, and am excited for the GeoDomain Expo that begins tonight. I may have covered this in the past, but I would like to take some time to define the different types of geodomain names, which will be helpful as I post articles in my geodomain series. I have purchased region .com gedomains, long tail geodomains, and non-com geodomains, although I have never purchased a ccTLD geodomain or an abbreviated geodomain.

A region .com geodomain name is fairly self-explanatory – it is the exact name and spelling of a location in the world in the .com extension. People who visit the location or who live there exclusively refer to the location by this name, and it is spelled correctly. These are the diamonds as far as geodomains go. Some examples of region .com gedomain are Burbank.com, Mexico.com, Caribbean.com, and NewEngland.com.

Within region .com geodomain names, there are towns, cities, counties, states, countries, lakes, mountains… etc. A region .com domain name is generally the most prized geodomain name because people are familiar with that particular area and in many cases, visitors simply type the region + .com into their Internet browser and visit whatever site is there looking for information.

Long tail geodomain names have a regional area in them as well as specific keywords either related to that area or to something specific in that area. The better long tail geodomain names make complete sense and have people searching for that keyword in the region. Many of these names are great because they are so targeted that the traffic converts well. Examples of these domain names are NewYorkHotels.com, MediterraneanCruise.com, IrelandPubs.com. Oftentimes, people in a particular geographical area want to be known as THE particular service provider of that keyword, and they will pay to have the domain name.

Non .com geodomain names are basically the same as above, but obviously not in the .com extension. I don’t include ccTLDs in this, because I think they are an entity in and of itself. Non .com geodomains would be Chicago.net, LehighValleyDoctors.info, and Seoul.org.

ccTLD geodomains are very popular in many countries outside of the United States, where adoption of the .US ccTLD hasn’t been as widespread. In many countries, such as Croatia and Italy, the country’s ccTLD is as popular or more than .com domain names. Two examples would be Vancouver.ca and TurismoVenezia.it.

Abbreviated geodomain names are geodomain names where an abbreviation is either standard (StLouis.com) or necessary because all other extensions are registered NewYorkNY.org. Abbreviated geodomain names can be any type of geographic area and any extension.

For the sake of my series, I am going to mainly focus on what I know – region .com geodomains and long tail keyword geodomain names. I have experience buying these types of domain names, and I would rather write about something I know and have experience with than to write based on theory.

Did I miss any types of GeoDomain Names?

Special Thank You for Post # 1,000

Elliot Silver
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24

It seems pretty silly, but a few weeks ago I noticed that I had around 950 posts on my blog dating to its inception.   Since then, in the back of my mind, I’ve been thinking about what to write for my 1,000th post. I know it’s silly, but I wanted to come up with something fun for the occasion of post #1,000. A few days ago while running on the treadmill, I determined what I wanted to post here for this special post.

Several years ago, I was a “struggling domain investor,” buying and selling inexpensive domain names (which I still do on occasion). While I sold primarily on Ebay and on DN Forum, I also sold quite a bit in private to clients of mine. Most of the domain names I owned were “brandable” domain names, and their sales prices ranged from $20 – $200/each with $200 being the anomaly.

One of my better clients when I began was a lady named Tasha Kidd. Aside from buying domain names from me, Tasha and I also chatted via email and instant messenger about marketing strategy and domain names. Tasha was the first person who introduced me to keyword generic domain names, and she emphasized their value over brandable domain names. In terms of domain acquisitions, that has been my focus since then. Tasha also designed the first iteration of my company logo and website a few years ago.

Later on in early 2006, I acquired a past tense domain name, for a booming industry. Tasha mentioned that she was a member of Rick Schwartz’s exclusive domain forum, and she suggested that I meet with one of the best domain brokers in the business who was a member in order to sell this domain name. Tasha introduced me to Kevin Leto and she also recommended me for admission onto Rick’s Board, which was approved. Before posting on Rick’s Board, Tasha taught me the protocol that she learned, some of which is only learned by making mistakes – helping me to avoid many landmines that may have gone off had I done or said something wrong.

I can’t even tell you how many friends I made and colleagues I met after joining Rick’s Board. Kevin also   been instrumental in private deals I’ve made as well as answering countless technical questions about my blog, website security, and other technical questions I can’t answer. I ended up selling that domain name for 5 figures, which was my largest sale at the time. For all of this that came as a result of Tasha’s help and advice, I want to say thank you x 1,000 to Tasha.

I also would like to thank readers of my blog who have offered their opinions, support, commentary, criticism, friendship, and everything in between. Without your continued visits, this blog wouldn’t exist and without your commentary, it wouldn’t have any life or be nearly as interesting. Being a blogger has its ups and downs, but fortunately there are many more ups than downs. Thank you for all of your support!

Trust & Goodwill of a Category Defining Domain Name

Elliot Silver
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4

Andrew posted some commentary on Monday from ABCsearch CEO Daniel Yomtobian on why the company went out and acquired Advertise.com. According to Yomtobian, Advertise.com “is the perfect brand name to attract new customers and make them feel comfortable if they had not heard of us—which translates into a much higher customer acquisition rate.”

TRUST is a huge aspect of a category defining domain name. People might not have heard of a particular company operating on a category defining domain name, but they generally trust that company until the trust is broken simply because of the domain name. As the saying goes, “perception is reality,” and people automatically think that with a category defining domain name, the company must be trustworthy. Yomtobian knows this, and his results should reflect this.

One thing that is not frequently discussed in the purchase of a domain name is a small thing called “goodwill.” According to Finance-Glossary.com, goodwill is defined as “The value of a business to a purchaser over and above its net asset value. It reflects the value of intangible assets such as reputation, brand name, good customer relations, high employee morale and other factors that improve the company’s business.” A category defining domain name has a considerable amount of good will associated with it, and that alone can help catapult a brand like ABCSearch onto the radar screens of their target clients.

People may not have visited a particular website in the past, but because the name rings a bell, they might think they have. Trust and goodwill are not things that can be very accurately quantified, but they have considerable value to a company.

5 With… Jay Westerdal, CEO, .Movie

Elliot Silver
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26

Many months ago, I interviewed DomainTools founder Jay Westerdal in one of the first “5 With…” interviews I did. Since then, Jay sold his company to Thought Convergence, which has moved right to the top as one of the domain industry’s leading companies. Their services run the gamut – parking (Trafficz), conference (Domain Roundtable), domain auctions (Aftermarket.com), tools (DomainTools), and many other products and services.

Jay is also involved in another project as CEO of the .movie registry, which hopes to secure the .movie gTLD. The general premise is that every year, hundreds of movies are released via different channels, and many struggle to match the .com domain name with the title of their movie. The .movie extension would allow production companies to choose the name of their movie in the .movie extension. An example of this would be that Paramount Pictures could register StateOfPlay.movie instead of the dumb domain name they chose, StateOfPlayMovie.net.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I interviewed Antony Van Couvering, founder of Minds + Machines, a gTLD consulting company, and CEO of .NYC. If you have any interest in gTLD domain names, that’s another interview you might want to read.

EJS:1) Who is involved in .Movie and are there any movie studios involved as partners or passive players?

JW: We have talked with a number of studios so far and they like our vision. There are six major studios which we have a good working relationship with at this point and expect that to grow. We have raised or got commitments for just over $5 Million dollars from Investors and we might be interested in raising more. I am not going to mention the investors by name but most people reading your blog would recognize their names. Our vision is very clear. We want to create a namespace where movie goers trust that they can direct navigate to a movie just by knowing the name of it. BacktoTheFuture.movie would work in this situation along with every other example of a movie name. We are going after two TLDs .Movie and .Film and with one registration the registrant would get both domains.

EJS: 2) Will the .Movie registry have a directory of .Movie sites classified by genre, release date…etc?

JW: No, we are a pure registry with no special tools. We will leave organizing the world’s data up to smart people like Google, Yahoo, MSN, or the like. We want to be just a TLD for movies. Every movie should have a type-in domain at our registry with no speculators allowed.

EJS: 3) Will the .Movie registry offer special development tools for website owners?

Nope, we offer nameservers for the TLD and the things you would expect from normal TLDs like .COM or .INFO. Just the basic DNS stuff along with a ultra strong UDRP which favors studios.

EJS: 4) How will .Movie compete with Movie.com/Movies.com?

JW: We are not competing with Movies.com, we are a TLD for movies. Every domain in our TLD will be owned by the movie owner. We are not operating a website, we are enabling direct nav websites for movie studios. I think the vision for this started because I was a domainer with a lot of ICANN experience, I got frustrated looking at trailers for new movies coming out and seeing that they had horrible domain names. So I decided I would help the movie industry and create a TLD
just for them with no outsiders allowed in to clog up the good domains.

EJS: 5) Do you expect to run a TM landrush, and how will domains be awarded, ie CasaBlanca.movie where a TM might not be valid?

JW: We expect Warner Bros. Pictures will register Casablanca.movie. We are not encouraging registrations inside this space unless the registrant owns film rights to a movie of the same name. We will present big hurtles to register in the space and we expect only a few outsiders to come in, domains like Google.movie might actually go to the Google search engine which indexed the movies rather then a film about Google.

Our goal would be to allow movie companies to register great names like Ducks.movie for just $10. Keeping speculators out will require the mind of a domainer because we want to keep the space open for anyone but only encourage movie studios and special edge cases like search engines. We would not want Google coming in and registering Search.movie they should be using their trademark instead. Generic domains would go to a studio that had a film named Search or The Search. Unless you had a trademark in the space don’t expect to come it. Even with a TM we know there are loopholes like registering TMs just to come in and speculate; we will guard against that and throw speculators out. More information can be found on our website www.dotmovieregistry.com.

EJS: 6) How long do you think it will be until we see these type of gTLD approved by ICANN?

JW: I expect this TLD to be approved in 12-24 months and operating in the root.

Great New Template from My Designer

Elliot Silver
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7

My primary web designer, Mike McAlister of Six One Five Design, has released a new website template that would be perfect for personal or business use. Mike didn’t ask me to post this – and I am not getting compensated in any way for posting this, but I found the link and thought the design looked pretty sleek.

Two weeks ago in my newsletter, I recommended a source for free web templates – FreeCSSTemplates.org. I subscribed to the theory that when building a mini site, keyword driven content is king so don’t sweat the layout – and don’t pay more for something that doesn’t matter much? I am changing my mind on this thought process because Mike’s template (and others featured on the site) look nicer than the freebie I chose, and perhaps a more professional looking site will yield more authority and click throughs.

IMO, you can’t really go wrong by paying $15 for a great looking template template, and Mike’s is now featured on ThemeForest.net. Others seem to like the template as well, with it receiving 54 ratings, averaging 5 stars (of 5). As of this morning, it’s been purchased just 222 times – which is a great number, but I am sure is much less than the freebies.

Burbank.com Assist

Elliot Silver
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14

After speaking to David Castello and Jess Bookstaff this morning, I made a few changes to the homepage of Burbank.com. First off – thanks again for the calls David and Jess. I think the layout change will drive more advertising revenue for the site with the better placement of advertising.

For those who haven’t visited, I just added 6 advertising blocks above the fold in lieu of the rotating banners on the site. This follows what many other geodomains have successfully done with their websites. I think this is a needed step to help advertisers drive traffic.

Since I only use two nternet browsers, I am asking visitors to my blog to have a quick look at Burbank.com to let me know how it looks in your browser. Please drop me a note or a comment and let me know if it looks okay and what browser you are using.

I am sure there’s an easier way to test this, but I am working overtime right now to continue building my Newburyport website!   I would also love to hear feedback on that site, although I know there are many pages missing. Hopefully many of those will be added tomorrow though.

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