I read an interesting article in the New York Times a couple of days ago, and I want to share it with you. It seems that many large websites are creating their own ad "networks" to sell remnant space on their websites.  Instead of the teeth  whitening  and belly  flattening  ads you are accustomed to seeing on large websites, you may actually begin to see some better targeted advertising.

The publishers  are able to accomplish a few things when starting their own advertising networks. First, they are able to eliminate the middle man from their ad sales. Instead of paying an outside ad network to aggregate advertising, the websites are able to work directly with their advertisers.

Secondly, the publishers are able to offer more targeted (and more relevant) advertisements to their visitors. This should encourage higher click throughs and better conversion rates for advertisers. Again, this will help increase the CPM for publishers who find that advertisers are able to offer more money for their remnant positions.
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Editors of the Boston Globe announced that they are moving towards the paid subscription model, and they intend to use BostonGlobe.com as the portal for the paid news site, which will contain all of the articles currently found in the print edition. They will keep Boston.com as the free website for visitors who choose not to pay for subscriptions.

From a geodomainer's perspective, I think it's nice to see that the Boston Globe is going to reinforce that BostonGlobe.com is one website with paid news and content, while their city.com site, Boston.com, will remain free and presumably the most widely read. Boston.com will have event listings and really be the go to site for information about Boston, notoriety which I believe it's already achieved.

From a blogger's perspective, it will be interesting to see how this experiment goes. Rupert Murdoch has been talking about putting up a pay wall as have others, which was previously tried by the NY Times (owners of the Boston Globe) with their Times Select version (no longer running).
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I sent an email to several officials with the Boston Globe today, as I am considering the sale of a number of Massachusetts city .com domain names. One of the contacts I emailed is a Vice President at the company, and his email address is listed as the Whois contact. For some reason, this particular email address bounced, and the email was returned to me as undeliverable.

At the moment, Boston.com isn't set to expire until June of 2012. I would imagine they have the name set to auto-renew with a credit card on file, but that isn't always failproof. One problem they may have as the date gets closer is that as of 2004, the domain name was still to expire in 2012, meaning that they haven't had to renew Boston.com for several years.

When June of 2012 comes around, the domain registrar will likely automatically email the Whois contact reminder notices to renew the domain name, and those could possibly bounce. In addition, if the credit card on file has since expired, they may not have a payment method on file to pay for the domain → Read More