More and more people are deciding to develop their domains rather than park them. Often times, people register domains because they have a keen/deep interest in a subject/name that might make a great website someday. For example, if you have an intense interest in slotcars, you might register a domain like slotcarmemories.com to provide information regarding antique slot cars, slot car trading, slot car news… whatever, it’s your vision.
So, you get all excited and register your slotcar URL but then what do you do? There are lots of tools that will help you get a free or cheap website up and running. Beyond that, you’ll have to fill the site with interesting thoughts, insights, and other content – that is the bigger problem for most folks. Without interesting content, no one will come to your site. If no one visits, it’s less fun and the potential to make money is dramatically reduced.
YouTube has now become a huge library of sharable video content that you can re-publish on your website. Some of the videos might be what you would consider garbage, but lots of them are very well produced.
Back to our slotcar example. You can search YouTube using the keyword “slotcar” and thousands of videos will be presented to you. If you find one that fits well with your site, you simply copy the Embed code under the video and post it to your website.
This can save you hours (more like days and weeks) of content development time. If you want to eventually ihave all your website video be original (produced by you), you can use it as a placeholder until you find the time and energy to develop your own.
MediaPost’s Laurie Sullivan interviewed Jeremiah Johnston, CEO at Sedo, recently and he shared some interesting information that has come out of a recent market study re their 2009 domain sales activity. According to SEDO, they were responsible for 64% of the top 100 public domain sales. Here are some informational tidbits:
Overall, domain sales were up 5% in 2009, when compared to 2008.
44% of domain sales are .com domain extensions (vs. .net, .org, etc).
The average price of a .com site dropped approximately $719 in the fourth quarter of 2009.
Top-selling domain categories for 2009 included software, employment, services, regions, country and cities, tobacco, insurance, three-character domains, hardware and casino.
Also, Domain Wire conducted a survey (537 respondents from 49 countries, 57% from the US, 7% of respondents own 10,000 or more domains) with some interesting trend data. Here are some excerpts:
60% of domain name owners are making less than $20 RPM (revenue per thousand visits).
40% of domain name owners are making less that $10 RPM.
35% of domain name owners say 2009 revenue was similar to 2008 revenue.
30% expect domain parking revenue to rise in 2010.
The Domain Wire survey respondent listed the following as the best places to register a domain.
VeriSign, the organization that manages the underpinning for ICANN is raising the wholesale prices it charges to Registrar organizations to manage the core base of .com and .net domains. The wholesale price of a .com domain that Verisign charges Registrars will go from $6.86 (does not include ICANN fee) to $7.34, effective July 1, 2010. That means you can realistically expect the yearly rate you pay your Registrar (example: GoDaddy) to go up by at least that amount of money.
ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has cleared the way to move beyond the standard latin characters for domain names and urls. They have approved the “internationalized Domain Name Fast Track Process” which will allow people to apply for new domain names in native languages/scripts such as Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew and others.
This is a process that has been working through the system since the mid-1990s. Now, rather than making the world conform to converting their native language into a string of roman letters, domain owners can provide internet address in their native language and characters.
This last week, we saw two interesting high-profile purchasers of domains. The first was Microsoft who purchased the office.com domain, ostensibly to house the hosted version of its popular Office software suite. The second was Yahoo, who purchased omg.com (omg = “oh my god” acronym = yahoo’s celebrity gossip site) for $80,000. General consensus around the net was that $80K was a bargain price.
Erick Schonfeld, at Techcrunch, noticed (When Amazon Bought Zappos, Clothes.com Also Came In The Box) that Amazon got a little extra bonus in its $928 million deal to by Zappos last month. The domain, clothes.com, had been purchased by Zappos from IdeaLab for $4.9 million. I’m sure Amazon will find a good way to put that particular name to work.
Jeremy Kirk at PC World writes an article (Comcast Redirects Bad URLs to Pages With Advertising) explaining that Comcast will now be forwarding web visitors who mistype urls to a page designed to show advertising. Rather than providing a “did you mean xyz?” suggested correction to the visitor, Comcast will now forward the user to a page with Yahoo search results and sponsored link ads.
For domain owners who are wondering what to do about falling domain monetization levels from their parked domains, you may want to consider developing your site if you have a domain name that corresponds to a high-value keyword. Lots of times, people register domains that are related to a subject they are passionate about or that they understand intimately. Advertisers may be very interested (they’ll pay lots of money) to display their ads in front of internet surfers who are also interested in that same keyword or subject.
Rather than parking a domain whose contextual subject you know a lot about (example: greenduckeggs.com may mean that you understand a great deal about “green duck eggs”), it may be better to launch a site and share some of that knowledge with the world. It’s never been easier to launch a free website (example: google sites) or blog (example: wordpress, typepad, blogger) and to add pay-per-click advertising (example: google adsense, kontera) to the site to generate revenue.
Search engines have learned to discount the value of parked domains in their search results — that means you’re not likely to have your site listed in the first 10 results if your site is hosted with a parking company.
Back to our “green duck eggs” example… Let’s say you know more about green duck eggs than anyone on the planet and you registered that domain (greenduckeggs.com) because of your familiarity with the subject. After you bought the domain, you parked it with a domain parking company because you didn’t have the skills or time to launch the site. At first the site made some monthly income because people interested in the subject (green duck eggs) were typing the address (greenduckeggs.com) directly into their browsers and you were getting some search engine traffic. But over time, your monthly income from the parking company went down. This is probably because the search engines stopped including your site when people searched on “green duck eggs”.
Today, you’re probably better off (you’ll make more money) just developing a small website or blog and adding some some online advertising to it. That’s because, if there are a significant number of people looking for information on “green duck eggs”, your website is likely to be re-inserted into the natural/organic results of the big search engines (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft). Now, when someone goes to Google and types “green duck eggs” and hits the search button, they may see your site as the first item in the list of search results. (note: this won’t happen over night and may take months) The world may be better off too if you are willing to share your valuable knowledge of green duck eggs with everyone.
The amount of money you can make depends on two primary factors; first, how many people in the world are searching for “green duck eggs” and two, how much are advertisers will to pay you for a person that clicks on a “green duck egg” keyword ad that is being served on your site. It will also depend on how well you pay attention to SEO (search engine optimization) techniques that increase the chances of your site being listed at the top of the list of search results.
Microsoft and Yahoo have been trying to put a search deal together forever. Headlines indicate it’s heating up again. Andrew at Domain Name Wire (What Microsoft-Yahoo Deal Would Mean to Domainers) continues his speculation of what would happen if the merger finally goes through. Andrew believes any pressure on Google is a good thing.
Max Chafkin at Inc Magazine (Good Domain Names Grow Scarce) writes about the shortage of “short, pronounceable names” for .com domains. His point is that small businesses are increasingly finding it difficult to register their targeted business name and are having to shop at auctions or come up with creative, often nonsensical, alternatives.