Additional uses for domain names

A good post here by Sahar on what else we might think of using domains for in the future: http://www.conceptualist.com/?p=488

Some interesting concepts – particularly the effective one-stop shop contact that a domain could be i.e. type it into TV and see a tv show, the same URL used on radio to play a radio station, typed into the phone to dial a number and so on.

Whilst most ads (whether on TV, radio or billboard) mention the companies domain, there is still a reliance put on the consumer having an internet device. This is changing as more and more people have internet ready mobile phones, but wouldn’t it be good just to type the URL on the keypad and go straight to the companies site or dial straight through.

Interesting.

Parked Domain content development

A good post spotted over at Domain Name News discussing the need to further develop content on parked domain name pages. I couldn’t agree more with this.

Clearly existing parking tools are good and mostly strong, but I agree that it’s time now to develop new ways to populate pages with richer content, focusing on greater growth in the long term. We currently do well with simply PPC listings on most of our pages, but we have a handful of “good” domains that don’t receive much traffic or revenue. However I do beleive given the correct development (not just PPC links) they could over time be good earners for us. We also have a few domains that receive high levels of traffic, but 0 revenue. For these I’m thinking of creating our own pages for these sites (i.e. making mini sites for them) and loading with AdSense, Affiliation tools etc.

We don’t really have time to develop individual sites for all of these domain names, but a tool to allow more than just PPC listings would allow us to grow the site in terms of traffic and focus on growing revenue in the longer term.

I have read this morning about a tool, still in Beta version, called Domain Embarking. It generates content based on keywords you enter, but it is still in Beta version. However, it is a start. I’ll probably try it for a couple of domains.

Clever move by dotMobi!

It appears we’ll shortly see several hundred dotMobi domain names up for auction through Sedo. Apparently at launch, dotMobi decided to set aside over 5000 commonly used words to stop their registration – and are now intending on releasing them into auction.

However, certain restrictions do apply. All bought domains must show a dotMobi compliant parking page and have a live site with relevant content launched within 6 months. Each site must reach a certain level on .mobi’s compliance scale.

This should be a good money earner for dotMobi, although the restrictions put in place will no doubt have an impact on overall revenues. Many people would have been interested in snapping these names up purely as investments, not with an intention to develop relevant sites.

It does however highlight a way in which money could be made, although it would obviously have some moral issues. Create and launch a new domain extension, advertise it a lot, keep thousands of keywords aside until your new extension picks up, then sale the keywords at inflated prices when there is a high demand for them! Nice!

New “Industry Links” Section

As part of our new focus on keeping our blog up-to-date, we’ve added a new Industry Links section to point readers in the right direction of other high quality domainer resources. This includes links to domainer blogs, marketplaces, forums and general resources.

Have a read and leave a comment if there are any others you’d like added. We’ll continue to grow the list of resources over time.

An ever growing market

VeriSign have released their most up to date Domain Name Industry Brief and it looks like the domain name market is still growing rapidly. According to this most recent report, new domain registrations hit an all time high in the second quarter of 2007 with 14.5 million domain name registrations, bringing the total base of domain name registrations worldwide to a staggering 138 million across all Top Level Domains (TLDs).

ccTLD registrations also increased dramatically, mainly driven by the growth of .cn, to 51.5 million registrations by the end of the second quarter of 2007. The report does however suggest that while there are now more than 240 ccTLD extensions available, 66% of the total registrations are made up of the top 10.

According to Verisign, the top 10 ccTLD registreis by domain name base (second quarter 2007), were:

1.  .de (Germany)
2.  .uk (United Kingdom)
3.  .cn (China)
4.  .nl (Netherlands)
5.  .eu (European Union)
6.  .it (Italy)
7.  .ar (Argentina)
8.  .us (United States)
9.  .br (Brazil)
10.  .ch (Switzerland)

View the report online for yourselves: http://www.verisign.com/static/042726.pdf

New Domains pages updated

We’ve now updated our New Domains pageto show some of the domains we’ve added to our portfolio in recent months. These are only a selection of domains. As always, for a full list of domains currently available for sale, visit our pages on Sedo

To long a break from posting!

Well, there has been quite a gap since the last post on here, but hopefully they’ll be far more frequent from now on. It was a busy summer and the “we’ll post tomorrow” has now gone one for over 1 month – so it’s about time we actually posted. We’ll now plan to post a couple of times every week at the least, to keep you up-to-date with our own domains portfolio and with the domain after market in general.

We’ve added quite a few domains to our portfolio since the last post, most notably the 3 letter mxb.info, the amusing blingstring.com (welcome to the world of bling!) and inheemsen.com.

To search the full list of domains in our portfolio, visit our Sedo listings

Domainers, the equivalent of e-mail spammers?

According to an article mentioned on Domain Name Wire, this is the case. In agreement with the comments on domain name wire, this article has been a rushed job.

Of course there are domainers out there tagging domains and snapping them up the 2nd they lapse, then holding original owners to ransom. However, I also know of some who happily hand the domain back if original owners contact them within a certain period.

There are also domainers who wait for a fairly generous time after a domain has lapsed before snapping it up for themselves.

In terms of comparing Domainers to Spammers – well thats just nonsense. You wouldn’t class everyone who uses email as a spammer, so it’s not very fair to be comparing all domainers with spammers.

Of course there are those who are out to hold ex-owners to ransom, but there are even more simply out to build their own businesses.

Dollars.com – the start of a flurry of currency domain sales?

Interesting that dollars.com is this weeks biggest earner according to DNJournal, selling for $650k compared with the second highest domain name to sell, cushion.com, which sold for $75k. A fairly impressive difference.

There will no doubt now by a flurry to find money related domain names now that this value has been put on the most relevant money term around. It will also be interesting, don’t you think, to see what impact this has on both euro.com and pound.com which are also both parked. I wonder if they’ll sell soon? Or if click revenue will spike in the coming days because of the publicity surrounding dollar.com.

In terms of money related domains, we now have savebillions.com and 2daydeals.com for sale. savebillions.com is a recent addition to our portfolio and has a starting bid of £150. We’ve now started the steps to generating traffic to it, and we think there is quite a bit of potential there. In terms of 2daydeals.com, this is a fair size traffic generator, acheiving just over 1k unique views in June. Like savebillions.com, this has a starting bid price of £150.

Both domains are now for sale through our Sedo Portfolio.

Weclome to Easydomains

Hopefully this blog will help you in buying / selling your own domains from your own portfolio. We’ve built it specifically to let you see our own portfolio of domain names, and give you the chance to track new additions, view recently sold domains and generally browse our account.

Easydomains