Monte Cohen is up first from Moniker.com and Traffic Club. Monte has been in the domain space for sometime so I imagine he will have some good things to say. He discusses about professional domain portfolios. The domain market has become very profitable he says. Domain revenue was not originally known in the beginning. Revenue = Search revenue, CPA programs, and selling domains. 850 million dollars in annual advertising and domain sales. Potential to reach 2 billion by 2010. Impressive. Companies and individuals that own more than 1000, 10,000 or more domains is on the rise. Buy domains.com owns 660,000 has investment domains. That is a substantial amount of domains.
So what makes up a good domain? He says: Natural generic brand, easy to remember (radio test), clear, concise, and descriptive (what does it say to the user), commercially oriented (search bids), visually pleasing, existing type-in traffic, back links, page rank, alexa rank, mistypes (generic vs trademark). So how do domains generate revenue. Mainly through ad revenue from CPC, CPA, and CPM. Domain sales or the sale of domain names directly or portals. Domain development such as individually or in partnership domain owners add content, diversify advertising, and build web networks. Monte puts up some article links and studies. He says that 70% of internet surfers type a name in an address bar to reach a destination, according to WebSideStory, an internet analytic firm in San Diego. Thats up from 53 percent four years ago. He gives some example of domain advertising pages. It is a one click page that is focused around the keyword in the domain. So where does this traffic come from? There is type in traffic, development, search engine referrals, and search engine organic listings.
He discusses the domain sales front. Are all the .com domain gone? Longer more descriptive domains could diamonds in the rough. 5 million domains available in the aftermarket. Domains not on market for sale? – They are for sale (private market is the largest market). Domain owner whois – and then offer market value. He says that retail vendors are the optimal domain developers. He mentions vertical dominance. He says that you need to own as many domains as you can. He says you need to also protect your brand. Try typing in brand name 100 times and see which ones you got wrong and then possibly go register them. In order to create your portfolio, you will need some moderate capital and there are many tools.
John Lisbin from Point It, Inc is up second, he says that Google makes a lot of money from domain traffic. He talks about the traffic sources and how poor domain traffic can be for advertisers. He says that cost per action is about 3-4 times higher and often 8-10 times here with domain traffic. He also says that Google and other use domain traffic in the search network even though you can’t opt out of it.
Andrew Beckman from Search Ad Network is up third. He talks about how they break down the traffic referrers to determine conversions and uses it to compare sites that are in the traffic stream. He is basically trying to show that there are so good traffic in these sources from Adsense. He recommends to track this and then go after those sites in order to capitalize on those higher conversions from those sites. He is recommending the secondary engines. Hmmm… He says they are trying to grab traffic by buying domains, good example is Marchex who has spent over 200MM on direct navigation domains. Josh Meyers from Yahoo and says they have partners with 3 of the major domain traffic consolidators. He discusses the domain and direct navigation channel. He says the traffic from direct navigation has increased substantially and will probably continue to increase. In terms of the future he is suggesting that there is movement towards considering the domains as media. Some of these companies want to turn the domains into micro-portals and there will be a lot of blurring of lines in terms of use for these things.
