Facing The Absurd

Happy New Year’s everyone! Hope 2011 will be a great year for you!

Anyway, just wanted to share an idea I have had for some time now. Never really got a chance to do it myself initially, then I decided that the business opportunity isn’t that huge and I have to focus on bigger niches. It’s basically an aftermarket play exploiting the drop game, a domain flea market if you will.

The idea is simple – all of us domainers drop domains sometimes, we choose to let them expire. The idea is that somebody would build a service where you could push these domains, say 2 weeks before they expire, and offer them for $10 a piece + renewal fee. If two or more people would be interested in the same domain, a standard namejet style auction would follow. The service operator and the domainer would then split the proceeds 50/50.

The service would just need to create accounts at all the main registrars where domainers would push the domains and do some simple programming of the marketplace, not much work imho.

This idea is based on a simple premise: some people can find gems (in their perception) in your garbage.

I personally drop a couple hundred thousand domains a year. The thing is that my only criteria for renewal is if the domains make reg fee. If they don’t, I simply let the domain drop and there are definitely gems in these drops that other people can discover but I don’t have time for.

I hope I created a new buzzword “drop monetization”:). Hope somebody picks this idea up. Good luck with it!

There’s been a lot of buzz lately about sex.com hitting the auction block soon. So how much can this beauty make on parking? My educated guess is about $80-100k a month, so let’s say $1 mil a year. That’s a pretty decent passive income for the buyer who picks it up.

One thing I never understood is why the current owner never really monetized the US traffic, just redirecting it to some kind of informational resource. He only monetized the non-US traffic via DomainSponsor. Lot of money wasted there…

The potential with sex.com is to monetize via selling directly to advertisers, CPA etc. I think the potential there strictly from the type-in traffic is about $1.5-$2 million a year.

It will be very interesting to see who ends up buying sex.com. I don’t think this time it will really be a domainer. There are not that many domainers out there that could do a deal this big on such a short notice and are generally involved with adult. Really only A1 National Advertising and Xedoc Holding pop on my mind.

I was just looking through Bido at the recent sales page. Since Bido get’s so much PR and buzz, I was really surprised about the miniscule amount of volume in dollar terms. Looks like on a typical day maybe $1,000-$1,500 of sales go through. That’s $100-150 of margin for Bido a day. And a hell of a lot of effort is put into that from Sahar’s team with no doubt to even get that result. I don’t really want to show off or anything, but just to put that number in context, I make that kind of money in less than 10 minutes, 24 hours a day, just from parking.

What the example of Bido clearly shows us is how difficult it really is to create a new viable aftermarket platform and especially get the model right. I think Sahar&co will really have to fundamentally change Bido’s model and I sincerely wish them a lot of luck, because any efforts like this help increase liquidity, which is always positive for all of us.

Overall, if you look  at the various aftermarket platform models, I think only some work very well, some moderately and some don’t at all.

Somebody who I think got the aftermarket model working really well is Namemedia with BuyDomains etc. Why it is so nicely profitable is that to a large degree, Namemedia is what I call in the business of proprietary domain trading. They own the inventory (or most of it) that they sell, hence their margins are really thick. Whereas others just rely on their 10% cut, Namemedia takes almost 100%. That’s why they can market their names proactively. Dark Blue Sea has been trying to do something similar to that with it’s Domain Distribution Network, but they are clearly not even close to as good as NameMedia is on this.

Another aftermarket model that I think makes a lot of sense is the dropcatching-to-auction model of Namejet, Snapnames and Pool. If you create liquidity in the marketplace, you can snap up domains for $7 and sell them for $79 or even thousands of dollars. Obviously most of the inventory comes from preferred registrar partnerships so the margins are not that high (as they have to give a big chunk to the registrars), but these dropcatching services definitely take a bigger cut than 10% that for example Bido or Sedo rely on.

Rick Latona gets it right as well through his whole aftermarket package (newsletter, auctions, active brokering). He also engages in what I call a lot of proprietary trading, a lot of the inventory he sells is his.

To a lesser degree I don’t think the whole marketplace model of Sedo (on a standalone basis) is that awesome and profitable. On a typical month, Sedo sells something like $6 million in inventory, with a 10% margin of $600k roughly. However Sedo has a HUGE overhead to keep this operation running, spends significant amounts on marketing etc. There’s probably very little left of the $600k a month after all the costs. However why this model seems to work is the marketplace’s impact on Sedo’s parking business. Because of the marketplace, Sedo gets a lot of parking business, where it can make thicker margins. Pretty much all the small guys making $50 a month on parking park with Sedo now, but they probably have thousands or maybe even tens of thousands of them so it adds up. The impact of the marketplace on the parking side of the business is exactly why Namedrive went into this business with its NDX Market. Overall clearly, on a standalone basis, the marketplace model is nothing very profitable.

So bottom line is that if you want the marketplace model to work, you really need some kind of upsell to make it work – to parking, a registrar or something like that.

There’s been a lot of buzz around alternative forms of domain monetization, alternatives to domain parking. Here’s my take on it…

I think quite a few of the ideas circulating around at the moment are sort of dead end. One thing that is pretty overhyped overall I think is development (sorry to say). Domainers are not developers, developing is a defocus for them and they don’t know how to do it properly in most cases. What is the point of spending a week building a website about sharks or octopuses that ends up making $2 on ad-sense a month? Don’t get me wrong, I do believe in building out prime generic domains especially in an e-commerce/lead generation/cpa context, doing SEO, arbitraging the site via PPC etc. I just don’t believe in taking 1000 domains and producing mass content, it’s really only about tricking Google for a little while who will eventually kill it because it’s really about just littering his search index. The only fit for domain mass development is for domains that don’t get type-in traffic. Why would you want to own domains without type-in traffic anyway? Rule number 1 – always follow the traffic. If you stick to this mantra, you get the domain game. If you don’t, I guess you’re condemned to flipping domains on dnforum for $20.

Since developing is such a complex issue, let’s focus on ways of alternative monetization for type in traffic. These are the areas I think are the way to go forward and make sense, some of them overlap:

• Zero click – The whole idea of this is not sending a visitor to a parked page but directly to an advertiser for a fixed fee for every redirect, similar to PPC for advertisers
• CPA/Lead Generation – I am very strong believer in this model. I think that about 20% of traffic now going to parked pages can be monetized better via CPA/Lead gen. Could even be 30%. This year I plan to take this route and arbitrage significantly more domain traffic to CPA. I want to build a small department in my company entirely focused on this. Problem with CPA is that it is very time consuming, involves a lot of testing and is difficult to scale. I think I have a solution for this though, I will elaborate more in coming weeks.
• CPM Ads – I think this could be a very decent ad on to parking. Why not put banners or more aggressive display formats on parked pages for advertisers more focused on selling their brand. There is huge money in display advertising and this area has really been ignored by the domain industry. Say you have a domain making $10 rpm. Why not put a banner on top of the parked page making another $5 rpm on top?
• Email/list building – Another area still completely ignored by the domain industry. Say you have a domain like PersonalLoans.com (still paying my debts to Frank). Why not put on it a email submission box entitling subscribers to get hot loan deals once in a while. This could be an interesting avenue for creating another continuous source of revenue from your domains. Email marketing is seriously a huge business.

Just my few cents…