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!

Sorry for not posting much lately. First two weeks of November I was too busy. Second two weeks I was depressed (manio-depression sucks). Last week I am hyper though again so back in work mode. Just wanted to give a little update on things I am working on and how things are going.

- Elephant Traffic – since I last posted about ET has grown tremendously, we are currently monetizing about 550k uniques a day, which is a very decent chunk of traffic. Our advertiser base is growing on a daily basis and on some domains we are peforming 10x better than parking. If you have high volume domains doing over 1k uniques a day, contact us, we can beet your current monetization by a big margin. We’ve also expanded the team and planning version 2.0 hopefully next week.

- Elephant Orchestra lead generation – Still growing very nicely, we are now doing $200k in revenue a month, however we do have some issues with profitability, so we need to work hard on our margins, 30% is not enough. We need to get it up to 40% next year and double revenue, then it will be a pretty nice business. We’ve added a lot of bluechip clients in the last two months such as the Czech Rep’s biggest bank etc, expanded into new verticals such as utilities and travel etc.

- Otherwise we continue to be chased by venture capital, we just had a meeting with a fund with over $11 billion under management, they seem to be pretty interested. Otherwise word is on the street that we are planning an IPO in Poland, funny we had Nasdaq OMX contact us as a result and pitching their exchange to us as a better option

- When it comes to my own domain portfolio, I’ve been selling off a little. I sold about 20k domains in the last two weeks alone. I don’t usually sell much, but this is probably the best time of the year to do so since ppc is high. Plan is to use the cash to deleverage a little, maybe build a little warchest for some nice acquisitions.

- I”m thinking of buying one multimillion domain at the moment, so I’ve been putting together the cash, arranging a little investor syndicate and raising some debt for it. We’ll see how it goes. Plan is, believe it or not, develop!

- Otherwise Rick Latona has a new venture called WatchBrokers.com, so I put some money into that along with my friend Ammar. Looks very promising. Basically it’s a cash4gold concept, but for luxury watches. And I also think Rick can pull it off.

- I’m also bankrolling a new start up that is playing around with some semantics, we want to build out a new news aggregation service that will have some advanced features such as sentiment, emerging story spotting, some hyperlocal features etc. More news soon.

- Otherwise my friend Ondrej Bartos finally launched his venture fund Credo Ventures, so I put in a million euros into that. Plan is to finance promissing Czech and regional IT/biotech companies. Somehow makes me feel a little bit good as well as it’s nice to plow some money back and help start-ups.

- Otherwise my facebook game development venture Viral Maniacs that I bankrolled didn’t go so well, so we had to lay off the whole gaming division, we will just be focusing on apps now. One big one coming hopefully still this year, gut feeling that it might be a killer. All is not yet lost hopefully.

- What has been absolutely hot hot hot is our online insurance broker ePojisteni.cz. We are now the biggest in the Czech Rep, doing about 4,500 car insurance contracts a month. Our staff has grown to 50 people there and is actually starting to be a bottleneck since we need more skilled phone brokers. Early next year we’ll launch a new site with more products and also run a big media campaign for around $1 mil. That should boost our dominance further.

- Otherwise I had to scratch plans for the wood pellet factory in Eastern Slovakia. Corruption there is terrible and I refused to give bribes. Nothing was simply possible there with stuffing somebodies pockets, so in the end we didn’t get the contract for wood etc.

- My lipousuction chain Slim & Go is a little shit now, a) it’s a bad season now and b) competition has gone up like crazy and everybody is discounting like hell. We opened a new one in Brno though and will open in Ceske Budejovice in january.

- What’s been really fun lately is this movie we are making together with a friend. We have a pretty decent budget for a Czech film, hired the mexican cameraman who did Amorres Perros, so shots look really good. I’ll hopefully have a little teaser in a few weeks, so will post it here.

- Also have plans to open a new small club in Prague, little bit of a freak show. I’m talking midgets, women in latex, men in wehrmacht uniforms, cyberpunk music etc. Will be fun hopefully. Still early stage idea at this point only.

- Otherwise the European Poker Tour is coming to Prague next week, so will be probably playing the main event or at least the heads up event. Have had a pretty sick run in poker in the last two weeks, up more than $40k, mostly in heads up cash games.

- As for my travel plans, I’ll probably show up at Affiliate Summit in Vegas and DomainFest in LA, so if you’re coming, let me know.

P.S. Keep it real!

Congratulations to Moniker and associated parties on the sale of guns.com for $800k. I was interested in the domain as well submitting a $700k offer. Monte did a great job trying to do a deal and I can confess I almost got irritated by him sending me emails everyday if I am willing to go higher (I’m good friends with Monte, so just a joke). This is just proof how Moniker works hard to do these deals for their clients.

Why this domain really caught my attentions was a) because of the stable type-in traffic (1,000 uniques/day for years) and paradoxically b) the fact google doesn’t allow firearms ads. That’s why the true earning potential of the domain was depressed and I had a belief I could probably double to tripple the current monetization level going direct to advertisers via our zero-click model because this source of traffic is one of the few available for them to advertise on the internet.

I like making suggestions to parking companies how they should improve monetization, so here’s another try…here is how I think keyword optimization can be improved.

Today most parking companies rely on auto-optimization for optimizing their partners’ domains, over the years they have improved their automated systems to do this. To a smaller degree, parking companies do sometimes play around with manual optimization, i.e having their employees manually optimize domains. For example Skenzo does a lot of manual optization, obviously having the advantage that it can bank on a cheap Indian workforce.

In my experience auto optimization is often not the best option. For a lot of domains manual optimization brings a lot of upside.

I think that better keyword optimization could be brought by introducing crowdsourcing and decentralization into the opimization process.

Imagine that parking companies would create a “marketplace” where freelance optimizers could try and optimize their partner’s domains. The new settings would then be A/B tested against auto-optimization or other freelance optimizer’s optimization. If the freelancer’s optimization would be better, he/she would be paid a fee for his work. As part of the “marketplace”, the parking companies could score the various freelancers on their optimization skills and only let the most successful optimize the biggest domains etc. This process would need a lot of tweaking but I think it could work for the benefit of both parking companies and domainers.

Introduce decentralization into the optimization process is the phrase of the day!

I am fairly critical about the lack of evolution of the domain parking industry – it really hasn’t evolved much in recent years. Since PPC has fallen so sharply, it still is a puzzle to me why parking companies are not becoming more inventive when it comes to monetization.

One area I see completely unexploited is behavioural targeting on parked pages. When you look at ways how parking pages are optimized is is really all about contextual targeting. You basically have a universe of users hitting a particular domain, you optimize the ads based on the the domain name, what users are clicking on and maybe on location. However the point is that if you would take the universe of all US users hitting the domain for example, they would be all shown the same ads. Why not actually target the ads more to the particular user, for example based on his interests, gender, age etc and mix this behavioural targeting with the standard contextual targeting?

Parking companies themselves collect massive amounts of data by which particular users could be categorized. They could also partner with big ad networks that have collected even bigger swaths of data such as Doubleclick. Then use this data to improve targeting and monetization. If big e-commerce sites such as Amazon or Netflix can exploit this data, I don’t see a single reason why the parking companies couldn’t. This data is a potential goldmine that is just waiting to be collected by somebody.

I am generally cautious with new monetization platforms. So I’m generally not the first to jump on the bandwagon for tests. I prefer other friends to test out first and if I get a decent recomendation I start thinking about it. That was the case with WhyPark. I heard a lot of positives about it during DomainFest in January.

I’ve known Craig for some time, so I finally decided to run a test. Two weeks ago I pushed over a couple thousand domains onto their system that were making zero – we tested them on pretty much every parking company, so these were domains relegated to being dropped. From day one they started making about $20/day on WhyPark and about 7k uniques/day. Today it’s two weeks later and they are getting 11k uniques/day, so search engines are starting to pick them up. The amount of searches and clicks are going up as well, as the WhyPark team optimizes the domains. Yesterday they made $80, which is a great result if you look at it that previously they were making zero and were ready to be dropped. Seems like the earnings still have potential to go higher.

The test has been successful, so I’ve decided to put much more domains on WhyPark very soon. Well done WhyPark boys, looking forward to doing more business! Your platform has proved itself to me.

DOMAINSPONSOR® EXPANDS DOMAINFEST® TO EUROPE
--Early October event in Prague will focus on networking, building European business interest in online real estate--

LOS ANGELES, Calif. and FRANKFURT, Germany. DomainSponsor®, the domain monetization business unit of Oversee.net® and organizer of the DOMAINfest® series of conferences, said today that it will expand the highly regarded franchise into Europe with a conference in Prague, Czech Republic.

The two-day event will be held Wednesday and Thursday, October 6 and 7, 2010 at the landmark Hotel Intercontinental located in the heart of one of Europe’s most beautiful cities. Building on the success of last month’s event in Santa Monica, California, the October meeting will continue DOMAINfest’s focus on increasing the value of Internet real estate and will offer a rich setting for extensive networking involving topics relevant not only to domain investors from Europe, but also from around the world.  

Subject-matter experts will be invited to facilitate the networking sessions on Wednesday, October 6th.  The first day will also include a Moniker® Premium Domain Name Auction powered by SnapNames LiveTM technology.  Day 2 will be focused on social activities in and around Prague designed to provide the kind of shared experiences that can contribute to the building of long-term relationships between DOMAINfest Europe attendees.  Conference details, including the agenda and speakers, will be released in June, 2010.  

“DOMAINfest Europe is an excellent opportunity for European publishers, online marketers, and domain-related service providers to meet and discuss ways to increase the value of domain names, which we like to refer to as Internet real estate, “ said Peter Celeste, Senior Vice President of Oversee.net and General Manger, Monetization Services. “The DomainSponsor team looks forward to becoming more engaged with the European domain investor community, and this forum is the perfect venue to exchange ideas and build relationships.  As with all DOMAINfest events, we will be offering affordable registration rates to encourage maximum participation from a wide range of talented professionals from both inside and outside our industry.”

In January, 2010, DomainSponsor hosted a highly successful DOMAINfest Global® conference in Santa Monica, California that attracted more than 600 professionals from a variety of internet-related industries.  The conference included a variety of sessions over a three day period, including a keynote fireside chat with Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com. This recent DOMAINfest conference also featured a first-ever PITCHfest contest, structured networking sessions, and moderated general sessions with experts from the world of investment, advertising, and marketing. Videos of each session, including the keynote fireside chat, can be viewed at http://www.domainfest.com.  

In November 2009, DomainSponsor announced the establishment of its European head office in Frankfurt, Germany with Joerg Schnermann as General Manager. 

Moniker® Auction
Moniker will host a live premium domain name auction on Wednesday, October 6 followed by an extended online-only auction from October 7 to October 14.  Specific start and end times for each auction event will be announced June 1, 2010.  The live auction offers real-time online viewing and bidding from anywhere in the world via a free software download.  Details on how to bid in-person or remotely in any Moniker live auction can be found at http://domainauctions.moniker.com
.
Registration and Sponsorship Opportunities
Registration for DOMAINfest Europe will be open June 1, 2010. The early bird registration rate will be US$395 until July 1st.  A discounted rate of US$495 will then be available until September 1st, at which point the price increases to US$595. Companies interested in sponsorship opportunities can contact sales@domainfest.com
.
About DOMAINfest®
Founded and hosted by DomainSponsor®, the domain monetization division of Oversee.net, the DOMAINfest® conference brings domain industry and Internet professionals together to learn, network, and do business. Attendees include online advertising experts, domain publishers, domain monetization experts, SEO and SEM specialists, website developers, online marketers, ad or affiliate network suppliers, search advertising providers, venture capitalists, bankers and trademark/legal advisors. Visit http://www.domainfest.com for more information.

About Oversee.net
Oversee.net® is the leader in Internet real estate, specializing in monetizing, registering, selling and developing domain names. The company provides an array of managed services to domain investors, corporations, and individuals across more than ten million web sites. Oversee owns one of the largest portfolios of domain names in the world. The company’s unique optimized technology connects consumers and advertisers with highly relevant advertisements. Headquartered in Los Angeles, the company’s core brands include DomainSponsor®, SnapNames®, Moniker® and LowFares.comTM. To learn more, please visit www.oversee.net.

One thing that has been puzzling me for some time is the lack of institutional money in any structured way in the domain business. More institutional money is clearly a prerequisite for higher domain valuations.

When you look at it today there is only a little bit. Marchex/Fabulous/Tucows are publicly traded. Oversee, Demand Media, Skenzo, Name Media have all taken aboard funding, very decent amounts. Then we also had iReit, which sort of flopped. Various domaining companies managed to take on some debt such as Reinvent. Domain Capital at least brings a little leverage effect into the business (they have $30 million loaned out). But that’s pretty much it.

But why don’t we have more hedge fund-esque operations that would take on investor’s money, maybe even tie in a little leverage to increase ROE and start buying up portfolios? The only exceptions I sort of know of are DomainIvest.LU (they have raised their first 10 million Euro fund, which is now invested I hear), mad.biz runs some kind of private partnerships, where they bring in limited partners. I do a little bit of that as well. Maybe InternetRealEstate does some of that as well.

So what are the main reasons behind this lack of structured institutional capital?

One factor is that the first round of institutional capital that poured in sort of got burnt. This was before Google/Yahoo started heavily cutting payouts via various quality related claims, before the downturn hit etc. To really illustrate this: If you bought a portfolio in 2007, today it would be probably making 60-80% less on PPC than it did at the time of purchase.

Second is transparency. Michael Gilmour sums it up pretty well in his article here, so no need to elaborate further.

Another issue may be size. When you really think about it, the domain industry is pretty small. My estimate is that Google/Yahoo combined probably pay out about $40 million a month to the domain channel now. That’s already not much, again taking the more macro perspective (compare it to say the size of the bond market). Worse, the market is highly fragmented. There is not probably a domain portfolio owner that would own 10% of this market. Probably Oversee, Reinvent etc may be close to the 10%, but more likely in the 5-7% range, when it comes to their owned and operated portfolios. The domain biz may simply be too small to get on the radar of the big various funds.

And lastly, there is the issue of risk. There is the monetization risk (that ppc will further decline or a big upstream ad provider leaving the space and not syndicating its feeds to the domain channel), maybe a degree of type-in traffic fading away (more long term) and then there is the legal risk. I hope eventually somebody smart will find a way how to securitize the cashflow from domains and create domain derivatives that could for example separate the the yield of a portfolio and its risk. The same way that for example in the bond market you have credit default swaps (through which you can basically separate the yield of a bond from the risk of non-repayment). Doing this would be a huge boost for the business and would really help institutional money to flow in in masses.

So will be see an influx of institutional money coming into domains in the next 3 years?

I really think so. PPC is certainly not going to fall as much as it did in the last 2 years – I actually think it may be relatively stable and new monetization techniques (refer to previous post) may actually even bring a little bit of upside. I also think there is going to be a new breed of domainers-turned-domain fund managers that will start bringing in the institutional money – because the industry is so complex it’s rather difficult for an outsider to do that. And lastly, with us getting out the recession I think investors will have a higher appetite in risk again and start exploring more alternative investments again.

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…

The domain business is still about parking. That is still where the money is made and if you haven’t realized this yet, then you are getting something wrong. In many ways a large part of the aftermarket is held up by the parking business as parking earnings are reinvested etc.

In many ways, parking hasn’t really evolved over the last 5 years too much. It’s still quite similar. Parking companies are an entity that acquire an ad feed and are a mediator between domainers and the upstream ad providers such as Google and Yahoo. They ad a little twist with optimization etc but that’s it. Nothing fundamentally has changed over the last 5 years.

What is starting to happen and will continue is a margin squeeze for parking companies, it’s not really an envious spot to be in to be honest. A significant catalyst to that are services like Above.com (great service btw, really recommend it). Plain and simple, they send your traffic to wherever it pays best in an automated fashion. Hence parking is really becoming just a commodity because domainers are going to send their traffic simply where their traffic pays best. This should force parking companies to inovate more but also will force them to cut their margins. At least some good news to domainers!

This is really happening now and will grow even more so in the future (that is if evil Google doesn’t force the ban of redirects). DomainSponsor is now receiving more than 10% of it’s publisher traffic via Above. For namedrive I estimate it’s likely to be more like 20%. That’s a lot of revenue.

Parking companies should quickly realize that they have to start inovating more to be able to get more traffic from domainers. They should look into alternative forms of monetization like zero-click, lead generation, CPA. Or their margins will be squeezed further and eventually the middlemen could be cut out entirely.

As parking is more commoditized it looks obvious that the parking companies that built up/acquired their own portfolios have a decent hedge against this. Owning the traffic is vital. From this point of view the smart parking companies have been Oversee, HitFarm, Parked, NameMedia – they all have very sizeable portfolios of their own. Sedo has something as well of it’s own, not huge though. But for example Namedrive and Trafficz (not completely sure about Skenzo) have very limited portfolios and hence the margin squeeze could effect them much more than the others.

The second thing that will be vital in the future is owning the advertiser relationships if you don’t want to be squeezed. Parking companies should start going more direct to advertisers, it is a necessity for the future. Because in the end we are pretty much reliant on Google. Google can squeeze all of us.