Facing The Absurd

the absurd side of domaining

Posts Tagged US

So what’s going on

Jun 10

Posted by Sisyphus in Domaining | 2 Comments

My apologies for not posting lately, have been quite busy and that coupled with my laziness simply equals no posts for a long time. So anyway, what have I been up to lately…

When it comes to domaining I have to say I’m getting a little bit bored of it. It’s just become a completely routine job for me, going through my daily lists, picking domains etc. I’m actually thinking about putting my domaining operation on “autopilot” since I’ve tought all my guys how to handle everything. Recently I hit 1 million uniques a day as I’ve planned. That was a always my goal and since it’s already reached I just don’t have that much motivation to be honest. To keep myself motivated I just need to keep on coming up with new projects etc that keep me entertained for a year or two.

Two weeks ago we had the iGaming Supershow in Prague, which is basically a huge gettogether for people who are in the online gambling business. I have to say that this industry shares a lot with domaining in the sense that it is a pretty tightly knit circle, pretty secretive etc. One thing is certaing though – it is significantly larger than domaining. I’ve been looking into a gaming project of my own, which I plan to launch maybe in 6 months. My idea is basically to teach people to play various casual skill games against each other for money and charge a rake for connecting players together in the same way poker sites operate. So the idea is that people could play chess, checkers, scrabble etc against each other for a dollar or something like that. I think it will make the games more fun to play as well.

Another of my new projects is a wood processing plant that we will start building in Eastern Slovakia soon. We will basically be processing waste wood and manufacturing wooden pellets out it that will be used by powerplants in Austria and Italy. It’s quite a complex project with a lot of inputs etc, but it’s something new to keep me entertained.

Our online insurance broker ePojisteni.cz has been running strong. We will be moving into a bigger office next month to house our growing army of brokers in the callcenter, currently we have 40 there fulltime. We are also planning a large TV campaign for the autumn on national TV since the pools of available traffic online are just getting slimmer and slimmer and we simply need to keep growing.

Our liposuction clinic Slim & GO has been a big hit, we are currently running on full capacity with 5 machines operating 12 hours a day – we are doing 40 clients a day now. We’re just signing a lease for a new location where we plan to open our secong clinic, which should be even bigger than our first one. It might be a stretch to fill it up with clients, but challenge accepted :) .

Our facebook developer Viral Maniacs is hopefully going to launch its new game in the US in about 2 weeks. It’s something similar to the Sims. The first version of the game which we only launched in the Czech Rep has been quite a success, he already have about 80k users and 3k join everyday. Viral Maniacs should hopefully break even in July, which would be nice.

I’m also helping out with our new CPA department, I’ll probably joing them for LeadsCon in July in New York.

And that’s pretty much it now…

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The big push into CPA

May 17

Posted by Sisyphus in Domaining | 1 Comment

What I’ve been working on in the last month or so is building out a standalone CPA department in our company that will focus on monetizing my and my friend’s type-in traffic. The CPA department will be symbiotic with our Elephant Traffic offering because it will be buying traffic for monetization through ET, hence we should be capable of covering more and more verticals soon. We will obviously not be limited only to domain traffic but will also experiment with PPC, display, email etc, mainly acquiring US traffic for our CPA offerings.

The department will be headed by my long time friend Arnost Machytka, who spent the last two years working at Threadneedle, a big fund management firm based in London. Working alongside Arnost will be Martin Glatz, who has worked at Aegis Media recently. You should be seeing us at events such as LeadsCon and Affiliate Summit more often now.

The whole purpose off all these alternative monetization initiatives of mine is simple – by years end I have a goal of generating 20% of my domain income from alternative monetization. Last week Google clawed back $22k from one of my parking accounts for no obvious reason – a stark reminder that I cannot rely on them for monetization.

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The Sedo employee exodus

May 8

Posted by Sisyphus in Domaining | 8 Comments

Around 15 people have left Sedo in the past couple of months and I have information that more are to leave soon. That’s never a good sign for a company.

As I get to speak to people from Sedo on and off the mood and morale don’t seem to be very good. It seems that the organization got too hierarchical, bureacratic and unflexible. I think the company just became too German for a high growth and international business such as domains. People working there really have a problem in self realization. This bad mood may be more affecting the European office than the US one though.

Bottom line is that all this and the unflexible mode of doing business may be affecting relationships with key customers and Sedo’s bottom line. More aggressive and flexible companies such as Oversee and Namedrive are chipping away off Sedo’s parking business.

I can really illustrate this on myself. As great as Sedo’s account managers are (Hi Kamila!), they simply don’t call the shots and it is very difficult to push through non-standard business deals because of how Sedo is hierarchical. That’s why Sedo probably only gets around 5% of my business. Compare that to Oversee.net for example. I remember the first time I arrived to DomainFest (at that time I was doing maybe $700 revenue/day, which is basically nothing), my account manager (back then Jim Grace, who does a fantastic job, although we don’t work together any more) already understood my growth story and the potential I can bring them in the future so I got an introduction with Lawrence Ng and Jeff Kupietzky and all the top brass. Because they were able to make quick decisions and do non-standard looking deals, they got to win tonnes of my future business and we have a great relationship. Compare that to Sedo, which completely missed out.

Let’s hope Sedo will be able to reflect on what’s going on and be able to change the workings of the organization so it can get back onto a growth trajectory, wish them luck!

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The goldmine in the data and its potential implications for domain parking

Mar 7

Posted by Sisyphus in Domaining | 3 Comments

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.

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It’s official! DomainFest coming to Prague, 6-7. October

Mar 3

Posted by Sisyphus in Domaining | 4 Comments 

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
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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
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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.

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So what is the parking potential of sex.com?

Feb 26

Posted by Sisyphus in Domaining | 2 Comments

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.

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