Andy Sweet

Google.com – Ultimate Parked Page?

A large factor in domain valuation is the extension. .Com, .Net, .Org, .Info, etc… Kevin Ham has recently received a lot of press (positive and negative) for his relationship with Cameroon and their .CM extension. Frank Schilling has said on many occasions that he wishes there was more expansion in to extension typos. Well, Google has cut in front by not needing ANY extension. Put the terms in and voila! An equivalent to a parked landing page with sponsored results, related items and images.

People buying generic domains often think of the domains value stemming from the direct type-in traffic coming straight from the URL bar. These domains attract traffic without any effort. No SEO, no link building, no marketing. Just a direct connection with people’s keyboards.

And as we all know, most of these domains resolve to a parked page with nothing but PPC network text ads. That’s changing to a certain degree as more domainers begin to focus on development and establishing partnerships offline, breaking the reliance on PPC. But it’s practically impossible for these people with portfolios filled with thousands upon thousands of domains that make just slightly more than their annual registration cost. In those cases, development may be impractical.

Now it looks to me that Google may be trumping the whole game with relationships with the browsers. I’m a Firefox user and have noticed that if you put your search query into the URL bar, you will either be taken directly to a site or will land on a Google SERP (search engine results page). For example, if you put just ‘cars’ into the URL bar, you get forwarded to cars.com. But if you put ‘candy’, it takes you to the Google SERP for candy. Of particular interest to me was a search I did for one of my favorite bands. I put ‘No Use For A Name’ into the URL bar and landed directly on their site, http://www.nouse4aname.com. The search didn’t match the final destination page. Not quite sure how that worked.

I had heard that Google had a relationship with Firefox so I figured I’d try the same test with IE7. Every search resulted in a Google SERP. I figured that Microsoft certainly would have the their URL bar searches resolve to a Live.com page. Wrongo. Can someone explain this to me?

Old TV Shows on Demand

I’m sitting here watching the Wiggles with my 12 month old. Not a bad show, actually. I’m partial to Jack’s Big Music Show or the Upside Down Show.

But what I’m thinking about right now is how I recently did a program search on my Tivo for all available sitcoms and came up empty handed. I have how many hundreds of channels that are on 24 hours a day? Sure sure, there is a lot of ‘paid programming’ on at odd hours. But not one single channel has Alf? Diffrent Stroke? Charles in Charge? Growing Pains? Who’s the Boss? C’MON!!! No old Miami Vice or Magnum PI?

This seems to be the perfect web play. Can’t somebody license up with all the old tv shows to stream them on the web? I mean, how expensive could CHiPs be right now?

EvaSavealot.com – My first 'domaining' moment

I was struck today with the memory of what I guess could be called my first ‘domaining moment’. Yes, AndySweet.com was the first domain I ever bought, but I don’t consider that to be ‘domaining’.

The second domain I ever bought, I bought not because I had any intention to monetize it or capture traffic. I bought it because I was a big fan of Alyssa Milano. Hey, what guy growing up with “Who’s the Boss” wasn’t?

Anyway, in the mid to late 90′s Alyssa was trying to break away from her squeaky clean Samantha Micelli role. She was starring in movies like Poison Ivy 2 and Embrace of the Vampire. She also did recurring role on Melrose Place and starred in a Blink 182 video. I’ve got a great story about that one, but I’ll save that for another day.

In ’98 or so, she signed on to be the spokesperson for 1-800-Collect. The created a character their commercials, Eva Savealot. As soon as I learned the name, I registered EvaSavealot.com. I never had any intention of profiting off of it, didn’t try to sell it to the phone company or sell it to Alyssa Milano. I was just a fan dork. I think I used one of those free hosts.

Three thoughts came out of that:

1. I can’t believe the phone company didn’t register that domain.
2. If I tried to do that today, odds are good I wouldn’t be the first to try to register it.
3. Lawyers would be on me faster than greased lightning threatening to sue if I tried it today.

So there it is. I guess that would count as my first domaining moment. Can you remember your ‘first time’?

*edit – Some might call this cybersquatting.  I wouldn’t be inclined to disagree if I had been intending to profit by some way monetizing any traffic I received or selling high to 1-800-Collect.  But I wasn’t.  Nobody ever asked me to turn it over.

Yahoo to Finally Allow Distribution Partner Filtering (Hip Hop Hooray!)

Yahoo has finally taken a BIG step towards solving their traffic quality problems.

For years now, their have been complaints from far and wide about their distribution network (read: parked domains).  And for years now they’ve done nothing about it, leaving it up to the advertisers to solve the problem by adjusting their bids.

Now they’ve enabled a feature allowing you to load in a list of domains on which you don’t wish to appear.

It’s a major step, and it will be good for those clean domainers out there because advertisers may begin to feel more comfortable with the traffic and start up the bid races again, resulting in greater income.

However, just sitting here thinking about it, I can foresee some problems.

1.  As an advertiser, you can only block the domain once you’ve been hit enough to determine it’s bad.
2.  Once a domain has been blocked by enough advertisers, the fraudster will just go buy a new ‘clean’ domain.  Rinse and repeat.
3.  Some decent person may come along and buy a domain and find out too late that it’s already been poisoned and added to many advertisers’ blacklist.
4.  Once a domain is on the advertiser’s blacklist, it may never be reviewed again for quality despite new ownership.

Some people will get hurt by this, I suppose.  It will be mostly those advertisers that don’t utilize the feature or have adequate tracking and by domain acquirers that don’t do their due diligence prior to picking up a new domain.

*Caveat* This new feature just started.  So far, I think it’s only available to platinum level advertisers.  And whether it actually works or not remains to be seen.