Andy Sweet

CashCall.com

One of the benefits of working at home is that I get to catch up on a little bit of TV over lunch while I step out of the ‘office’. I’ll usually check out Sports Center or Law & Order. I get all my news and stock info from the web so I don’t check the tv for it.

As we all know, the ad spots on cable during the day are filled with direct marketing spots. Lawyers, Life Alert, dieting, trade schools, etc…

Today I saw an ad for CashCall.com. I’ve seen this ad before, but today I took the time to read the disclaimer. Say what you will about that. It’s your basic “Turned down for a loan? Call us now and get money fast!” deal.

The disclaimer is what completely shocked me. Here’s what you get if you borrow $2,600 from CashCall.com…

99.25% APR
42 payments of $216.55
$75 origination fee.

If you borrow $2,600 you will pay them back $9,095.10! That’s insane! Doesn’t that cross the line of predatory lending somehow? I feel like I could get a better rate if I borrowed from Bruno down the block!

America.com Auction Results

Looks like there was no sale of America.com. Last I saw, and that was with approximately 6 hours remaining in the auction, the bid was at $1,050,000 and had not yet met the reserve price. Whether the bid was by a legit bidder or a friend of the seller trying to drive up the price is unknown, but it did make it into the 7 figures. I wonder what the the reserve was…

America.com Goes Up For Auction – Worth More Than Sex.com?

Chris Brooks' Reply to the Single Site / Multi Site Debate

Chris read my post from yesterday and sent me this reply:

I think you basically reflected what I said correctly. To take my own domain
portfolio as an example, I have about 350 domains, and in March of this year,
they generated about $67 in parked revenue. Now, one domain generated $31 of
that total, but let’s ignore that for now, and just say that the average annual
revenue for these domains is about $2.30. Just to make some back of the
envelope calculations, let’s say that we can multiply traffic by 20x through
minimal development that just targets the keywords in the domain name. However,
revenue will fall substantially, because CPMs on parked domains are
really high. Let’s be generous, and say that revenue falls to 60% of its
former level. That means that the average domain will now make $2.30 x 20 x .6
= $27.60. Net out the registration fee, and I could average $20 per year per
domain, or about $7,000 per year.

That’s the good news. Now the bad
news. If every domain takes me two hours to “develop”, I need 700 hours in the
first year to launch those domains. That means in the first year, I make $10 /
hour. I still need at least one inbound link to get listed in Google — add
some more time. Now, put on your white hat Google search engineer perspective
– should my 350 sites really rank? Do they genuinely help people? Do they
genuinely solve a problem? I doubt that a site developed in 2 hours (or even 20
hours) is going to be very useful to end users. Essentially you’re exploiting a
rule in the search engine algorithms that says “there’s a good chance that a
site whose domain name exactly matches a query is related to that query”. My
guess is that at some point very lightweight sites whose only strength is that
they take advantage of that algorithm hole will be downgraded in the results.
As more domainers try to figure out how to make money on their portfolio the
search engines will have to respond.

Now, take a different
approach: choose 1 domain out of those 350 that has a high query volume on
highly commercial terms with relatively light competition. Put those same 700
hours into building useful content and functionality, optimizing revenue
(through a combination of contextual ads and affiliate offers), and bringing the
site’s content to the attention of webmasters who have an interest in the site’s
topic. Now you have an excellent chance that you can generate substantially
more than $7k per year from that single site. And you’re also building a site
that the search engines will love, so that it gets more valuable year after
year.

All that said, I think it’s perfectly legitimate to quickly develop
a broad swath of sites. In theory, you should be able to develop / buy tools
that give you leverage across all those sites — user-generated-content tools,
for example. Or perhaps tools that integrate the site with Mechanical Turk so
that you can generate and release relatively high-quality content
inexpensively. By virtue of throwing a whole mess of sites against the wall,
you may find that a handful of them take off. You might be able to argue that
this approach is a more failsafe approach to finding high-volume commercial
niches with relatively low competition.

Thanks for the thought-provoking
post!
-Chris

Single Domain Development vs. Multiple Micro-site Development Strategies

A couple of weeks ago (I was on vacation last week or would have written about this earlier), I met a friend for coffee to talk about domains and SEO. Yes, I actually schedule coffee get together for the sole purpose of talking about this. And I LIKE it!

Anyway, I met Chris Brooks at the Cambridge SEO MeetUp and he and I had talked briefly about this. I think he was intrigued about my monetization strategy for all of my domains. These are small, niche-specific domains that MIGHT recoup their registration fees by parking alone. In truth, most don’t even make that much. All of these domains have been ‘tasted’ multiple times but set free because they require development to be profitable.

Chris’ take on it (and a very intelligent take, at that) is that it would be very difficult to adequately develop on that scale while my perspective is that these domains would be able to rank highly on search with minimal effort as they are very specific. These domains may not be able to pull their weight by direct navigation, however I view direct navigation traffic as merely a hint at the potential traffic that awaits if you can rank for that term. Direct navigation to unknown or previously unvisited domains (not well-known destinations such as ESPN.com) is so tiny compared to the use of search engines that you can safely assume that it’s 15-20x the volume you might see from parking. Do I have evidence to back that claim? No, but doesn’t it make sense? And that multiple grows the more niche the term or phrase.

Well, I think the answer is a little bit of both. I quickly threw up a bad WordPress template for one of my domains, LasVegasTempAgencies.com, as a test. It ranked #2 for the term “Las Vegas Temp Agencies” (with the quotes) within 4 hours on Google. Granted, it requires the quotes. But it’s got no content! So I think my theory holds true. But so does Chris’ as I still haven’t developed those domains and they’re just sitting and either treading water or slowly drowning waiting for me to get off my butt.

So, what’s the cost? $.03/day for the domain, $.01/day for the hosting (I use a HTTPMe package for hosting). If you’re domain has any pulse at all over a week from parking, you can beat $.04/day. As I pointed out in another post about traffic valuation the average value per unique visitor across Frank Schilling’s network and the average value per unique visitor that helped create Shoemoney’s infamous $132k AdSense check was about $.06.

But Chris’ point is that it take scale to feel the impact with that strategy and he prefers to focus his energy on bigger sites like his septic system site (which I think is great).

I think the big difference is that my strategy relies more on the power of the domain to attain high natural rankings for a specific term while he builds sub-pages to rank for multiple terms. The advantage he has is not carrying the reg fee for 800 domains.

I think as you can guess, there doesn’t seem to be a clear answer here. We didn’t reach one over that cup of coffee. It just goes to show that there are multiple ways to skin the cat. There are other reasons I prefer the multi-domain strategy which I will write about soon. I’ll give you a hint: I don’t worship at the church of Google.