Archive for June, 2007
June 5th, 2007 - Interview With Dan Warner on Domain Research and Domain Investing
This is the full transcript of my interview with Dan Warner at DarkBlueSea. The end result was a feature story in the Next technology section that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and the Brisbane Times. There was some great interview material that didn’t make it into the article so with Dan’s gracious permission I’ve posted the full interview transcript here.
Dan Warner: We own around 550,000 domains or Web sites ourselves. That makes us the second largest portfolio out of all the professional domains in the world.
Dan Warner: The biggest is actually BuyDomains. They own, I believe, 675,000; we own 550,000. It goes down relatively quickly. There are probably only 15 domain portfolios in the world that own more than 100,000. I used to have a breakdown of exactly what it was; but when I did the breakdown, which was almost two years ago, it was eight people had more than 100,000, 18 or 19 had more than 10,000, and there was only something like 100 that owned more than 1,000 domains of value. Now, it’s just blown out. Everyone’s been buying like mad. It’s a havoc world.
Anyway, in the domain space I’m the guy that gets up and speaks at all the conferences. I speak at pretty much every domain conference, and I do a lot of analytics on the industry; so I pull it apart and put it back together again and figure out what’s right and wrong and report on details. I figure out who owns what domains and what portfolio and whether or not they have value and who owns trademark domains. One of the things that plagues our industry is that there is a portion of the domains that are owned, I think it’s a little bit less than 2 percent that actually have a trademark connotation like they’ve got the word Google or Yahoo or Microsoft in them, those kinds of domains. That’s just a part of the industry. Like any industry, you have people who are black hat in it; but those are the domains that a lot of people like to talk about.
Dan Skeen: What is your policy on those? When you’re buying domains, do you steer clear of anything with trademarks associated?
Dan Warner: With us, we actually have 100 percent no policy on it; so we don’t buy anything like that. The other thing is to know about that though, is when you register 550,000 domains ourselves it is impossible to vet them all for a trademark. So occasionally you run into domains that you bought, and you don’t have any idea that they were a trademark. But when you find out, the good thing is that you drop them.
Dan Skeen: Tell me a little bit about your role in the company, how long you’ve been with them.
Dan Warner: I’ve been with the company about five years. My role here at the company is a dual role of chief strategy officer and chief operations officer. I probably spend about 80 percent of my time on strategy and 20 percent on operations. I’m the spokesperson for the company as well.
Dan Skeen: And how did you accumulate all this strategic knowledge about domain buying and the domain market?
Dan Warner: We created a market intelligence engine about six years ago, or five years ago, and basically it goes and picks up data. There is a lot of data mining for things like search phrases, bids on search phrases, anything that can give us a window of information into the commercial or mind share viability of domains. We looked for all the domains that are based on search phrases or bid prices on search phrases that had volume, like users were actually searching for these phrases, and then bought was left in the market. And people naturally type these domains into their search bar and to their address bar; it’s a searching behavior. It’s absolutely identical to searching…people search for domains in search bars and people search for phrases in address bars as domains.
Dan Skeen: It amazes me how much volume there is actually with people doing that. That’s turned into quite a viable strategy for people with parked domains, hasn’t it?
Dan Warner: Oh, absolutely. The traffic is what pays the rent. There is a distinctive property analogy in this in that domain sales is actually realizing the asset value of domains. What pays the rent is the actual traffic. As you hold domains, they produce traffic; and that is oftentimes people’s primary means of making revenue. But, a secondary means is to sell domains because when you sell a domain, typically, you are getting between 25 and 100 years of revenue in a single transaction.
Dan Skeen: Based on what that revenue would be if it were just parked with no maintenance or contact?
Dan Warner: Yes, traffic.
Dan Skeen: That’s very interesting.
Dan Warner: When you can sell something for like 50 years or 100 years revenue, you do.
Dan Skeen: Yes. I would think so. So, there has been a huge accumulation based on the numbers you’re describing over recent years, in your case, using this intelligence. What’s driving it on the broader front? Why was there so much rapid accumulation of domains in the last four or five years?
Dan Warner: We’re more able to monetize revenue. The people who actually monetize this revenue are either Google or Yahoo. Those are the two primary means of actually getting parking revenue. We have a parking company ourselves, which is fabulous.com. It’s our registrar and parking company, and we park third-party domains, along with our own. We’re one of the largest services in the world for doing that. Now, we’re enabled by Google and Yahoo who go out there and find all the advertisers. So, they find all the advertisers, and then we make a call for them on every domain; and they tell us what advertisers they want to serve, and then they take a commission. Then they give us the rest of the money.
That’s definitely where we want to get some money. All right? There’s a certain amount of money that’s made in typo traffic, and there’s a certain amount of money that’s made in trademark traffic; those are the ones that people like to talk about. GoogleNews.com was not owned by Google. It’s owned by a domainer who was parking it who doesn’t actually get to make any money out of it anymore because Google stopped it, but these things have happened in the past. It’s a bit of a gold rush mentality; you get those that work on the edges, and then you get the highly professional corporations who won’t have anything to do with any that. We’re finding a major cleanup in the industry has happened over time, and a lot of the trademark domains and typos and things have actually made their way out of the industry, and it’s getting cleaner all the time.
Dan Skeen: Yet, it seems like there’s always some new scandal. Can you comment on kiting? What’s your take on that?
June 3rd, 2007 - Five Years of Web Innovation
Here’s the first draft of an article that ran in the Next technology section that appears in several Fairfax newspapers including the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and the Brisbane Times. You can view a published version here. Next was celebrating its fifth-year anniversary and the editor asked me to write something about five years of changes on the Web. Basically I sat down and the key innovations that stood out in my mind. Then I dug up details on dates and arranged them chronologically. Next came the tricky part, linking them all together. I wasn’t sure I could pull it off but in the end it came together alright.
Looking back over five years of changes on the Web, one theme that stands out is the increasing connectedness of the internet experience. More services, media, and publishers bring us together in a web of growing intricacy and reach.
With inter-connectedness as our theme, let’s look at some links between the internet’s biggest catalysts for change in the last five years.
Wikipedia Launched in 2001, the explosive growth of this volunteer-compiled resource has grown exponentially over the last five years. Today it contains 1,753,739 articles, including one on….
Technorati Founded in 2002, this blog search engine became a hub for bloggers. It currently tracks more than 75 million blogs. It also maintains a list of the 100 most popular blogs, in which #41 belongs to ….
Robert Scoble In February of 2003 Scoble published his “corporate blogging manifesto”, an inspiring list of 20 principles for bloggers. Scoble is a popular resident in …..
Second Life: This multi-player online world launched a beta version in 2003. Today Second Life has over five million registered accounts as reported on the Linden Life blog, which is run on…
WordPress: The popular open source blogging platform first appeared in 2003 as a joint effort between Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. Today Wordpress.com hosts over 893,000 blogs. Many of these feature ads from ….
AdSense: AdSense was born with Google’s 2003 acquisition of Applied Semantics. The “Ads by Google” contextual advertising units made web publishing much more effective and lucrative for independent website owners. Revenue is based on advertisers’ bids for specific keywords, such as the current top bid of $1.04 for the search term….
iPod: The original unit was launched in 2001, but the release of the iTunes Store and the Windows version of iTunes software in 2003 sent sales skyward. Apple’s portable media player drove demand for automated downloads of audio (and later video) content, commonly known as podcasts. Podcasting tools are available from many publishers, including….
MySpace: Founded in July 2003, the social networking site rapidly grew to one of the world’s most popular websites. It was bought in 2005 for US $580 million by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. MySpace made Murdoch shine at a time when many were calling his internet strategy a ….
Miserable failure: In October of 2003, several bloggers linked to the US White House site with the link text “miserable failure”, propelling George W Bush’s bio to top spot in Google for that phrase. It is the most popular example of “Google bombing”, a term tagged by 160 users of ….
Del.icio.us: This popular social bookmarking site, launched in late 2003, allowed users to categorize and share web pages using descriptive tags. The company was acquired by Yahoo in 2005. By then tagging was popular on other sites, including …..
Flickr: Ludicorp began building a massively multiplayer role-playing game, but instead used the tools they’d created to launch a photo sharing site. Flickr used tags to create the first tag cloud, a visual representation of popular tags. Flickr has over 1,600 photos tagged with the term ….
VOIP: 2004 saw the mass market roll-out of voice-over-IP services through providers like Skype. Offering a radical departure from traditional Telco pricing, Skype had nine million online users in January 2007. You can find 1,700 videos related to Skype on…
YouTube: Founded in February 2005 by three former employees of PayPal, YouTube uses Adobe’s Flash technology to display videos submitted by users. In 2006, the company was acquired for US$1.65 billion by the makers of ….
Google Maps: This free service was first announced on the Google Blog in February of 2005. It stood out from competitors through its fluid transitions between screen states, delivered by a programming method referred to as ….
AJAX: An acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, the term was first used in February, 2005. The technology creates a richer web experience by enabling elements within web pages to update without a full reload. This innovation is based on earlier research by the makers of….
Microsoft Vista: After a long production cycle, Microsoft Vista was released in late 2006, with the global release occurring in early 2007. It was the software manufacturer’s first new OS in 5 years, causing much excitement among users of….
Twitter: A micro-blogging service launched in 2006, Twitter allows users to send short messages to their network through SMS, instant messaging, or the web. Bringing the offline experience closer to the online, it further blurs the line between our ”real” and digital lives.