Blog

• What We Look for in a Domain Name

  We recently discovered that Domainer.com was mentioned on the popular NamePros.com forum. I thought I would post my reply here in our blog.

  I’m one of the developers from Domainer.com and while looking through our stats, I noticed the traffic coming over from NamePros. After reading through the thread, I thought I might clarify what it is that we’re looking for.

  As was earlier noted, we do prefer generic domain names; however, traffic on the domain is not necessary.

  For example, one site under our platform is Cabernets.com. It had almost zero type-in traffic when we took over control, but the name itself has potential and we’re happy to build it out. Although development of Cabernets.com is still in its infancy, it is now getting consistent traffic and generating income.

  The same thing goes for names that are not particularly generic, but have some traffic. This type of domain is something that we would need to talk the owner about to determine the options and potential of the name.

  An example of such a domain would be our current project: PreownedVehicles.com. The tools in our platform weren’t quite built toward an automotive option when we were approached with this name, but we have since built a component on our platform that now gives us the option of working with that particular name.

  Please note: At the time of this posting, we have not yet launched PreownedVehicles.com under our platform, but will be doing so by the month’s end.

  A domain like AtlantaHondas.com would now fit perfectly within our system and we would gladly discuss partnership, even if your traffic numbers are low.

  Regardless of your domain portfolio, we are always looking for the opportunity to get into a new niche so that we can offer our services to a wider group.

  With our continuing expansion and development options, we encourage anyone to submit a list of their domains to us. Some of the greatest opportunities we’ve had have been ideas that crop up through conversation with people who have been in contact with us through our domain submission form.

  So, by all means, please don’t assume that you don’t have anything of interest to us just because we are going a different direction at the moment. Going forward, we will be continually branching out what we offer.

  If in a few months we begin work on a particular domain niche that has been submitted to us, we’ll be in touch with you.

  Please submit your names here: http://www.domainer.com/domain-owners/inquire-about-your-domains/.

  At worse, we let you know that we don’t have any options for you at the moment. At best, we begin development on your domain where there’s money to be made.

  Cheers,
  The Domainer Team.

  November 5th, 2007 · No comments
• More Sites…

  I think I’ve given up on the idea that I’m going to blog every day and have tremendous insights… We’re too busy trying to bring new sites onto the system and new functionality.

  I had our production wizard Shane whip up a page to keep track of the sites we’re building. We’ve launched a few great brands over the past few weeks, including workouts.com and candy.ca. Have a look at the slowly but steadily growing list of domains.

  October 3rd, 2007 · No comments
• Another customer, another component

  Wanted to write a quick note about our progress over the summer.

  One thing we were up to is being hard at work, integrating the local data from iBegin. We can now create quick, relevant local directories for any kind of domain.

  But the other thing we’re up to is trying to launch more sites, and the first user of the directory information is Campgrounds.com. The site features blog content from camping and outdoor enthusiasts, comparative shopping for camping gear, and a national directory of campgrounds for users to find their next getaway.

  Onwards and upwards :-)!!!

  September 10th, 2007 · No comments
• Announcements…

  I alluded to this in my last post, as well as promising, yet again, to blog more regularly. However, we do have big news…

  This has been in the works for a while, but we can finally let the cat out of the bag and make the announcement: Domainer.com has raised some money! You can read the details here, but the basics are that we used the kind and competent folks at Flagship Bancorp Inc. as our agents and raised CDN$ 2.0 million. Flagship was fantastic during the process and orchestrated the raise perfectly.

  We’re really excited, mainly because the money will allow us to execute on a pile of ideas that we’ve had for literally years. And to execute, we’re going to need to hire, so if you’ve got the chops, we want to hear from you. Check the hiring page for any current job descriptions. We’ll be looking for developers, user interface gurus and search engine specialists.

  Did I mention we’re excited?!

  July 31st, 2007 · No comments
• Domainers and the Law

  Wow,

  I haven’t exactly kept up my pledge to keep posting. I promise the domainer.com has big things in the pipeline though.

  Some of the things I’ve been meaning to post about have just slipped into the past. Things move so quickly in this industry that even something that happened a month ago seems like old news. I attended the big TRAFFIC show in New York a month ago and had a pile of stuff I thought would make great posts. But in retrospect, they seem old. Mostly, the industry is really making strides toward building destination sites on great domains, and obviously, we’re happy to see the trend.

  I did get an email recently that I found interesting. Rich McIver publishes a site called “Aviva Directory” (no idea what that means) and tipped me to a post about domain names and relevant US laws. Makes a good read for those who are turning their domain collecting into a full time business.

  I also found the email interesting for another reason. I don’t know Rich, but he read the blog and decided to send me a message. I’ve never heard of his site, but noticed his site has a PR6 in Google and that this article now has over 400 votes over at Digg. For all the talk about SEO magic, the real magic isn’t some dark art. It’s hard work. Find people to link to your sites and send them a personalized message. We can all take a lesson from that.

  July 13th, 2007 · No comments
• Back on the bloggin train…

  I’ve been pretty slack about blogging lately. Building a startup and having a new baby can keep one busy, but I’ve returned from the NYC TRAFFIC show with a new resolve to try to be more vigilant about posting.

  First news: Not a big one, and I suspect that the email I received was a bit of a spam trying to attract backlinks, but I thought I’d give it a mention nonetheless. According to the email:

  DNHour.com is designed for members to submit short reviews of the latest industry news with a link to the source. Using an algorithm to determine the popularity of the news, members can choose to help promote or demote contents submitted by fellow members through a voting process. With enough votes, popular news stories are promoted to the main page of the website, exposing it to a broader audience.

  Translation: A ripoff (well, tribute really… they make no secret of the inspiration) of Digg.com specifically for domain name news.

  Domain name news has become so hot that it needs its own version of Digg? I doubt it, but it’s interesting that somebody thinks so…

  June 29th, 2007 · No comments
• Latest big time domainer profile

  Paul Sloan is probably the first mainstream media reporter to catch on to the domain scene. His article "Masters of Their Domains" is even credited with inspiring Richard Rosenblatt to get Demand Media off the ground. The latest edition of Business 2.0 features another profile of the domain scene, this time, featuring Kevin Ham of Reinvent Technology, Hitfarm and the redirection of all of Cameroon’s typo traffic on their country code domain, “.cm”.

  Some of the quotes are music to my ears

  But Ham is taking a longer view. The Web, he says, is becoming cluttered with parked pages. The model is amazingly efficient — lots of money for little work –but Ham argues that Internet users will soon grow weary of it all.

  “It’s time to build out the virtual real estate,” Ham says. “There’s so much more value in these names than pay-per-click.”

  May 23rd, 2007 · No comments
• Type-ins and Google

  I’ve finally gotten some insight and data regarding a big complaint among domainers regarding search engines. Well, specifically, their complaint is with Google. I’m no search engine historian, but at some point along the line, Google decided to boot pages which the algorithm determined were being parked. The methods by which this happened are of course a secret, but folks can guess. The bot can check IP #’s, your DNS Servers and also analyze page content. It figures your name is parked, and wipes it from the index.

  Now as sites, these pages aren’t much to look at. And a dumber robot would look at these pages, with all their links and related links and quickly get run around in a circle. Theoretically, any domain would have an infinite number of pages to index if the robot just kept following all the related links. So I can see why Google would want to get rid of them from a efficiency perspective. I can also see that these pages are competitive to Google. Why direct a searcher to a page with ads that are ultimately provided by a competitor. Even if Google itself is providing the ads on the page, they’d likely rather keep the user around for the prospect of keeping the entire price of a click for themselves.

  Here’s the issue: Google has every right to keep sites out of the index that it determines are of low quality (although they’ll make mistakes and punish innocent parties every so often). However, when Google takes sites out of the index, these sites don’t even rank for their domain name. So if type a site like Frank Schilling’s antarctica.com into the Google search bar, I get 691 results, none of them a link to antarctica.com. If my intention was to find out about that particular web site, or to actually use the Google search bar as a proxy for my browser address bar, Google hasn’t really served me very well.

  I didn’t used to think this was a particularly big deal. However, the traffic that is currently being sent to bags.com from the weak sister search engines like MSN and Yahoo! comes almost exclusively for the term “bags.com” or “www.bags.com”. Getting a site back into Google’s index can be worth dozens or potentially thousands of type in visitors from Google depending on the name, even if it ranks for no terms other than its own domain name!

  A helpful discussion of these issues can be found at Frank’s Blog and Jay Westerdal’s Blog.

  May 9th, 2007 · No comments
• The year of the domain blog

  2007 is shaping up to be the year that domain name pioneers discovered blogging. Blogs and newsletters about domain names have been around for years, but big name domainers have taken to blogging recently. Guys like Frank Schilling, Sahar Sarid and even the self-proclaimed (hey, I’m not going to dispute the title) Domain King himself, Rick Schwartz, have done what millions of bloggers before them have done: Opened up a free or cheap blogging account and started shooting their mouths off.

  While some blogging vets might dismiss this news with a “big deal!” and turn their attention back to their individual publications, I see it as a pretty big development. In my experience, there’s a pretty wide gulf of understanding between domainers and bloggers. Domainers I’ve talked to tended to see blogs, bloggers, and by extension, blogging as a whole as a pile of hype and a large waste of time. Having big-name domainers blogging should go a long way toward combating that notion. Not only will domainers at large think “Well, Frank and Rick are doing it, so there must be something to this blog thing after all.” But more domainers will start blogging and begin to realize what a powerful communication and marketing tool blogs really are.

  As well, the more domainers blogging will mean that the blogging community at large will better understand domains, domainers and domaining and realize what a powerful force domainers really are. They’ll be a little more hesitant to throw around the “Cybersquatter” label when they realize how much work and thought goes into success in the domain business.

  Hopefully, they’ll also realize that domainers control a ton of traffic and some original ideas and products will begin to surface which try to harness the power of domains and blogs together, instead of dismissing each other as a bunch of “squatters” or “whiners” respectively.

  Products like ours perhaps? Food for thought… Keep those posts coming guys.

  May 4th, 2007 · No comments
• Why I love domains…

  Although I’m not really an active domainer (no hate mail please), I really do love domains. While I know that many domainers “love” their collections for a variety of reasons, mine might be slightly different. Really, for me, it comes down to a domain name’s unique ability to capture, define and own a concept or idea. Yeah, that’s a pretty esoteric and nerdy reason. So sue me. But I think there’s nothing else out there that compares. Maybe an 800 number, like 1-800-GO-FEDEX. But that’s just in North America really. I can think of no other thing where, if you think of it first, you can be the exclusive worldwide owner of an idea just by tapping your keyboard for a few seconds.

  So, if you’re still reading, maybe you’d like an example.

  Here’s a silly one: I’m a big fan of Dave Chappelle. The man’s a comedic genius. And while I respect the guy’s decision to walk away from his contract, as a fan, I think it’s a shame I’m not going to see more of his sketches. Around the office, we’ve adopted a Chappelle catchphrase. It’s Chappelle’s hilarious imitation of Howard Dean’s “scream”, that turned him from a Presidential frontrunner into a national joke overnight. Chappelle’s joke? If Dean turned the “scream” into a catchphrase instead of being ashamed of it, he’d be president.

  Make a great argument? BYAAAH! Solve a difficult technical problem? BYAAAH! How was your weekend? BYAAAH!

  So somebody at the office asks: “How do you spell BYAAAH!”? Our answer? Let’s type it into my browser address bar until it resolves to something. And with that, we determine that it is spelled with 3 “a”s followed by 1 “h”. Why? Because BYAAAH.com says so by claiming to be the web site that will “chop your mutha&@#$in’ desk in half, like, BYAAAH!!”. So some half baked college student sees Chappelle’s sketch, logs on to Godaddy.com and BAM! He doesn’t just own a domain. He owns the idea. He owns the term. If you want to push it this far, he owns the sketch. Not Chappelle, but him. Forever. Around the world.

  To quote the man: BYAAAH!!

  May 2nd, 2007 · No comments