Calm before the Storm

[phio]

Seems like we are in a calm period... Auctions have slowed down, type in traffic on Sedo and ND up quite a bit from a month ago. PPC parking has slowed for Ascii domainers. The economy sucks in the US... but it seems like IDNs are on the verge of exploding. Anyone else sense this?

[bwhhisc]

I wouldn't go so far as to say "exploding", but that would be nice
I still see steady growth each month, with Russian IDNs the most active.

[atoms2me]

One of my Chinese IDN stats:
2008 February 32
2008 January 36
2007 December 73
2007 November 51
2007 October 36
2007 September 39
2007 August 42
2007 July 38
2007 June 51
2007 May 26
2007 April 40
2007 March 20
2007 February 21

[Ross]

Originally Posted by phio

Seems like we are in a calm period... Auctions have slowed down, type in traffic on Sedo and ND up quite a bit from a month ago. PPC parking has slowed for Ascii domainers. The economy sucks in the US... but it seems like IDNs are on the verge of exploding. Anyone else sense this?

How can you see that something is on the verge of exploding?

My traffic and revenue is up at ND. I am getting plenty of type-ins on a lot of my new names (which don't have existing ascii sites, either). I am so busy registering new names that I am not even sure if I have all of them parked - need to take an entire day to reconcile.

German and Arabic are going crazy now... And if Dabsi knew what the hell she was doing, I wouldn't be picking up so many names now. None of these are her drops, either - all brand new domains.

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[phio]

Exploding may have been too dramatic a word. But something is brewing these days. Perhaps more people are looking into IDNs as an investment, and with real estate and the stock market down, this may be a great time to buy IDNs for future high ROI. Not sure really what is going on....seems very calm as if something is about to happen.

[Ross]

Originally Posted by phio

Exploding may have been too dramatic a word. But something is brewing these days. Perhaps more people are looking into IDNs as an investment, and with real estate and the stock market down, this may be a great time to buy IDNs for future high ROI. Not sure really what is going on....seems very calm as if something is about to happen.

Well, I just calculated that for the first half of this month, my parking traffic is 10 times January's entire monthly traffic. Basically an average of 20 times increase per day. And I don't own 20 times the number of domains that I owned in January, either - not even double.

As I have said many times, this is the sort of ramping up we can expect - not some mythical overnight retirement enabling explosion of traffic and revenue.

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[touchring]

Originally Posted by phio

Exploding may have been too dramatic a word. But something is brewing these days. Perhaps more people are looking into IDNs as an investment, and with real estate and the stock market down, this may be a great time to buy IDNs for future high ROI. Not sure really what is going on....seems very calm as if something is about to happen.

Sure, a new bubble is formed when there's new killer app technology.

IDN browsers are a new killer app technology.

The IDN bubble is only starting.

[npcomplete]

Originally Posted by phio

Seems like we are in a calm period... Auctions have slowed down, type in traffic on Sedo and ND up quite a bit from a month ago. PPC parking has slowed for Ascii domainers. The economy sucks in the US... but it seems like IDNs are on the verge of exploding. Anyone else sense this?

Well... I can certainly testify to the Ascii PPC being down. I have seen a decrease in PPC by a factor of 4 or more in the last couple of months. For Ascii I use Fabulous (arguably the best there is at Ascii) and DomainSponsor. Most of this decrease in PPC is in high quality single word domains that I have held since 1996... so the Ascii market is tanking. Since Fabulous uses a Google feed, and since Google has recently allowed advertisers to opt out of parked pages, then it may be time to look for non-google feed parking companies for Ascii domains. A lot of other domainers with high quality Ascii portfolios are seeing similar decreases. It also raises the issue of "solvency" with some of the major parking companies, since they are also seeing a major drop in PPC based on the fractional share of PPC with domain owners.

[Ross]

The days of the lazy domainer might be just about over.

There was life before google, and there will be life after google. It just requires hands-on work.

As much as I loathe micros~1, I start to wonder how a yahoo acquisition might change google's behaviour toward domainers.

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[Ryu]

Originally Posted by phio

Seems like we are in a calm period... Auctions have slowed down, type in traffic on Sedo and ND up quite a bit from a month ago. PPC parking has slowed for Ascii domainers. The economy sucks in the US... but it seems like IDNs are on the verge of exploding. Anyone else sense this?

Perhaps it is the calm period... and in the real world, doldrums lasts very very long...

[lipps]

I have noticed that that there is always a slow down this time of year for sales. Usually picks up when the US tax checks are issued then spring hits and it slows down again as people get out in the weather. At least in the US
As far as traffic, I am seeing a marked increase in the idn domains up 40 to 50% from last year while the english domains are down quite a bit. I had several that had some really good links but that traffic has stopped.

[npcomplete]

Originally Posted by Ross

The days of the lazy domainer might be just about over.

There was life before google, and there will be life after google. It just requires hands-on work.

As much as I loathe micros~1, I start to wonder how a yahoo acquisition might change google's behaviour toward domainers.

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yep. The word on the street is "develop or die" wrt monetization. In the past there was real cooperation between Google and Fabulous. Since Fab used a google feed, then it was in google's best interest to provide service to Fab. A lot of my domains would get page 1 listing on google with popular keywords. Now the placement sucks, and the advertisers are leaving parked pages in droves. That is a major double hit (search engine placement, loss of advertisers). Like I said above, there is a trickle down effect that is going to hurt Fabulous too.

arghhh... I program in most of the major languages, and am a perl fanatic at the system level, but the prospect of developing 1500 domains, even into mini-sites, is a bit frightening.

Overall, this is going to impact sales too, since many resellers price their domains based on ppc and traffic. With search engine placement way down and advertiser competition tanking, this will hurt resale value. The times they are a changing.

[markits]

Based on recent performance of my portfolio, I believe Japanese domains will have the brightest future. This will happen soon. I tend to agree to the use of "exploding".

[Rubber Duck]

Originally Posted by npcomplete

yep. The word on the street is "develop or die" wrt monetization. In the past there was real cooperation between Google and Fabulous. Since Fab used a google feed, then it was in google's best interest to provide service to Fab. A lot of my domains would get page 1 listing on google with popular keywords. Now the placement sucks, and the advertisers are leaving parked pages in droves. That is a major double hit (search engine placement, loss of advertisers). Like I said above, there is a trickle down effect that is going to hurt Fabulous too.

arghhh... I program in most of the major languages, and am a perl fanatic at the system level, but the prospect of developing 1500 domains, even into mini-sites, is a bit frightening.

Overall, this is going to impact sales too, since many resellers price their domains based on ppc and traffic. With search engine placement way down and advertiser competition tanking, this will hurt resale value. The times they are a changing.

If you have decent domains you are not reliant on parking pages getting SERP.

Top keywords have never got SERP!

No wonder people are happy registering crap, when they think this is how the system works!

[thefabfive]

Dave, pull your head out of your ass.

Read the posts, realize that npcomplete has quite a bit more experience with ASCII domains than you, process the data, and stop talking about things you know nothing about.

[mdw]

Good keywords absolutely get SERP, and IDN sites get plenty of love from search engines, but it's their stated goal to suppress rankings for "parked" sites and favor "real" sites. Nothing evil about that, it's just common sense business strategy for search engines.

Sometimes they seem to favor IDN keyword domains disproportionately, but typically don't favor them enough. The pendulum will continue to work it's way toward equilibrium in both ASCII and IDN.

[Rubber Duck]

Originally Posted by thefabfive

Dave, pull your head out of your ass.

Read the posts, realize that npcomplete has quite a bit more experience with ASCII domains than you, process the data, and stop talking about things you know nothing about.

Look if top keywords got significant amount of Serps, FS would have been a major site developer by now as would Rick. They aren't. They have kept their domains parked because they found that is where their money is coming from. It comes from Direct Navigation, which has fuck all to do with SERPS. Perhaps, I don't regard Rick as the World's greatest guru when it comes to the International scene, but he can sure as hell smell a revenue stream!

And one more thing whilst we are on, the one thing that is sure to happen over the next year is that site will be ranked according to domain extension. That is inevitable. As ICANN releases new extensions by the bucketful, it is not possible for them all to be ranked equally. This means that extensions will be ranked within markets and according to their market weight. This means that dot WS will be pretty light weight globally and will only feature on Google.ws! The Web Builder Outers are going to suffer massively, especially those that have built of Me Too extensions. And trust me Google won't give a shit if they all get flushed down the pan!

[thegenius1]

Originally Posted by Rubber Duck

Look if top keywords got significant amount of Serps, FS would have been a major site developer by now as would Rick. They aren't. They have kept their domains parked because they found that is where their money is coming from. It comes from Direct Navigation, which has fuck all to do with SERPS. Perhaps, I don't regard Rick as the World's greatest guru when it comes to the International scene, but he can sure as hell smell a revenue stream!

I think what you will find with Frank being that he owns XXX,XXX amount of domains is that not even 1% are Top Keywords ( depends of what is considered top i guess ) It would appear to me that FS makes good money from Direct Nav but the bulk of his 20million a year is coming from highly targeted searched phrases ( longtail ). He makes one to many references to rumcakes.com lol . And as far as RS i seen debates on his board before about parking vs development and his take was basically that the effort to do serious development was not worth it because he was banking enough on the direct Nav of his names. So more or less Ricks perspective is he is content how things are , going into development is just more work that he doesn't really need to do.

Being that rick only Owns around 5k domains and has top keywords he makes alot from "a little amount of names" because of the quality.

FS is a different type of animal He has over 100k names that catch money in the serps. A few cents spread across all those names equals 20million a year.

[Rubber Duck]

Maybe, but I would hazard that Frank owns more top keywords than Rick and of much higher quality. Something has to pay for that long-tail which is not making huge money as far as I can figure out.

Also if you read Franks Blog, he talks about Direct Navigation not SERPS. I think you have called it wrong if you think that is where all the cash comes from. Frank worries about people stealing his type-in not out-ranking him on SERPS.

Originally Posted by thegenius1

I think what you will find with Frank being that he owns XXX,XXX amount of domains is that not even 1% are Top Keywords ( depends of what is considered top i guess ) It would appear to me that FS makes good money from Direct Nav but the bulk of his 20million a year is coming from highly targeted searched phrases ( longtail ). He makes one to many references to rumcakes.com lol . And as far as RS i seen debates on his board before about parking vs development and his take was basicaly that the effort to do sersious development was not worth it because he was banking enough on the direct Nav of his names. So more or less Ricks perspective is he is content how things are , going into development is just more work that he doesn't really need to do.

Being that rick only Owns around 5k domains and has top keywords he makes alot from "a little amount of names" because of the quality.

FS is a different type of animal He has over 100k names that catch money in the serps. A few cents spread across all those names equals 20million a year.

[Ross]

Are your bank accounts empty right now? If not, then why aren't you busy?

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