PDA

View Full Version : Frank Shilling Keynote


Rubber Duck
21st August 2007, 05:48 PM
At DomainToolsBlog:

http://blog.domaintools.com/

30 Million Uniques a Month on 320,000 domains. That is not an awful lot even by IDN Standards as an average. Less than 100 uniques a month. If you then consider his better domains must be doing a lot better than that, some of the lower key names cannot be doing very much at all!

domainguru
21st August 2007, 05:51 PM
At DomainToolsBlog:

http://blog.domaintools.com/

30 Million Uniques a Month on 320,000 domains. That is not an awful lot even by IDN Standards as an average. Less than 100 uniques a month. If you then consider his better domains must be doing a lot better than that, some of the lower key names cannot be doing very much at all!

Yeah, 30 million uniques is really bad!

Rubber Duck
21st August 2007, 06:32 PM
It goes to show that what is available out there in ASCII is a lot more no hope than IDN.

With top end IDN at about 5K visits per month, that is about 100 times the average of Franks Portfolio. It would seem that the "Long Tail" represents a serious problem of diminishing returns. Of course before anyone jumps in, the first few thousand of Frank's will be really quite extraordinary.

All I see lately is post including those from Frager extrapolating their earning by projected growth in global internet subscribers. Where do these guys get off? Even if IDN failed totally and everyone used ASCII, they would not be using purely English Keywords!

domainguru
21st August 2007, 06:42 PM
It goes to show that what is available out there in ASCII is a lot more no hope than IDN.

With top end IDN at about 5K visits per month, that is about 100 times the average of Franks Portfolio. It would seem that the "Long Tail" represents a serious problem of diminishing returns. Of course before anyone jumps in, the first few thousand of Frank's will be really quite extraordinary.

All I see lately is post including those from Frager extrapolating their earning by projected growth in global internet subscribers. Where do these guys get off? Even if IDN failed totally and everyone used ASCII, they would not be using purely English Keywords!

ok, let's put this in real simple terms. Frank probably earns more in a month from his ASCII domains than all our IDN domains put together have earnt since we registered them. Whilst top end IDNs might get 5K visits a month (what are they?), Franks will get many more visits than that from his top end ASCIIs, and earn more PPC to boot.

Don't you think that if Frank didn't see value in his "lower end names" he would drop them, and just keep the top 30%? Sorry, but we are all "dreamers". Frank is the real deal, and has the bank account to prove it.

***It's all about the money***

Rubber Duck
21st August 2007, 06:52 PM
Yes, I think we all understand that he is in the driving seat. And sure he would not be investing if he did not think they were profitable. It is, however, becoming clear that we are looking at the tail of comet that stretches millions of miles into space but still does not add up to the mass of the comet.

ok, let's put this in real simple terms. Frank probably earns more in a month from his ASCII domains than all our IDN domains put together have earnt since we registered them. Whilst top end IDNs might get 5K visits a month (what are they?), Franks will get many more visits than that from his top end ASCIIs, and earn more PPC to boot.

Don't you think that if Frank didn't see value in his "lower end names" he would drop them, and just keep the top 30%? Sorry, but we are all "dreamers". Frank is the real deal, and has the bank account to prove it.

***It's all about the money***

Rubber Duck
23rd August 2007, 06:10 PM
Having taken the time to listen to the whole thing, I came away with a couple of points.

Basically, Frank probably quite rightly explain that if you had 5 to 10K to invest you still pick up good domains that would be suitable for building a profitable online business. That ain't going to make another FS, but you could do a lot worse.

The other important thing that came out was something Rick has touch upon before. That is the "moment in time" theme. FS admits he was not the first to see the potential of domains , but his moment in time came with the Dot Com bust, when nearly everyone had lost confidence in the domain market. The lesson I got from this is that you have to identify unique opportunities at a unique point in time. The unique point in time for FS's big opportunity has clearly passed. So those wishing to emulate Frank, need to identify a new opportunity of their own and exploit it in a timely manner.

So basically you need to hit on an exciting investment opportunity before the World and his Wife gets aboard. This is likely to be something which is held in disdain in many cirlces. This clearly could relate to IDN.

Frank though is a shrewd businessman and he emphasised the sustainable cash-flow situation. This rather mitigates against those that expect to come in this week and flip for a fortune by Saturday.

touchring
23rd August 2007, 06:38 PM
Views is not everything, i saw someone selling a millions of views a day file hosting website, Alexa rank was like 400+, the site earned only a few thousand a mth after minusing server cost of 10k a mth!

OTOH, if you got a name like creditcard.com, you can earn a million dollars in PPC a mth with just ten thousand views a day. Talking about creditcard, i always think about markit's name! A masterstroke indeed. :o

Rubber Duck
23rd August 2007, 06:51 PM
Maybe not but it should not be difficult to come up with some kind of average across a portfolio that size, at least as a working assumption.

If you strip out the super- premiums which is where most of the money will have historically come from, it looks as though we are looking at typically 50 visitors a month. Most of my non-IDN at that level earn bugger all, but lets assume that conversion is about 15 cents on 15% of visits. That would be just over a dollar a month, which is fine if he is clearing $5 or even $10 a year on each of those domains, every year, but it is not hard to see why you might get upset at browsers stealing traffic or Verisign hiking fees!

I am of course not saying it is not good business, but the margins are thin enough to be eroded significantly by costs, and it would seem to me that it only makes sense to chase the long-tail so far. I think in ASCII land that point may well have already been reached.