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| | The Un-Marketing Network is not currently active and cannot accept new posts | | domains as an investment / traffic generator | Views: 774 | | Nov 20, 2005 7:02 pm | | domains as an investment / traffic generator | # | 
Frank Michlick | | Hi,
I came across two articles that discuss the value of domains for traffic generation and as an investment strategy.
Business 2.0: http://tinyurl.com/8fusk
Wall Street Journal: http://tinyurl.com/8n7jc
What do you think, how valuable are your domains? What type and how much traffic do they get? Are your names generic or not? Have you ever sold or bought an already registered domain?
/Frank
http://tinyurl.com/czt64Private Reply to Frank Michlick | | Nov 22, 2005 5:53 am | | re: domains as an investment / traffic generator | # |
Steve Hardman | | This is a business that if you are going to get into it, you are going to have to do so in a big way. No small players can really make a buck at it anymore, simply because most of the "type-in" domains are taken, or there are people sitting in option on these in the event they do expire. If you note, these people are sitting on a half million domain names. Only a small portion of these make anything at all and there's no telling which ones may do well while other never get a hit. Sure, you can count on candy.com to do something wonderful for you, but how many of these are there out there like that? As a percent of that half million, not many.
The other VERY risky side to this is that they depend on the good will and the maintenance of certain business conditions like the continuation of their good graces in the Google and Yahoo programs. If either or both of these companies decide that a no-content website isn't where they want their ads showing up (and that really is a risk), then there goes the money.
This is all these are really good for anyway, advertising. The days are pretty much long gone when people will buy a domain name from you in order to go into business. Search engines have developed enough that you could have a complete garbage domain name and do nearly as well as you could with something that people would recognize. People visit sites all the time without realizing what the domain name is.
I am working on an experiment that is starting to show pretty much just that. There are many things going on with it and I cannot release the name now because all I am working with is search engines and I don't want to pollute the data. But it's a completely made up name that brought back a big fat zero in a search. Guess what... with proper search engine optimization, it doesn't matter. I will come back and post when the data is in. Private Reply to Steve Hardman | | Nov 22, 2005 6:58 pm | | re: domains as an investment / traffic generator | # |
Frank Michlick | | Steve,
Thank you for your comments - I agree with some of your points.
One thing that I was trying to show, that already owning the right domain can already bring you a certain amount of traffic. It is very important to note that not all traffic comes from search engines.
> The other VERY risky side to this is that they depend on the good
> will and the maintenance of certain business conditions like the
> continuation of their good graces in the Google and Yahoo programs.
> If either or both of these companies decide that a no-content website
> isn't where they want their ads showing up (and that really is a
> risk), then there goes the money.
I do not see this as an apparent danger. If you look at recent press coverage, it seems that the big advertising networks (which would include Google and Yahoo!) actually do not have enough places to display their ads.
Since the people that type in domains often see typing in a domain as an alternative to a search, they are interested in the topics that are being advertised.
However I also agree that the owners of the large portfolios should start thinking about how they can develop their domains into actual sites, or at least partnerships.
/FrankPrivate Reply to Frank Michlick | | Nov 23, 2005 5:11 pm | | re: domains as an investment / traffic generator | # | 
Andrew Barnes | | A slight twist on this thread.
I have just received an offer to purchase a quantity of 'Expired Domain Traffic'. It would appear that the people behind the offer have purchased a large number of expired domains that were receiving a large number of visitors (the lowest number of visitors available for purchase is 10,000).
Has any-one come across this kind of offer/tactic in the past.
Presumably, they are recently expired so that they still show up in the SE's and would presumably have a large number of 'live' links all over the internet that presently annoy clickers with 'can't find domain' messages.
The sales pitch extols the fact these visitors are very 'warm' as they have already clicked on a related site, and rather than get to the one they think, they are redirected straight to yours. So if you sell say toothpaste, and you have bought 10,000 visitors to www.clean-teeth.com, you are onto a good thing.
Thoughts/experiences on this gratefully received. They aren't cheap!
Autograph Your Work With Excellence.
AndyE Barnes
New Audio Edition. On-line Today.
Working Together - We Win.
Newsletter. Private Reply to Andrew Barnes | | Nov 23, 2005 7:26 pm | | re: re: domains as an investment / traffic generator | # | 
>> Barry Caplan - Start Your Future Today | | Andy-
This is a sleazy tactic associated mainly with porn sites.
My worst nightmare recently was that a personal domain that my non-techie foather has registered would fall into this trap - that people would end up re-directed elsehere, esp to a porn or scam site. Luckily he managed the re-upping and turned matters over to me for the future :)
I would bet that the email you got bears all the hallmarks of spam...false headers, unsolicited, etc.
If you want me to check, then contact me via PM and I will give you an address to forward it to...
Best,
BarryPrivate Reply to >> Barry Caplan - Start Your Future Today | | Nov 23, 2005 8:25 pm | | re: domains as an investment / traffic generator | # |
Frank Michlick | | Thanks for your responses!
Andy wrote:
> I have just received an offer to purchase a quantity of 'Expired
> Domain Traffic'. It would appear that the people behind the offer
> have purchased a large number of expired domains that were receiving
> a large number of visitors (the lowest number of visitors available
> for purchase is 10,000). Has any-one come across this kind of
> offer/tactic in the past.
In general I would be very very careful with any unsolicited offer. Plus
one has to be aware that "expiring traffic" has to be set up very carefully
in order to maintain the traffic momentum. If you would like more details
on this, feel free to contact me directly.
Barry wrote:
> This is a sleazy tactic associated mainly with porn sites.
The so-called secondary domain market has long expanded beyond the
porn industry - as you can see in the articles I posted earlier.
/FrankPrivate Reply to Frank Michlick | | Nov 23, 2005 9:38 pm | | re: domains as an investment / traffic generator | # |
Andrew Barnes | | Barry,
Thanks for your help. It all sounded a bit too good, and I wondered why I hadn't heard of it before.
I was put onto it in an email newsletter that I have since deleted, but the page they seny me to is -
http://www.jpeadvertising.com/edtraffic/
Let us know your thoughts.
Thanks a lot.
Autograph Your Work With Excellence.
AndyE Barnes
New Audio Edition. On-line Today.
Working Together - We Win.
Newsletter. Private Reply to Andrew Barnes | | Nov 23, 2005 10:16 pm | | re: re: domains as an investment / traffic generator | # |
>> Barry Caplan - Start Your Future Today | | Frank -
OK, I just read the articles. Neither one of them touches on the adult issue at all. So somebody has 500K domains? How many of them pointing to adult site now?
How about to link farms, which are the current bane of people everywhere?
Fine if "eatingdisorders.com" has some links, but how many domains point to sites that are even remotely related to the topic of the domain?
I think the people who are described as they are at the top of th B2.0 article, peple know how to interpet that - they are going to be described the same way in "look how much money spmmers really make" articles, or descritions of success stories at any year's AVN Awards.
Tread carefully.
I also think they are being disingenuous at best and liars at worst when they suggest that most traffic comes in form typing in the toolbar.
That part of it is minuscule.
Traffic eitehr comes from legitimate searches that point to these illigitamate sites, or form one of the demon sites pointing to each other. Or from clicking on spam.
Not unlike porn, get rich quick, buy meds, and other such net.fraudsters. I wonder how many people got out of spam and into this?
The lack of transparency in the business makes for all hype.
That said, whether I like the market or not, I see tht it does exist for now (if the search engines cut them off it won't for long though) and, with access to raw logs, one could model the traffic enough to place a valuation on it.
Which makes me think it might be time to dust off a couple of industry feneric domains I have, but which do not have web sites on them, and put up link farms and see what happens :)
Best,
BarryPrivate Reply to >> Barry Caplan - Start Your Future Today | | Nov 23, 2005 10:22 pm | | re: re: domains as an investment / traffic generator | # |
>> Barry Caplan - Start Your Future Today | | Andy -
My first thought is this is the next toy for the same people that brought you x10 popup adds, spam, and everything else you know of and hate and lots more you might not know of but would hate if you did.
OK, after I wrote that I popped up one level on the link you sent to the home page...I dare you to read that and tell me these guys are not into every internet scam and scourge on earth... spam, spyware, fake re-directs....is this who you want to do business with?
Best,
BarryPrivate Reply to >> Barry Caplan - Start Your Future Today | | Nov 23, 2005 11:04 pm | | re: domains as an investment / traffic generator | # |
Andrew Barnes | | Barry,
I can see what you mean.
What about D.I.Y?
If I found a handful of relevant expired domains with good inward links still in place, and personally redirected them to my site, do you think this would prove a good R.O.I. or would even doing it myself (and thereby maintaining integrity) still be frowned upon. I certainly don't want to risk downgrading my own site!
Autograph Your Work With Excellence.
AndyE Barnes
New Audio Edition. On-line Today.
Working Together - We Win.
Newsletter. Private Reply to Andrew Barnes | | Nov 24, 2005 2:34 am | | re: re: domains as an investment / traffic generator | # |
>> Barry Caplan - Start Your Future Today | | Andy -
There are probaly sites and blogs that discuss this in more detail that you can find, but here is my 2 cents....
What are the odds that someone will follow a link, which is all but random from your point of view, the reader will say - gee not what I expected about Christmas recipes but maybe I will follow these links for truck stops in Iowa...
Pretty low IMHO.
that is nto to say that there isn;t a way to toss semi-relevant content up...I have come across some sites that were clearly trying to do thatbut those were pags coming in form google (or someoother serach engine, and all they did was toss the query terms in in a few places of otherwise random words.
I suppose if you were really determined, you could grab the page the link is coming from, parse it and decide what content to throw up there via a script, witht he idea the content would then be relevant to the place the person just came from, but do you really think you are going to fool the reader?
Actually, I could think of a way to do it that would fool a lot of poeple, and wouldn't be so hard to do, but would violate the TOS of every legitimate ISP on earth, and probably the laws of most of the nations they reside in.
Is that the kind of company you want to keep? If so contact me with what you wil pay for such a script :)
If not realize, that these guys you read about are probaly either lined up with "bad actor ISPs" or they get chased from ISP to ISP just like spammers and phishers because sites will block them and search engines will probably refuse to pay them (or if they don't the time is coming)
Finally, dead links aren't going to hang out all that long in a search engine...and if a site drops away, how popular could it have been anyway?
Just did a wuick look-see on that last point - I have a domain where the main bulk of pages was droped probably 2 years ago and now there is only a place holder. Surprisingly, about 4 or so links are still hanging in google. I doubt there is any traffic there though, and this is an industry-standard generic domain name...I guess I should look at the log files sometime to see who is there besides spiders...
Anyway, the whole thing smacks of trouble to me...
Best,
BarryPrivate Reply to >> Barry Caplan - Start Your Future Today | | Nov 24, 2005 8:28 pm | | re: domains as an investment / traffic generator | # |
Frank Michlick | | Barry wrote:
> OK, I just read the articles. Neither one of them touches on the
> adult issue at all. So somebody has 500K domains? How many of them
> pointing to adult site now?
Hardly any. Most of them point to related PPC pages. For the two companies that I know with about 300K domains each the amount of porn sites would be in the range from 0-3% of the names.
> How about to link farms, which are the current bane of people
> everywhere?
Are you referring to something like 'search engine spamming'? Just a
problem of the times, there will always be a problem similar to this.
Pure type-in traffic or Direct Navigation hardly relates to this, while there are of course areas where both things meet.
> Fine if "eatingdisorders.com" has some links, but how many domains
> point to sites that are even remotely related to the topic of the
> domain?
This depends on the advertising feed. Same as in an actual search in a search engine or in content syndication (a la adsense). Also the ads that you see depend on where you are located and where you have been before (if that site receives feeds from the same advertising networks).
> I also think they are being disingenuous at best and liars at worst
> when they suggest that most traffic comes in form typing in the
> toolbar.
I wouldn't have believed it either, but I have seen site stats and server log files that _proove_ that this is indeed the case. A lot of people browse or search by simply typing in domains. It might not make sense to you, but it happens. (This also is the weak point of the Business 2.0 article - they do not focus on this concept
I still find that this is hard to believe, but this is the behaviour of many people. People "browse" the Internet - they stroll and a lot of them try domains by typing them in. How do you normally find a corporate site, via a search engine? I do type in the domain that I think the company would have. Apparently a lot of users try the same with generic domains.
As a matter of fact, I have just PPC parked one of my German language generic .ORG domains. There are about 30 people per day that just enter this domain. If I check the log files, I can see that they have not come via a search engine - unless all of them use some kind of privacy software that does not transmit the referrer-URL.
> That said, whether I like the market or not, I see that it does exist
> for now (if the search engines cut them off it won't for long though)
> and, with access to raw logs, one could model the traffic enough to
> place a valuation on it.
I doubt that the search engines would cut this off at this point. After all (this is from the business 2.0 article), it is responsible for about 10% of Yahoo!'s annual revenue. Also the search engines have more ads than page inventory, so they need any space they can get to publish their ads.
As for those sites being listed in search engines, this is a different story. A lot of search engines do actually not list those pages at all - another indicator that the traffic has another source than search engine referrals.
> Which makes me think it might be time to dust off a couple of
> industry generic domains I have, but which do not have web sites on
> them, and put up link farms and see what happens :)
It would be worth a try. Take a look at http://ppcpool.com/ , which contains a list of available PPC domain parking programs. Some of the links on this site (which is not operated by me nor am I affiliated with it), contain affiliate codes.
From your second post:
> I suppose if you were really determined, you could grab the page the
> link is coming from, parse it and decide what content to throw up
> there via a script, witht he idea the content would then be relevant
> to the place the person just came from, but do you really think you
> are going to fool the reader?
How does customization fool the reader? I don't think it actually is necessary to mimic the design of the previous site - as long as the content is related. Nobody is trying to fool the user into thinking that they ended up on the same site as before.
> Actually, I could think of a way to do it that would fool a lot of
> poeple, and wouldn't be so hard to do, but would violate the TOS of
> every legitimate ISP on earth, and probably the laws of most of the
> nations they reside in.
While this could be considered a problem with privacy, I am not sure how would this violate the terms of ISPs? The refer URL is part of the request string for most web browsers. If you want it stripped out, you need to use a privacy browser or proxy. Most web servers store this information by default in their log files. If you go from one Google Adsense site (or from a Google search to another), they are planning to base the ads you will see on where you have been before. Doubleclick (an advertising network) has been doing this for years and years.
Also customized ads will be more interesting to the visitor to the site. I do share the privacy concerns here, and there is a huge responsibility for the advertising network to act as the clearinghouse that protects this information.
> Finally, dead links aren't going to hang out all that long in a
> search engine...and if a site drops away, how popular could it have
> been anyway?
A lot of people do not realize that their sites a popular. A lot of companies come and go. People disappear or lose interest. This happens all the time, especially in the time of blogs.
> Just did a wuick look-see on that last point - I have a domain where
> the main bulk of pages was droped probably 2 years ago and now there
> is only a place holder. Surprisingly, about 4 or so links are still
> hanging in google. I doubt there is any traffic there though, and
> this is an industry-standard generic domain name...I guess I should
> look at the log files sometime to see who is there besides spiders...
How many people check their links to other sites regularly, how many directories are checked on a regular basis. Not too many.
Taking a look at log files always is a great idea, it can teach many things about your site visitors, where the come from and where they go.
AndyE wrote:
> If I found a handful of relevant expired domains with good inward
> links still in place, and personally redirected them to my site, do
> you think this would prove a good R.O.I. or would even doing it
> myself (and thereby maintaining integrity) still be frowned upon. I
> certainly don't want to risk downgrading my own site!
It might be worth a try, however you can count on a lot of domains with valuable traffic not being available again for registration. Many of those domains go into auction and go for prices from $60 to several thousand dollars.
If you are planning on trying this, I would suggest setting up pages on the expired domains first instead of just redirecting the traffic. If you are planning on redirecting the traffic, use a 'permanent' 302 redirect instead of a temporary (code 301) redirect or a META-refresh redirect.
/FrankPrivate Reply to Frank Michlick | | |
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