The Domaining Revolution - Lessons In the Domain Roundtable

"The Revolution won't be televised...you won't have the option to stay ?dominio .cat property ...you will not find a way to plug in, turn on and cop out...the revolution will probably be no re-run brothers...the revolution are going to be live." ... Gil Scott-Heron

I (together with fellow SEO´s John Andrews, Dustin Woodard, Aaron Wall, Chuck Cost & Dave Bascom) attended the 2007 Domain Roundtable in Seattle. There has been a lot written about domaining recently by SEO´s...some of it complimentary, and some of it misinformed. I find domaining to be fascinating because I view it as an online extension of old-school business that just so also happens to reasonably immune from your shifting search engine algorithms. Even more compelling, the amount of money that successful domainers earn from their investments is downright scary.

Area Names Are Assets

The parallels between Area Names and Conventional Real Estate operate deep. A area name can be compared to "raw developable land" (which can either lay fallow or be developed). The area name can be either "parked" for revenue or "developed" into a business.

Area Parking

To park a domain, a area owner forwards the Area DNS to a parking company. He/she than tells the parking company what type of ads to show on the page (by category, by keyword or both). The area owner can then "optimize" the parked page by choosing a user-friendly page design and advertising content for the page for ads that both map best to the topic of the website URL and also offers the area owner the best EPC.

Typically, parked domains get visitors and earn revenue from "type-in traffic", where a web-surfer types the search terms into the browser without spaces (followed by a .com or other extension). However, if the parked website has previous link popularity, it might also get traffic from people following those links.

Site Development

A domain owner might also do a cost-benefit analysis and decide to "develop" the area name through site creation. Most domainers lack some if not all the skills for site development, so a true domainer will only do development with the strongest generic brands due to the cost involved.

The level of site development might somewhat depend on the intent of the domainer. Is he/she planning to hold the area for the long-term or planning to sell? Either way, a developed site is all about "profit and loss"...that´s how a domainer evaluates the performance of his/her investment.

Some take site development one step further. For example, Mike "Zappy" Zapolin will, for some of his super-premium domains, form a corporation, hire a CEO, and build out a major business presence revolving around his generic name purchase.

Have you noticed on business shows recently that many of the interviewees are from "generickeyword.com"? Behind that business is likely a domainer trying to get maximum ROI from his/her premium domain investment.

Area Values

Hopefully, most SEO´s now know that the intrinsic value of a domain name can far exceed the slight search engine benefit accrued from having the targeted keyword present in it. Each generic keyword dot com area is unique and can have only one owner. Each will also control a consistent level of type-in traffic. Formerly, many domain owners believed domain value to be 5 to 10 times its yearly PPC revenue...however, this rule of thumb has been mostly discredited. A area is worth what a willing buyer will pay for it and domain appraisal seems to be an inexact science.