The Domaining Revolution - Lessons Within the Domain Roundtable

"The Revolution will not be televised...you will not have the opportunity to stay ?dominio .ly residence ...you won't have the opportunity to plug in, turn on and cop out...the revolution are going to be no re-run brothers...the revolution might be live." ... Gil Scott-Heron

I (as well as fellow SEO´s John Andrews, Dustin Woodard, Aaron Wall, Chuck Selling price & 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 within the shifting search engine algorithms. Even more compelling, the amount of money that successful domainers earn from their investments is downright scary.

Domain Names Are Assets

The parallels between Domain Names and Conventional Real Estate operate deep. A domain 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 domain 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 domain 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 area 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 area appraisal seems to be an inexact science.