Seven Mile

 Domaining .com (news from whos/who of the domain world) http://www.domaining.com/

***FS***  Cool!~ I hadn’t seen this.  :)   Seriously slick and simple mashup on a terrific name..  This is going to be a big big high-traffic site if they don’t get bored.  The drudge of domaining.
Yahoo to put adverts in PDF files
Yahoo has reached a deal to start running advertisements in Adobe’s popular PDF document-reading format.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7118363.stm

***FS***  Don’t count Yahoo out..  This is a resourceful bunch

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20071126.wgtmedia1126/BNStory/Technology/home

Excerpt: “”Experts say advertisers need to remain competitive in a tightening market while keeping costs down, making them likely to boost spending in areas more directly linked to commerce, such as Web search queries. That would benefit companies like Google Inc., Amazon.com
Inc. and eBay Inc. But television networks like CBS or NBC and Web companies like Yahoo Inc. that rely on brand advertising could suffer. “We see continued strength in paid search and continued strength in retail e-commerce, and possibly an acceleration of online video,” said Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay.”"

***FS***  I see Yahoo as being in a great position,  they have my domains, others, error-search from Verizon, others..  These guys have so much potential if they could just use the parts better..  I serve Yahoo ads more than a million times a day, nobody knows though because Yahoo! has been so overly cautious about displaying “powered by Yahoo!” in the search box..  What has Google done?  They have put “ads by Google” across nearly every site that will have them..  and that reach has helped it to grow it’s advertiser base..  How many eating disorder clinics would run to Yahoo to advertise with them if they’d just place a ghosted Yahoo bug in the search-box at EatingDisorders.com? or a “click here to advertise” button to lead folks in?  Tens of millions of collective visits a day and nobody knows the network is powered by Yahoo!..  such a lost opportunity to brand your search..  Yahoo has the pieces, they have the good intentions..  they just need to execute better.  And quicker…  and stop coddling their brand to their share price’s detriment.

The networks have the money but they keep getting led astray ..  buying indefensible pieces..  businesses without burn-down value and other assorted bags of smoke. The net is surprisingly simple..  Traditional media outlets overthing the opportunities and fail to execute, or overpay for the pieces they do buy.  JMO

http://thewebdesign.blogspot.com/2007/11/good-post-on-getting-ranked-high-on.html

Nice post.

http://blog.snipperoo.com/2007/11/death-of-the-do.html

  Summary:  A guy who could have bought billions of dollars worth of domain real estate by applying his foresight (but didn’t) now declares “domain names dead” and hypothesizes that we will abandon domain names in favor of Rube Goldberg inspired Universal Search Locators (USLs) which will take over as the foundational elements of the web.. 

While I could actually see some variant of this trying to marginalize domains in the next 50 years,  in the end I think the obstacles are so many and the challenges so daunting that nothing could actually “do away” with the usefulness of domain names.  Consider:

—You would need to have Google agree on a global standard with Microsoft, Yahoo, Sina, Baidu and all other competing search services so that the experience of USL’s is uniform. You wouldn’t want to type Snipperoo at Baidu and get to Widgettown instead.

 —Even if you got everybody to agree on a standard you wouldn’t have mail because email runs on domain names.  This chap would surely argue that we could all abandon our email in favor of search engine messengers.. but those would have to run on a globally universal standard too.

— After clearing the initial hurdles above, you’d just have to convince every existing site owner to adopt your new platform and abandon their trillions on global collective branding in domains (think of every business card, bus bench, billboard, TV commercial, directory you’d have to change)

— You’d have to persuade governments of the world to cast away their national heritage embodied in (CCtlds)

— You’d have to convince Verisign to roll over and play dead.. or just buy them.. ditto with PIR (.org) and Affilias..

— Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, and Safari would have to give up their browsers because we wouldn’t need them.

It’s funny to read posts like this because search engines actually search for domain names.. It’s a symbiotic relationship. Without a name there is nothing to search for  

In fact it would be easier to just buy all the available domain names from large name holders around the world..  a few billion would roll up 60% of the most visited sites on the net.

Quote: “”The idea here is that as your content is broken up and thown out into the four corners of the web, that is where you come to reside. You no longer have a central address, you only exist where you end up. If you are good, you end up in some very powerful places. If you are bad - well, we all know what happens on the web if you are bad.”"

Those “Places” will need to have a unique location of course..  There is no such thing as a “place” without a unique location..  and on the Internet you need a Domain name to have a unique location – unless you want to start typing-in IP numbers that is.

This guy needs to lay of the over the counter cold medication.  Sahar calls bullshit too..  Next.

Yahoo and Google plan to turn their e-mail systems and personalized home page services into social networks.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/13/inbox-20-yahoo-and-google-to-turn-e-mail-into-a-social-network/index.html?ex=1352696400&en=b7f0d6a896f23bec&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Josh sends link and says:  For most people, email is important.  For many people, it is vital/mission critical.  I’m a strong proponent of people getting their own email address under their own domain name.  Gives you alot of control and potential more secure email.  And yes, there is a trend away from using mail.  I guess, at 42, i’m a bit of a dinosaur.

***FS*** Email is the language of business and commerce.  Nobody selling products or services directs you to their Facebook or Twitter Messenger.  Nobody sane anyway..

   Elliot Silver writes:  “”Hi Frank, Did you hear about Yahoo’s new social networking site Kickstart? Check it out when you have a chance…. if you can find it :-)”"

***FS*** Find it indeed.. I like Yahoo, but these folks really need some help with naming.. They own Flickr.com but don’t think to acquire the more logical, generic and often mistyped “Flicker.com”. They decide to lay the foundations for their new social networking site on kickstart.yahoo.com as opposed to the more logical Kickstart.com.  I think this is part of an internal naming culture that runs to the top at Yahoo.  I used to love Launch.com … The brand was seared into my mind..  Then they abandoned the years of branding and switched to music.yahoo.com..   It felt different.. Then they blocked foreign IPs from viewing videos (I’m in the US Centric Cayman Islands), so today I watch music videos on Youtube.com

   I believe you can run multiple domain names in tandem with each other, without confusing your audience and for the overall betterment of “the brand”. (ie. Activate launch.yahoo.com, music.yahoo.com, musicvideos.yahoo.com, videos.yahoo.com and point them to the stand-alone “Launch.com .. a Yahoo property” .. That way when Launch.com (it’s own brand and identity) gets big you can spin it off as a seperate publically traded company with its own currency..  extracting value for all Yahoo shareholders (thank-you Barry Diller).

   What would be really cool is if Jerry Yang played the role of Willy Wonka…  invited a bunch of domainers and spirited outsiders to Yahoo through some “Charlie and the Chocolate factory” like contest..  and then the winner who in Jerry’s judgement had the ‘heart’ and ‘passion’ to coax Yahoo’s naming/marketing culture into previously unexplored directions got to be “Charlie”, who with the help of Brad Garlinghouse would swoop up all salient domain names for Yahoo, adding billions to Yahoo’s market-cap. They could make it a reality show..  It would be bigger than “The Apprentice“..   Note to Jerry: I hereby give you a free irrevocable license to this concept should you choose to explore 

   PCs losing their relevance in Japan.  Both for desktops and laptops. Overall PC shipments in Japan have fallen for five  consecutive quarters, the first ever drawn-out decline in PC sales in a key market, according to IDC. The trend shows no signs of letting up: In the second quarter of 2007, desktops fell 4.8 percent and laptops 3.1 percent.

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/071104/japan_bye_bye_pcs.html?.v=2

You could argue that a lack of IDN’s have led to less Japan-language websites…  so more traffic is flowing to portals like Yahoo in Japan. Portals have a greater percentage of Internet traffic so there’s a greater incentive to create browsing experiences for telco platforms, phones, game consoles and web-appliances. Also, seems like much of this flows back to the fact that Japan is a more conformist, inwardly looking culture. Fewer Japanese are venturing out of the portal’s bounds to test/explore… and if I can access the portal on my Nintendo Wii ..  who needs a PC?

Yahoo Flirts With Social Networking

http://mashable.com/2007/11/01/yahoo-flirts-social-networking/

***FS***  On may way to the airport this morning my cab driver told me he’s starting a social networking site. I’m selling out before the crash. 

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9800958-7.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=NewsB

Could be Part of the "de-Silo"ing at Yahoo or it could just be that Ms. Dunaway has jumped on the employment opportunity of her dreams.. I like to keep an eye on Yahoo because this company is a sleeper if they can just organise the pieces they have better. Companies with high stock valuations and a "can do no wrong" sparkle, that’s one thing. Companies with great assets who can’t get any love ..  that’s an opportunity.

http://domainnamewire.com/2007/09/17/so-long-overture-scores/

Ahhh the ‘goto tool’…  Old timers in the domain industry still ask "What’s the goto" when trying to determine the popularity of a given search-phrase with spaces between the words (apart), with spaces removed (together) and as a complete domain name (with extension). What these folks are asking is "How many times has this term been searched over the past month across the goto, (later called Overture and currently called Yahoo) paid search network? The answer to that question will determine whether a given phrase will garner organic, generic-intent type-in traffic when registered as a domain name.

I’ll never forget the day when Garry Chernoff showed me this tool for the first time. My eyes lit up with wonderment at this window into the hearts, minds and souls of the Internet browsing public. Want to know what the most popular types of pie are?  Just enter the word "pie" and see how many people search for apple, blueberry, cherry etc.. "American Pie" and "Pie Theory" always seemed to be the most popular pies..  but after a while you learned why that was.. 

It stood to reason that if some portion of the browsing public was so determined to find pictures of dolphins that they simply typed dolphinpictures.com into the search box at yahoo (recording one search in the suggestion tool) that those same people (and others) would type the domain-name in their browser address bar looking for the non-existent website that this powerful name describes.

I acquired the name when it dropped and was surprised to see 25 visits a day.. The people still come back, half a decade later.

That goto suggestion tool faithfully turned back billions of queries over the years and helped guide countless novice domain investors as they mined for untapped traffic veins. Many of those folks became "Fabulous"ly successful and created vast fortunes in spite of being late to the domain game. As word about this open software tool made rounds on the Internet it became much slower as parties ran monster lists against it, trying to harvest data. Surprisingly, Yahoo kept the tool open and unrestricted even after acquiring Overture.

Those days now appear to be "over" .. Several folks have reported the demise of the tool’s monthly update and results appear skewed since last week. Thanks for the memories goto tool. We’ll always have Wordtracker but you will be missed by many.

I had the weirdest dream last night..  weird for several reasons. Firstly, I don’t usually dream about the domain business (that I can remember) and they certainly don’t wake me from my sleep at 4AM.

In this dream I was in New York, during some kind of conference and was meeting with Rupert Murdoch about a strategic merger..  A faceless female assistant or key staff-member (who is a mutual acquaintance in said dream) had arranged to bring Rupert by my hotel suite as he made his way to some other meeting. In the office of the suite we talked about the domain name business, how domain name traffic powers part of Google, Yahoo and drives a significant portion of generic-intenet Internet traffic.. Rupe tried to get his head around the concept that many of the companies he had bought and invested in had domain name underpinnings. He was quite clever, savvy and aware of things in my dream.

As much as I wanted to take this meeting to talk shop with today’s William Randolph Hearst, Rupert had somehow heard of me (and the domain industry) and he wanted to take the meeting as well! It wasn’t a love-fest meeting though. Rupert was the classic 2002 era skeptic.. He wanted to talk about charts and projections through 2012. He seemed hurried, synopsizing the domain industry’s highlights and playing devils advocate, talking about fragmented interests and the difficulty of uniting a scatter-shot domain audience around a cohesive core or brand. It didn’t seem like I was going to sell Mr. Murdoch on the benefits of merging a large domain network with his media content core.

I had several browser windows open during our discussion and suddenly, as we were in the wrap-up phase of our conversation (Rupert had his coat over his arm and umbrella in hand) it occurred to me to resize two of the open browser windows on my laptop…

What would happen if every time somebody typed one of our potent domain names they received a single split-screen of targeted paid search advertising, married to a relevant Newscorp media content page?  Type a cooking name and get a relevant food story from today’s Newscorp newspaper…  Type Sportscores.com and get ads coupled with the sports section of Foxnews..  Type PersonalLoans.com and get a split-screen with related content from the WSJ..   Rupert’s eye’s lit up.  I explained how a mash-up of my traffic with his rotating content could turn the 30 million unique visitors we get each month into 60 or 100 million as people came back for more. Then we could ramp up our own Domain Sponsor style third-party syndication business to augment our own proprietary traffic with other domainer’s traffic; making Newscorp websites the most visited on the Internet in about 6 months.

Rupert started talking about creating his own ad marketplace and the mechanics of our proposed merger when it suddenly occurred to me that I had already signed a deal to be sold to a less strategic company for hundreds of millions of dollars less than Rupert was offering..  Then I woke up… That’s what you call a ‘high-class nightmare’ folks

I jotted down a few notes so I could remember to blog about it then went back to another dream about the playboy mansion.

It was the implementation in the Murdoch dream that still resonated the morning after. The content exists today..  the domain name networks exist today.. They are an invisible traffic source, generating hundreds of millions of unique visits a month globally.  How could Newscorp or another media content house elevate it’s Internet presence and exert control over Google by injecting itself as a domain name network owner/sub-syndicator and marrying content to each and every page load?

Lawrence Ng should have a ‘frank’ conversation with Rupert’s people

I can’t be 100% sure, but I just checked my stats and revenues seem to be fairly strong for a Monday in mid-July (the kids are still out of school after all).. 

If Yahoo could do one thing right it would be to fix their keyword marketplace..  if Yahoo’s sales force can get the bidders to return, (like in the heyday of Overture), that single action will gloss over all sorts of unrelated perceived bungling/mismanagement and lost opportunity elsewhere in the company (which they have taken heat for over the past year).

The stock price should rebound and Sue and Jerry will look like geniuses.  JMO

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/12/yahoo-launches-suggest-search-feature/

Link on Techcrunch via DomainNameNews.com … Nice..  and all.. but I sure miss the days of the old goto search term suggestion tool.. 

Before people started running bajillions of queries against it… Before the updates were delayed by a month..  before they renamed to Overture.  Old-timers like me still say "How much Goto apart?". 

This little tool right here made a lot of early domainers very very successful (Roy, Guido, Garry.. you know who you are).  I still have a laptop bag with the logo somewhere. Ahhh memory lane… 

http://www.siliconrepublic.com/news/news.nv?storyid=single8692

Quote: "By combining its huge audience, dynamic ad creation capabilities and deep knowledge of user interests, Yahoo! has developed a true innovation that will benefit agencies and its clients, especially companies with a large number of offers to present to many audience segments."

Something else domainers should be doing..  Harvesting click-in, click-out and IP data, session and user-agent info across all their names..  Log everything, sort it out later.

http://www.techanalyst.com/domains/beyond-the-googleyahoo-hegemony-the-future-of-domain-parking.html

Joe Davidson strikes a chord with this one.  He points out that the power to change the pecking order in paid search is here with us, in our hands. The pieces are all here but nobody is putting them together to extract max-value.  I’ve previously had thoughts along a similar vein.

In order to rival the Yahoos or Googles of the World you need to take a page from their play-book.. These co’s each have functionality, utility and (most importantly) reach that is admired and respected the web-over.. Once you have a nucleus of your own (a search utility, a content site, a very large bucket of domain names), other elements are drawn to you and begin to orbit (traffic redistribution/syndication/direct ad deals). Then you use that cash-flow to increase the size of your nucleus (double-down, buy something bigger, expand) .. then draw bigger redistribution fish like what Ask.com is doing with its Google pass-through syndication deal.  I would never sign onto a sub-syndication deal for my traffic but I would consider Ask.com, because they have the leading Google rev-share which they got by getting very big.

The key of course is to get BIG.  Too many co’s either cheap-out or fail to execute ..  They buy one big asset then chill and roll up smaller inconsequential pieces. Even the big like Ask.com risk getting unseated if fail to expand as quickly as their competitors. One day somebody in the will ‘go big’ and move beyond domain PPC by changing the pecking order, utilizing the leverage described above.

http://news.com.com/Can+she+turn+Yahoo+into%2C+well%2C+Google/2100-1024_3-6194437.html?tag=ne.fd.mnbc

Link also from Josh…  thanks bro Josh!

I don’t think Yahoo should try to be more like Google.  I think they should try to be more like the companies they acquire..

Yahoo’s problem (in my view) is that they often buy companies like Overture (their paid-search, monetization and keyword marketplace) and then make it more like Yahoo, taking away the sparkle that made the company acquisition worthy in the first place. In my experience dealing with Yahoo, there is not enough latitude given to key staff to allow them to go out and do things. If I ran Yahoo I’d allow for a culture that empowers those creative spirits within the organization, and makes them feel great about going to work each morning.  That includes allowing its people to follow through on ideas that may not pan-out, without an oppressive layer of bureaucracy to water down the concepts and ideas that may ultimately evolve into significant revenue drivers..

If Yahoo could do one thing more like Google it would be to move quicker, and try more stuff. See the Google mapping thing below…

Jeff writes:

"Yahoo Photos with over 2 billion photos is shutting down:
http://news.com.com/FAQ+What+to+do+with+your+Yahoo+photos/2100-1038_3-6191167.html?tag=nefd.lede

I guess too many of these web 2.0 startups are kicking their butts."

That’s a buying opportunity Jeff..  I wonder if Yahoo can sell the 2 Billion pix?  Thanks for the link 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2007/06/12/cngoogle112.xml

I am consciously starting to use different search engines and experimenting outside of Google.  I’ve been trying Ask.com (with the forest background skin), Yahoo.com and MSN.com, but not Live.com (my silent browser error search protest) ..  I still like Google’s results better, but would be lying if I told you I’m not worried about Google deliberately violating my privacy or that G’s competitors are getting better. 

I’m a frequent Google user but I don’t like all that they are doing..  Some of the people I knew there are leaving and I’m worried that the culture will inexorably shift as the next generation of Googlers picks up the reigns, more consumed with the financial upside than the substance of the company. What made Google great was the passion and drive of it’s first generation founding staff and its search algo.

Other companies are beginning to mimic the flavor of their algo and Google’s success breeds problems as the passionate people take the money and run. SEO black-hats are like barbarians at the gate unleashing the force of software and dark energy to game their results to the top, spoiling potent results. As the core people cash out and newcomers fill their shoes, how will those folks feel about growing the company if GOOG’s stock-price craters for 3 consecutive quarters? Will generation II Googler’s passion fizzle when competitors start to school them?

Those are the sorts of things I ask myself and other professional Google users will ask themselves when stories like this point out that lady Google is not as "absent of evil" as they told us she was. Time will tell; I’m hoping for the best because I like this engine.

http://domainstate.com/showthread.php3?s=1f681f3fe60c0a38d7192845183a51fe&threadid=77920

Discussion suggests that Yahoo smart pricing has begun.  To be fair, Yahoo has employed a "discard rate" (which rhymes with the smart-pricing dynamic) for years now. So if this Yahoo "smart pricing" is for real, I hope there is a removal of the historical "discard rate" ..  If not, there would effectively be a double-tax on a publisher’s earnings.

The most glaring problem with "Smart Pricing" is that those who employ it (Google and now reportedly Yahoo) hold their own traffic out as the 100% benchmark, so if you own traffic that converts two or three times as well as Google, you only get the 10 out of 10 score..  There is no such thing as 20 out of 10 to reward you if you’re bringing better traffic to the network.

What the keyword marketplaces don’t seem to understand is that by running smart pricing in this way, they incentivise "competitor markets" and "niche specialist shops" to cream-off the best publisher traffic and move it elsewhere. Inefficiencies are always exploited in technology and failing to correctly reward those who deliver the sales conversions is a pretty glaring inefficiency.

Also, this opens the door to mercantilistic publisher partners with high smart-price scores, willing to dilute their score down a point or two by knowingly backfilling low quality traffic onto their networks. Nothing like turning a 0 into a 7 if it only costs your 10 a half a point to a point.. arbitraginging traffic volumes to gain a tactical advantage.

All things to watch and consider as this new development changes the gaming of the rules.

http://mediabiz.blogs.cnnmoney.com/2007/05/23/microsoft-shoots-down-yahoo-merger-rumors/

Quote: "Microsoft will continue to work closely with Yahoo - the two have made their instant messaging networks compatible, for example - Microsoft was not looking to pursue other big mergers.."

http://www.dmnews.com:80/cms/dm-news/search-marketing/41110.html

Microsoft is smitten, Yahoo is playing hard to get ..  but the courtship continues..  It may wind up being Microhoo / Goople world yet.. Owen..  If this happens I’m changing your name to Rainman and taking you to Vegas..  my tailor will be over at three to have us sized in matching suits. Thanks sincerely for the links Josh

http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticleHomePage&art_aid=59867

Summary:  Story outlines some valid arguments why a YHOO/MSFT merger would be bad for Google.

I personally don’t think Google has anything to worry about right away. Reason?  Their search algo is just too good.  Microsoft and Yahoo can’t deliver results like Google has done.  But they could…

What "Microhoo" could do (and what domain owners of the world could do for that matter) is best illustrated in the "onebox". Many of Google’s searches are the same, year after year and the answers are pretty much always the same.  "Distance to the moon", "ounces to pounds", list of 50 states", "why is the sky blue" and millions upon millions of other searches have consistent answers that don’t change.

Microhoo or domain owners could deliver a onebox answer to these common queries just as well as Google does.  If you have the right answer to common questions most of the time,  then users will try you on the harder questions. That’s how Microhoo or domain owners could compete with GOOG.

Some say discussions are on, some say it aint so.

http://www.reportonbusiness.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070504.wmicrosoft_update0504/BNStory/Business/home

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article1747293.ece

This would be huge if it happened.  Reading this story reminded me of another from the 1980’s..  back then, Sears (the US retailer) was so preocupied with defeating K-Mart and Montgomery Ward (other retailers) that they didn’t see Wal Mart coming..  the rest as they say, is history.

I wonder if domain names aren’t the Walmart in this scenario.  Everybody is so busy jockeying for a position on "Platform A" that they are underestimating the potential of "Platform D".

"Love" this quote in the Bloomberg piece because it’s so applicable to Platform D … "It’s all about the battle for the advertisement market. Who will be the dominant force on the Internet,” said Wim Zwanenburg, who helps oversee 27 billion euros at Bank Degroof Group, including Microsoft shares. “Microsoft won’t be able to catch up with Google on its own. If you want to play a role, you’ll have to gain market share and conquer a position.”

http://searchengineland.com/070416-113737.php

Summary:  Yahoo cozies up to old media and helps them in transformation to the web..  because that’s what folks are reading when they go online. Similar flavor to Google’s radio deal. Radio plays to a captive audience in the form of millions of folks behind the wheel of their car.  But when folks lean forward to buy things they are in front of their PC not behind the wheel.  Advantage, Yahoo.