• Event kicked off Monday March 5, 2007 with cocktails and networking; of course some also ventured outside of the hotel. The casinos and shows were a blast. Ever seen the Blue Man Group? Several domainers, including Ron Jackson of DNJournal, did!
• The Internet Commerce Association became official as the association members signed a “Domain Owners' Bill of Rights”. Finally, there's an official organization to fight for domainers!
• Tuesday’s panel discussion on domain development compared to parking was right on the money. As with any panel, the opinions were mixed on the best way to go to earn top dollar with domains. Some said, “develop” while others said, “Diversify! Develop, buy / sell and monetize!” but the trend definitely seems to be towards development.
• A definite hit of the conference was a domain development newcomer called Pricester.com. With a large portion of the conference focusing on development to help domainers increase revenue, the company peaked quite a bit of interests in domainers, not just because of their development capabilities but also because of the low annual $300 (hosting + development) price tag.
• One of the keynote speakers of the 2007 Las Vegas T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Conference & Expo was Income.com founder / CEO John Reese who provided insightful advice on how to keep the dough rolling in from domains.
  1. Reinvest. Use the profit off of your first domains, no matter how small, and invest in other domains. If you keep recycling the money in that way, your cash stash will continue to grow!
  2. Outsource. Pay others to help you get the work you need done to promote your domains and you’ll profit in the end.
  3. People are power: Keep your business mailing list updated and keep it growing so you’ll always have potential buyers when you’re ready to sell.
  4. Grow your lists. You should be using your domains to build consumer lists for each of your domains. You can build that list by offering site visitors something and having them sign up to get it. Once you have the contact information, you can contact them from time to time to keep them coming back to your site!
• Some additional advice on developing domain names was given by Lou Doctor, managing director of Arbor Advisors. He suggested that domainers not get too gung ho about developing domains one right after the other. Instead, he suggested that we pick out top domains that are likely to bring in the most cash from development and take our time developing just those domains, not all the domains that we own.

Those are pretty much the highlights of the conference. Of course, the event didn’t go by without the usual domain auction, which collectively transacted more than $4.26 million in sales! The next T.R.A.F.F.I.C. conference is scheduled for June 19 – 22 at the Grand Central Hyatt in New York City. Register here.

Other interesting facts:

• In 2006, 76% of expiring domains were renewed by their owners.
• 63% of all .com and .net domains resolve to live websites, 23% are parked (this includes PPC domains and websites under construction) and the remaining 14% do not have a website of any kind.
• VeriSign's statistics does not include any information about domains that were deleted during the grace period (a phenomenon known as domain tasting). This would be important and necessary because the inclusion in these statistics of domains that were still in the five day grace period would make it impossible to tell how much of the growth in .com and .net domains is artificial and temporary.
• VeriSign processed an average of 24 to 25 billion .com and .net queries per day in the fourth quarter of 2006, compared to 1 billion queries in 2000.
• In 2006, unknown perpetrators leveraged 32,000 hijacked PCs to launch a DDOS attack on VeriSign's DNS servers that was 70 times larger than any attack seen previously. To counter future attacks VeriSign continues to increase its bandwidth.

Below are a few abbreviated excerpts from the interview.

About Oversee.net:

The business focus is on two areas–one in domain services, the other in what we call marketing services, which is much more the lead generation businesses.

In domain services, getting into some detail, there are three main components. There's our monetization platform, the DomainSponsor business; the second is our own portfolio which we acquire in the primary market–so that consists of something north of 600,000 domain names; and we also buy in the secondary market directly from domain owners.

In the marketing services area we are in mortgage–that was started in 2005–another highly competitive time, and have successfully managing being recognized as number one in terms of quality.

We also have our travel business in LowFares.com, which is a travel comparison shopping site, which has main top relationships in that space – Cendent companies, IAC travel companies, so and so forth.

Abot the competition:

We don't have a single direct competitor, I would say. We're diversified enough and are in a leading position in enough areas to where it's not so much of a concern. I'll give you an example, in our domain acquisition and secondary markets, we have relationships in this space and a presence in this space that money can't buy. That's one area where it doesn't matter how much money a company has. Domainers are perceived as "selling out" when they sell to one of the newer financial guys. But for them to sell to use they're leaving it "in the family".

About Demand Media:

Smart guys — Richard did a great job at MySpace, and will continue to do a great job at Demand–but I just think we're traveling two different routes. We see ourselves as between prime time and late night television, and I think Richard's company sees themselves much more in the prime time television market, where the effort is much more in repeat users and eyeballs–which is great. That's just an area we don't focus in.

About the domaining boom:

I'd say that traffic has always been there, and it's grown obviously. What has changed is that there is an influx of advertisers, and paid search has really helped the industry. A domain name is very much like a search in the address bar. Paid search has been pivotal in its growth. No one is going to buy that land if they can't monetize it, though sometimes people do, mainly speculators. What we did when we entered the space in 2001, we gave the domain owners the ability to monetize that land, which had the effect that they bought more land.

Read the full interview here.

The companies are Communicate.com, Inc. (CMNN.OB), Dark Blue Sea, Inc. (DBS), InterSearch Group, Inc. (IGO), Local.com, Inc. (LOCM), Marchex, Inc. (MCHX), Tucows Inc. (TCX), Verisign, Inc. (VRSN) and Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO).

The index is published on Monday, Wednesday and Friday at stock.dnvw.com. Since its inception on January 1, 2007 the index has a already increased 12.89%.

The Daily Domainer notes that Marchex stock is up 19.38% since reaching a low of $11.56 on January 17 when analyst William Morrison downgraded the stock from "Market Outperform" to "Market Perform" and predicted "a few quarters of rocky performance". Many stock investors do the exact opposite of what the majority of analysts tells them, and some of them have fared very well with this approach.

Interestingly, Communicate.com, Inc.'s corporate website is located at CMNN.com, even though they own Communicate.com as well which acts instead as a parked domain featuring PPC ads. That's a good sign of a company that puts profits above vanity.

Nofollow was introduced and promoted by Google to combat the phenomenon of comment spam which was plaguing millions of blogs around the world. Spammers were bombarding blogs with fake comments in the hope of getting credit for the backlinks to their websites (or so Google believed), thereby improving their own search engine rankings.

Two years later, it has become obvious that nofollow didn't stop comment spam. Instead, it turned out that spammers are spamming blogs to get direct traffic and not necessarily to improve their search engine rankings.

Apart from not having achieving its declared goal, nofollow has had some unintended consequences. Wikipedia now applies nofollow to all outgoing links, thereby retaining the "link energy" it receives from the millions of sites that link to it. The result? Wikipedia becomes even more popular and dominant in search engine results while continually pushing down other sites. It is not inconceivable that someday soon a Wikipedia entry about a person or company could rank higher in search engine results than the entity's website itself.

Meanwhile, anti-spam software for blogs has become so advanced that it actually catches 95% of all spam attempts. The Daily Domainer uses Spam Karma 2 for WordPress and we're extremely satisfied with it.

To reflect this technological advance and to reward all our commentators who make valuable contributions to discussions on our blog, we have deactivated the nofollow attribute.

This means that if you submit a comment to any of the posts on this blog and include a link to your website, it will count as a valuable backlink and improve your search engine rankings. The same applies if you talk about one of the Daily Domainer's articles on your blog and send us a pingback (your blogging software will usually do this automatically).

A big drawback is that the tool apparently generates its ideas from existing domain names. This means that most (but not all) suggested domains are already taken in the .com extension.

Also, it might takes a few minutes to get the hang of it. Make sure you play around a bit and try several different inquiries, and then click on the results, which in many cases are ranges, to drill down further.

These investments, according to the website, are

Domain Names, Farm Land and Cash in the Bank.

It looks like the word is getting out…

Fabulous.com confirmed the deal and advised that the domains, which are currently listed at Fabulousdomains.com, are actually owned by an affiliate.

A whois check revealed that the domains are registered to Domain Active Pty. Ltd., which, like Fabulous.com, is a subsidiary of Dark Blue Sea Ltd., a direct navigation company that is listed as DBS on the Australian Stock Exchange.

"BuyDomains and Afternic are pleased to partner with Fabulous.com. The breadth and quality of the Fabulous.com domain name portfolio provides great benefit to our global small- to mid-sized business customer base", said Peter Lamson, senior vice president and general manager of NameMedia's domain name marketplace.

Afternic's competitor Sedo claims to have more than six million domains in its database with a transaction volume exceeding $3 million per month. Sedo is different from BuyDomains and Fabulousdomains.com in that it serves as a sales platform for the domains of its 300,000+ members. BuyDomains sells its own domains and Fabulousdomains.com brokers the domains of an affiliated party.

They join the ranks of well established domainer forums such as DNForum.com, NamePros.com, Domainstate.com, IDNForums.com, Consultdomain.de and Demene.com. Only a small percentage of forums actually manage to establish a thriving online presence, simply because it takes much more to build a forum than simply setting it up. The Daily Domainer wishes the two newcomers the best of success.

Domainers: Submit a comment to let us know about your favorite domainer forums around the world.