Written by David Goldstein , Tuesday, 18 March 2008
In a report in January, Click Forensics found that the overall click-fraud rate for the online advertising industry was 16.6% in the last quarter of 2007, up from 14.2% for the same period a year earlier reports Forbes. In contextual advertising networks like Google Adsense and Yahoo! Publisher Network, Click Forensics estimated that 28.3% of clicks were fraudulent, up from 19.2% for last quarter of 2006.
Written by Melanie Delannoy , Tuesday, 18 March 2008
Tuesday, March 18th – After extensive beta-testing, EuroDNS launches its 2.0 website with a wealth of new features and improved services. Thought from the ground up to facilitate Domain Name Registrations even more, the site provides enhanced ergonomy with an attractive look and feel.
With version 2.0 of its flagship Website, EuroDNS offers an even better interface to register Domain Names; the “address” used to access and recognizes a particular website on the Internet. Thanks to the new version, less than three seconds are now needed to find out whether a required name is available for registration and secure it in more than 50 domain extensions (.Com, .Asia, .EU, .Fr…).
Written by David Goldstein , Tuesday, 18 March 2008
.es, Spain’s ccTLD, is well on the way to its one millionth registration and will pass the nine hundred thousandth domain registration this month. It is expected the one millionth registration will occur in May.
Written by David Goldstein , Monday, 17 March 2008
The necessity for the move to IPv6 is the focus of an article from Forbes recently. The article quotes Leslie Daigle, chief Internet technology officer for ISOC, who says it is simple math: the Internet Protocol addresses that are assigned to differentiate networks and individual computers at the edges of the Internet have 32 digits, allowing for only a finite number of addresses–about 4.2 billion. Daigle also says the move to IPv6 would help to limit spam since “[i]n today’s addressing system, large groups of IP addresses–what Daigle calls ‘the swamp’–are often assigned and then left unused for a period of time. Spammers can impersonate those virtual identities to circumvent e-mail filters based on blacklisted IP addresses.
Written by Caycee Boyce , Monday, 17 March 2008
The GNSO Initial Report on Inter/Registrar Transfer Policy: Clarification of Reasons for Denial [PDF, 229K] has been posted for comment. The comment period will be from 18 March 2008 to 7 April 2008.
Written by Michael Gilmour , Monday, 17 March 2008
This is a follow on article in the series on transparency and standards. The previous article examined how both Google and Yahoo have agreed to the standards outlined by the IAB but have not flowed the transparency down to domain owners. Because our industry is so small it’s been suggested that many of the strange policies that come down from on-high in both Google and Yahoo are often not aimed at us but others and domain owners just get caught in the cross fire. I personally don’t subscribe to this view as it would appear to mean that there are a lot of policies that "seem" to be impacting domain owners on a regular basis for the benefit of Google and Yahoo. Although there has been some consolidation the domain industry is still incredibly fragmented at each of the industry levels. I’m still amazed at the number of reasonable sized domainers that I’ve never met before but suddenly popup at one of the domain conferences. There are still too many parking companies and this is despite the recent closures of a few of them. In this fragmented market both Google and Yahoo can really do what they want and there really isn’t anyone large enough that can oppose them. There also isn’t a co-ordinated effort from domain owners to aggregate their traffic now or any time into the future. As an aside it’s been interesting to see how both Google and Yahoo have been restricting the number of new parking companies being launched by raising the "volume of traffic" bar before you can qualify for a direct agreement. While doing this they appear to be ensuring via their contracts that no parking company is achieving market dominance. It’s a very unusual industry that doesn’t have a single dominate player and whole group of companies fighting for second position. There does not appear to be a clear stand-out domain parking leader but rather quite a number of companies that are vying for first position. The real clincher has been the way that both Google and Yahoo are purposefully stifling innovation in the parking industry. The restrictions placed on template design, the development of other potentially lucrative revenue streams and a host of other innovate ideas is incredible. This could be seen as a blatant misuse of market power to reduce the ability of the industry to move forward. To understand what this all means we need appreciate the power of domain traffic. The following is a quotation from a case study conducted by Google in 2007 when they compared the conversion rates of domain versus search traffic for a particular customer. "When we analyzed the results, we were shocked. We didn’t expect to see that domain park sites can bring in the quality of traffic necessary to result in twice the conversion rates, at a cost-per-click that’s equal to that of search."    When I read this report I congratulated our whole industry on the fact that we’ve managed to negotiate our way out of 50% of the revenue stream. It also means that although we are only 3% of Google/Yahoo’s revenue line we are actually punching at the 6% level of effectiveness. For the past 2 years Google has been reducing its margins to acquire greater volumes of traffic moving them down from 22% (Q1, 06) to 12% (Q4, 2007) (source: Google quarterly report). To put this in context if advertisers paid $1 per click (EPC) in Q1 2006 typical publishers would have been paid 78 cents (ignoring parking companies for the moment) and likewise in Q4 2007 they would be paid 88 cents. This would give an overall increase of 12.8% over 2006/7 but this is not the case for the domain channel. Since the domain channel is converting at double search our EPC was effectively 39 cents in 2006 and 44 cents in 2007. In reality the experience of many domainers has been that EPC rates have fallen by approximately 50% over the same period of time. This means that in 2007 we are being paid 22 cents while other publishers are being paid 88 cents for every dollar of advertising. The domain channel is cross subsidizing other content channel traffic such as mySpace and that they are reaping the benefits of our success. This is not surprising as the mySpace traffic is notoriously bad converting traffic. If you were Google I don’t think that this sort of information is actually what you want to communicate to today’s market. It’s much easier to make a multi-billion dollar deal look a lot better by reducing the income levels of a highly fragmented market and aggregating all the numbers together in a report for the analysts. Isn’t it nice to be needed! Source: Posted by Michael Gilmour — Original post on on Whizzbangsblog — March 17, 2008
Written by David Goldstein , Monday, 17 March 2008
American Airlines have announced they are making their website accessible via mobile devices, but not via a .mobi domain name as many companies are doing these days. Rather, when accessing AA.com on a mobile phone or device their system recognises when customers are accessing AA.com via mobile devices and directs them to the mobile version of AA.com.On the mobile version, content is condensed, the design is simplified, and the connection is fast, making the site ideally suited for navigation on a mobile device. The option to access a full HTML version of the site is also available. Could this move mean a slowing of demand for .mobi names? It is likely other companies will have their websites designed to recognise when being accessed by a mobile device. But it is also likely mobile-only websites will still proliferate. The news release announcing the launch of the AA.com mobile version is available from www.aa.com/content/amrcorp/pressReleases/2008_03/11_aacom.jhtml.
Written by David Goldstein , Monday, 17 March 2008
Nic.gp (Guadeloupe) have announced 1 and 2 digit domain names will be available for registration soon, although no date is given. One hundred domain names will be available from 00.gp to 99.gp as will ten domain names from 0.gp to 9.gp. There will be more information as it comes to hand, or check out the nic.gp website here.
Written by David Goldstein , Monday, 17 March 2008
The CZ.NIC association, administrator of the .CZ national top-level domain, registered yesterday at 22.20 the 400,000th domain. The domain registration speed has increased significantly since the last year’s 2 October when the association launched their own registration system for the .CZ and .ENUM domains named FRED (fred.nic.cz). Over 74,000 domains have been registered in this system from the last year’s October.
Read more…
Written by David Goldstein , Monday, 17 March 2008
SIDN, the .nl registry, has been looking into allegations the landrush for numerical domain names was poorly organised and disenfranchised many who participated in the landrush. SIDN has commenced an internal investigation into the complaints that come from a small number of the 500 participants in the landrush.
Read more…
Written by David Goldstein , Sunday, 16 March 2008
Following hot on the heels of the record-breaking sale of fund.com for almost US$10 million comes the sale of casino.de for €400,000 (US$591,000). It is inaccurately claimed to be the record price for a .de domain name – the record goes to another gambling-related domain name, poker.de, that sold for €695,000 in 2007. However it is the fifth highest reported domain name sale of 2008 with all five sales by private sale.
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