Domain Magnate

Google recently added new case studies or “success stories” as they call them. These are mostly established sites that use adsense as either the main or the secondary source of revenue. They all look good, have nice and neat designs and lots of unique high quality content. Some are major news, entertainment  or informational portal, others are smaller niche sites.

The funny part is most success stories start with a tale of how someone decided to make a site to provide some useful information for students/patients/stock traders and one day decided to try adsense on it – put a small ad unit at the bottom of the pages and was forever surprised by the high earnings:

Furniture.ie was founded in 2003 by Richard Moyles to make the process of finding products for the home easier, with the goal of saving people time and money by allowing them to search many stores from a single location..

Finfacts.ie is a business and finance portal launched in 1997 with the aim of providing content related to business and personal finance to the Irish market..

Livecharts.co.uk is a stock market data portal covering global markets. The site started out as a hobby site in 2005 and – depending on market conditions – now gets up to 3 million page impressions per month..

Spartacus Educational started life in a small office at the home of its founder and director John Simkin in 1997. Simkin left a job as a textbook publisher to set up his own company, providing academic publications online.

I guess that is the image they want to present to the world (that is the regular people are not into online marketing) and not the one of a growing number of people researching keywords, buying targeted domains, cheap content and links and trying to maximize their adsense revenue by placing tons of ads everywhere. Adsense turned content into online commodity and made massive amounts of low quality free content available online and  profitable like never before. Not that I’d complain of course, on the contrary. However duplicity and hypocrisy rules as always.

According to the recently published stats by hitwise (first posted here), Google accounted for 67.90 percent of all U.S. searches in the four weeks ending April 26, 2008. Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com each received 20.28, 6.26 and 4.17 percent respectively. The remaining 45 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.40 percent of U.S. searches.

Hitwise data is based on the sample of 10 million US Internet users.  christianity read more »

In a report published on Monday, Google said it was concerned about the free flow of information on the Internet if Microsoft was to succeed in acquiring Yahoo.“We would be concerned by any kind of acquisition of Yahoo by Microsoft,” Chief Executive Eric Schmidt told reporters.

“We would hope that anything they did would be consistent with the openness of the Internet, but I doubt it would be.”

Schmidt pointed to Microsoft’s past history and “the things that it has done that have been so difficult for everyone,” but he did not elaborate. read more »

AP reports:

DOVER, Del. (AP) — Two Detroit pension funds have sued Yahoo Inc. and its board of directors, saying they breached their duties to shareholders in trying to thwart a takeover by Microsoft Corp.

The lawsuit was filed in Delaware Chancery Court on Thursday by lawyers representing Detroit’s police and fire retirement system and general retirement system, as well as “all other similarly situated public shareholders.”

According to the lawsuit, Yahoo’s board is pursuing “value-destructive” third-party deals in an effort to fight off Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft, which on Feb. 1 announced a takeover bid of $31 per share in cash and stock, a 62 percent premium over Yahoo’s previous day’s closing price.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo, whose shares closed unchanged at $28.42 on Friday, rejected Microsoft’s $44.6 billion takeover bid as inadequate, but indicated that it might be willing to negotiate if the price was right. Yahoo is believed to want at least $40 per share, or about $56 billion. read more »

This is a complete guide on domain scammers that shows how to recognize and avoid scammers while trading domains.

There are several popular scamming schemes:

1. Scammer sells stolen domains

How it works:

Scammer trying to sell quickly a stolen domain for a bargain price.

A domain can be stolen by hacking into the a email address associated with it – like yahoo, or hotmail; or by means of social engineering, e.g. if a scammer contacts the registrar support and pretends to be the owner of the domain who forgot the password. Stealing passwords is also possible through keyloggers and trojans installed on the domain owner’s computer.

How to avoid having a domain stolen?

- don’t use free email addresses in your domain contact details. Most people still do this and it puts their valuable domain assets as higher risk. Instead use an email address from your own domain.
- install and run an antivirus and antispyware software, update it frequently and run scans. Here is a good guide on cleaning your computer from spyware and viruses.
- always use strong passwords, random letters and numbers that are near each other on the keyboard. Use different passwords for everything and a password manager to keep track of them. Roboform is recommended. Change the passwords once in a while.
- keep your whois contacts and registrar information up to date read more »

As many domainers have noticed in the past few days the old google keywords tool is gone for good and instead there is only the new one. This is actually bad news for most domain sellers as the old tool used to show much higher search counts “allowing” them to show higher counts and ask for a higher price for their domains. Google’s explanation for this was that the old tool included data from Google partners compared to only data from Google in the new tool. This is however hard to believe, for many keywords values were considerably higher on the old tool, frequently even 3-10 times more searches – an unlikely possibility since Google controls round 70% of the search market.

I mostly used the new keyword tool so this is not a big problem for me, however it was nice having the option to double check and compare values. Another option for that I use now is gTrends from WordTracker – the daily traffic estimates can hardly be taken seriously, but the data is good for comparisons on search volume between different keywords. Another good keyword tool allowing for an additional separate point of view on the keywords popularity is Keyword Discovery – they have a free account option with limited number of searches allowed.

An important issue to consider with the Google keywords tool, that apparently many domainers aren’t aware of is the “Match Type” option. There are 3 options: Broad, [Exact] and “Phrase”. The first one broad is the default and shows the highest search counts. However it’s deceiving since it pretty much sums up the whole niche and shows an estimate of many searches are performed with the current keyword being part of the search query. The “phrase” option shows results where the phrase appears as it is and the [exact] match option is the actual and relevant option which shows the searches for this exact keyword.

[exact] is what should be used when evaluating exact match domains to get a better idea of how much traffic top ranking can bring for that keyword. Exact is what I always use when buying domains for development. While the phrase and broad options can be good for category defining domains to get an idea on the market and search volumes for the niche.