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As Elliot and I have predicted in mid-February, aftermarket prices of 4-letter domains have finally dropped in what I would call a market correction. According to Reece’s LLLL price guide, sales prices went down 2-16% depending on the domains’ quality and letter combinations. Prices of four-letter .com domains were previously driven by last year’s buyout and flipping among domain resellers, in my opinion. It was no question that prices would fall at some point in the near future. Don’t get me wrong, I still believe that LLLL values will continue to rise, they will just do so at a more reasonable rate that will be less inflated than the weekly >10% increases we’ve seen as of late.
To sum things up, if you’re going to invest in LLLL domains now, be it .com or .net, concentrate on aged domains with higher-quality letters. Also, consider LLLL domains a more risky investment than generic .com domains and don’t count on making >100% short-term returns, as the early LLLL investors were able to rake in. The market for four-letter domains has slowed down and you will be better off keeping the domains and selling them peu à peu in the long run rather than flipping them after a few days only.
Yahoo has just launched its new Ads for Adobe PDF program, which will allow publishers to display contextual pay-per-click ads in a panel adjacent to the content within PDFs.
Details can be found on the official Ads for Adobe PDF blog.
I think this is a good opportunity for writers to monetize their content while keeping it free for their readers. For example, this new service allows the integration of ads into eBooks or scientific reports published online.
It is my understanding that the service is only available to a limited number of publishers at this time. But if you’re interested, you can apply here.
VeriSign has released its new Domain Name Industry Brief. According to the report, more than 33 million new domain names were registered in 2007. The growth rate is slightly lower than in last year’s other quarters, but that has usually been the case in the fourth quarter of earlier years, too. There are more than 150 million registered domain names now.
The .com gTLD is still the most popular top-level domain, followed by .de, .net and China’s ccTLD .cn. Overall, 2007 was a very good year for ccTLDs: The total number of ccTLD registrations was just under 60 million at the end of 2007, up from about 45 million in 2006.
What I find interesting, is the registry renewal rate of .com and .net. The rate has been about the same since 2004, always being around 75%. I expect this rate to fall if both pay-per-click prices and the overall economy will continue to decline, because some domain owners might then find it increasingly hard to pay their renewal bills.
Click here to download your PDF copy of VeriSign’s Domain Name Industry Brief, March 2008.
Via ReadWriteWeb:
Microsoft’s next-generation web browser Internet Explorer 8, has arrived. In a surprising move, after the demo of IE8 and its new features at today’s session of the MIX08 conference, the startling announcement was made: “It’s available for download now”. The new browser showcases many new features and improvements, like Facebook and eBay integration, standards compliance, and the ability to work with AJAX web pages. What’s most notable about IE8, though, is more than a sum of its parts. If anything, this launch shows that Microsoft is not taking Firefox’s creep into browser market share lightly.
What I think is particularly interesting from a domainer’s perspective is the browser’s Domain Highlighting feature. This is a technology that highlights the top-level-domain in the address bar by making it bold and black. This way it stands out from the rest of the URL, which is written in gray.
You can download the new browser here, but be careful as this is still an early beta version which might not be stable and which might still include some bugs.
According to this Washington Post interview, Marriott.com ranks among the Internet’s top 10 for sales. Shafiq Khan is Marriott International‘s senior vice president of e-commerce, and he is in charge of the hotel chain’s website. He had been working for United Airlines and US Airways before going to Marriott and his online marketing experience helped Marriott to get where it is today: In 2007, Marriott.com generated more than $5.2 billion in sales.
But Khan says that the company has only scratched the surface so far. He already has plans for a new Marriott.com site that will be more personalized. For example, Marriot’s site doesn’t recognize return visitors and it doesn’t take their past purchases into account. Once the company has implemented better targeting for their return visitors it will make millions more from online sales.
In addition to that, Marriott is also currently considering to sell advertising on their website, although this could be a risky undertaking for a corporate website. After all, the hotel chain wants to make sales and complete transactions, it does not want to distract potential buyers from its offerings. Khan mentioned a good subtle possibility they’re looking into, which is “powered by…” ads and products the site will offer to you after the transaction has been completed, such as books or other products you might want to take with you when travelling.
I don’t know any personalized hotel website yet, so I think Marriott will be very successful with its new online presence if they can pull it off by 2009, as planned. Targeting does not only work for Google, Amazon or Netflix. Targeting is one of the great benefits of online marketing every business should make use of in order to boost sales and profits.
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