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If you’re a fan of The Beatles and if you have a spare $1 million, you might want to check out this collection. By the by, the owner understands that having a relevant domain name is a first step towards making a sale; he uses UltimateBeatlesCollection.com to promote his collection.
In a security advisory published on May 30, 2008, Microsoft urges its Windows users to stop using Apple’s popular Safari web browser, because Safari doesn’t ask for user permission before downloading files, including certain executable malicious files which are often automatically downloaded from visited websites in the background. These malicious files could then be activated by a second attack, so they represent a serious security problem, according to Microsoft.
MSFT also offers workarounds if you do not want to stop using Safari on Windows. Click here to read the advisory.
Via Advertising Age:
Local ad spending online may be the nexus of traditional publishers’ greatest hopes for future growth, but the anticipated spoils have already generated fierce competition, according to a new report from Borrell Associates.
Local ad revenue online looks likely to grow by 50% this year to $13.1 billion from $8.7 billion in 2007, Borrell said. The expansion can’t sustain that pace much longer, though; its compound annual growth over the next four years is likely to fall to 15% from 48% over the last four years.
Local advertising offers many opportunities to both pure web companies and “traditional” media companies that are now extending their offerings to the Internet. But looking at different types of ads, some ads are better for local marketing than others, in my opinion.
CPM advertising, as still offered mostly by websites of newspapers and by the bigger online portals, doesn’t offer as much value to advertisers as contextual sponsored links, individual flat-fee advertising deals and classified ads. This is because most CPM advertising campaigns are still untargeted and they do not offer any incentives for publishers to offer related quality content. Instead, CPM advertising might induce publishers to simply concentrate on the number of pageviews their site generates. PPC ads, flat-fee ads and classifieds, on the other hand, rely very much on traffic quality and high conversion rates. Thus these types of ads offer publishers an incentive for creating quality content and attracting quality traffic that will convert well into actual leads and sales for their clients.
That is why I think both publishers and advertisers should try to make more use of contextual advertising and classified ads, especially in local marketing, as it should result in more value being created in the long run.
The Economist has a chart showing the trend of US house prices from 1920 to 2008. It shows that house prices have fallen by 18% in real terms since 2007. This means house prices have fallen faster than during the Depression in the 1930s.
European buyers are already entering the US real estate market, because they can now buy houses at very low prices. Many houses are being sold in foreclosure sales and on top of that the US Dollar is weak compared to the Euro, so Europeans pay even less than American buyers currently looking to purchase a home.
The same applies for domain names too, by the way. I’ve said it before: If you’re based in Europe you can save a lot of money when buying domains from US sellers now!
The geographic domain name America.com, which had been put up for auction at Sedo, has not been sold because the reserve price has not been met. The highest bid placed was a petty $1,710,000, although many expected America.com to fetch mid seven figures (including me). What is even worse is that only three bidders were involved and it was only Bidder 3 who raised the bid little by little from $25,000 to the highest bid, probably because he tried to find out what the reserve price was. The other two bidders were not willing to offer more than a few thousand dollars.
I think this auction, just as the TRAFFIC East 2008 live domain auction, is a crystal-clear sign of a weakening economy causing a slowdown in the domain name market. Therefore, I would consider carefully whether to sell domains at the moment, unless you’re willing to let them go at low prices compared to what you could have gotten just a few months ago.
The dry spell will go over as the economy gets back on track. I would take these slow times as a chance to look over your portfolio, see which domains you want to unload, which ones to hold on for and where you see potential for more (e.g. development or strategic partnerships).
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