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Over the past couple of months, along with the growth of the domain industry’s blogosphere, there have been a bunch of domain news aggregators coming up where you can read articles from most domain blogs and news sites in one place.
One of the newer blog aggregators is NameBee.com, and it’s very nice actually. The design is both nice and functional. You can also sign up for a free account so you can use some of the site’s extra functions: NameBee.com allows you to add any RSS feeds that are not on its standard list and it lets you block certain feeds that you don’t want to read. As a signed-up member you can also mark articles as read or save articles that you think you may want to read again in the future. NameBee.com also provides you with a personalized history of your site usage. The operator of NameBee has reassured me that accessing the site and reading the news there will always be free to its users.
Now, this is certainly a website that I like, but there are also some other great domain news aggregators that I don’t want to deprive you of. Most prominently, there is Guy Kawasaki’s AllTop.com, which now features a domain name category. Other popular domain news sites are DNHeadlines.com, SocialDN.com and DN.vc. You see, there is a great wealth of domain news sites out there where you can satisfy your thirst for the latest scoop in domaining!
http://www.pcworld.com/article/158254/microsoft_to_merge_windows_live_and_office_live.html
It’s been reported that Microsoft (MSFT) is going to rebrand both of its Windows Live and Office Live services under the name of Kumo. Apparently, “kumo” is Japanese for “cloud” or “sea spider”, inter alia. The company filed a trademark application for Kumo on December 04, 2008. It has also bought a couple of domains that will be pointing to the new site. First and foremost, they bought the four-letter domain Kumo.com, which was originally registered in 1996. Microsoft also bought and registered KumoSearch.com, KumoWiki.com, KumoPics.com, KumoGroups.com and KumoTravel.com.
Microsoft’s online software business has been struggling for a while and is facing increasing competition from Google’s line of online office software. The Windows Live and Office Live brand has never been a success, so rebranding may be a good decision, especially since MSFT is now going to merge most of its online services and its Live.com search engine under one name. However, whether Kumo is a good name remains to be seen. I’ve actually liked Live.com very much, and I still think it’s better than Kumo. Both are short names, but “live” is an actual word that I think has a lot of branding potential. I don’t think that completely moving away from that brand will do any good. Why does Microsoft not concentrate on merging its online products and keep the Live.com brand instead of dumping it for a typical Web 2.0 start-up name?
Anyway, there seems to be increasing demand for short four-letter brands, which will be music in the ears of the owners of four-letter domain names. Hulu, Wiki, Kumo, Fusu and others… Short seems to be good.
The DN Journal reports that the Ask.com division Ask Sponsored Listings, which is an IAC company, has acquired domain monetization company Sendori. Founded in August 2006, Sendori is a relatively new service acting as a middle-man between owners of premium type-in domains and advertisers looking to buy additional quality traffic to their websites.
Instead of monetizing the domain through a parking page and earning money per click, Sendori allows domain owners to directly sell their traffic to advertisers who will pay per visit. This has made Sendori’s advertising program an innovative approach to matching the needs of traffic buyers and those owning the traffic sources, the domain name owners.
Direct navigation traffic is high-quality traffic that converts well, so buying direct traffic is a good option for businesses to send thousands of additional clients to their online destinations every day. At the time of the acquisition, Sendori had 130,000 advertisers buying a total of 33 million page views per month. This massive amount of traffic surely is one of the reasons why Ask.com/IAC has been interested in the company. It’s also a good addition to Ask.com’s portfolio of online businesses. Today, every search and online marketing business needs a strong base of advertisers and traffic to be able to compete with Google to some extent instead of completely falling behind. Ask.com has shown deep knowledge of the value of generic domains in the past: Last year it bought the Lexico Publishing Group, owner of the Dictionary.com portfolio of domains and websites. Other domains part of that deal were Thesaurus.com and Reference.com.
The takeover of Sendori marks an important strategic move by Ask.com, which now has a lot more traffic to drive to its growing group of online advertisers. It is a small player compared to Google, therefore this was also a necessary acquisition.
FreshDrop is a service that makes it easy to find quality domain names that are for sale on the major domain marketplaces and drop services. It’s really a very useful tool for analyzing a large number of domains so you can then extract and buy only the best of them.
For example, on FreshDrop you can sort domains by traffic, page rank, DMOZ and Yahoo listings, Google search results as well as the domain age, backlinks and a couple of other criteria. FreshDrop analyzes the domains for sale on TDNAM, Sedo, eBay, Afternic, Pool, SnapNames and NameJet. In addition, you can also search for recently dropped domains that are now available for registration. What is cool, is that a great deal of the data is actually available for free. TDNAM, Sedo and eBay, for instance, you can search for free. Going through the available domains list is also free.
Because FreshDrop has so many domains in its database, it’s often useful to use more filters to better find the domains that are the most valuable to you. Therefore, the service offers a variety of filters: FreshDrop lets you find domains in a certain language (e.g. only show English or German keywords), four- or three-letter domains, geo domains, and it also lets you exclude TLDs that you don’t like and so on… Although much of the data is available for free, you may want to consider becoming a PRO member, which costs just under $33 per month. With a PRO membership you have access to more data such as AltaVista backlinks, Wordtracker searches, Google searches, Google pay-per-click prices and more. As a PRO subscriber you can also analyze the domains for sale on the popular drop services Pool, SnapNames and NameJet, hence having a competitive advantage over bidders not having access to those data.
Today I received an email from Mike Robertson at Fabulous saying that the videos of the speeches from the TRAFFIC Down Under 2008 conference have been made available for everyone to watch.
The videos can be found at http://www.trafficdownunder.com/news.htm. I should note that the site seems to work best in Internet Explorer (Firefox requires a plug-in). As far as I know, the speeches and seminars from the other past TRAFFIC shows have only been available on DVDs, which you could purchase on the TargetedTraffic.com website. So this marks a novum from the guys at Fabulous that we can be thankful for!
The videos include sessions on Domain Strategy, Industry Development, Monetization Alternatives, Domain Acquisition, and a keynote speech from Paul Twomey, CEO of ICANN.
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