Hi Everyone,

Apologies for the lack of news update last week, Mr B was on holiday. Now fit and bronzed, he respectfully submits the below for your edification and delight. Quite a few opinion pieces; Google finally hits double figures (age, not revenue); there’s even a guide for how to buy domains. Although if you don’t know already, why on earth are you reading this! Why am I including it then, I hear you ask? Don’t question Mr B, I respond. Check mate.

Have a wonderful weekend,

Mr B.

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ND Weekly #64
Domain Companies Need to Increase “Switching Costs”
The road to profits lies in an integrated approach to domain management.
In the domain business there are low “switching costs”. A switching cost is the time and money you incur to change service providers. Consider domain parking, where you can move 1,000 domains from one parking company to another in about 15 minutes. Even switching registrars is relatively painless compared to many other service provider changes you do in the “offline” world. To see an industry that has mastered switching costs, look at banks. People don’t close out one bank account and switch to another bank just because they can earn a half point more interest. Switching banks is a pain, and banks have made it that way by offering value added services like free bill pay.
More…

How the Domain Industry Can Clean Itself Up
The domain business is a good business with a bad image. What can be done about it?
Earlier today I read DNJournal’s weekly sales recap. There were some good sales, including RoomDividers.com at $75,000 (congratulations, Rick). But all of the good sales were overshadowed by a couple bad sales: Mozzilla.com for $40,000 and wwwMatch.com at $11,100.
Neither of these domain names would stand a chance in UDRP challenges. Both of them are typos of famous web sites. These are the types of domain sales that make the industry look bad.
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dotMobi to Enforce Compliance Rules for Premium Domains (Eventually)
In June I wrote a second article about premium dotMobi domain names that were won at auctions at Sedo . At the time, not a single domain won at the first Sedo auction was in compliance. Compliance basically requires a dotMobi compatible parking page followed by a mobile web site within 6 months. Although it’s not surprising that few of the domains had real web sites within 6 months, it was shameful that few even had .mobi parking pages.
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Google Chrome already beating Opera
Maybe Google really does have something here — in just two days, they have leapfrogged Opera in market share, and have their eyes set on bigger fish. I would have thought that Google’s foray into the browser market would have taken a bit more time to develop, but it seems that adoption has been extremely rapid. According to TechCrunch, most users are coming from Internet Explorer, not Firefox. Microsoft must be worried, or at least they should be — imagine how embarrassing it would be if Google begins to dominate IE in short order, and Microsoft continues to lose search market share regardless how hard they try.
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Google At Age 10
Google applied for incorporation as a business 10 years ago Thursday, according to a timeline supplied by the company. The application was accepted on Sept. 7, which is Sunday. In that decade, the search engine company has quickly emerged as the most successful business on the Web, and many expect it to dominate the next era of computing as thoroughly as Microsoft dominated the era of personal computers. Here’s a quick snapshot of Google by the numbers along with some comparisons to Microsoft. The sources of the data are the companies, Yahoo Finance and comScore.
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Microsoft says chances of buying Yahoo ‘negligible’
Microsoft Corp.’s chief financial officer said Thursday that the chances of the software maker buying Yahoo Inc. are still “negligible.”

“You never say never, I can never say that, but it’s so close to negligible,” Chris Liddell said Thursday at a Citigroup Inc. conference in New York. The low chances of an acquisition mean Microsoft won’t limit its share repurchases, he said.

The remarks echo comments Liddell made in July, when he described Yahoo as a “declining asset.” Microsoft, the world’s largest software maker, bid as much as $47.5 billion for Yahoo
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Study says Obama beating McCain in online advertising
Study says Obama beating McCain in online advertising The first six months of 2008 brought a more advanced Internet Advertising campaign for Barack Obama compared with US presidential rival John McCain, according to new research from comScore.

Mr Obama led the way when it came to site visitors, candidate searches, and display ads, while Mr McCain was ahead only on video views, the report suggested.

More online ads were displayed by Mr Obama overall during the first half of the year, with almost 92 million exposures per month. Mr McCain, meanwhile, saw seven million exposures a month.
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The Great Online Advertising Divide Widens
As online advertising spending continues its meteoric rise — the Wall Street Journal is reporting a healthy gain of 20 percent in the second quarter alone — not every form of advertising is enjoying such success. In fact, as economic troubles continue, more and more advertisers are only willing to spend money on search ads and are increasingly ignoring other forms of advertising.

According to eMarketer, search ad spending will reach $10.4 billion this year, more than twice as much as advertisers will spend on display ads. More importantly for Google, search ads will represent 42 percent of all advertising spending, while display ads will account for just 21 percent of all online advertising.
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How to Buy a Domain Name
You’ve learned some useful HTML and put together some pretty great Web pages in your time. But at some point, it’s time to take things up to the next level. Do you know how to create a Web site that’s entirely your own? Do you know how to buy a domain name? Keep reading.

Every single time you use the Internet, you see domain names. But do you know what they really are? Often, people confuse domain names with Web addresses, and the two are not always one and the same.

All Web sites, every single one of them, have domain names. These domain names are present in the formal Web address (the mess beginning with http that you type into your Internet browser to look at online pages), and that’s from where most of the confusion springs.
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VeriSign: Internet Growth Remains Strong
VeriSign, Inc, the trusted provider of Internet infrastructure services for the networked world today released the Domain Report for the second quarter of 2008, highlighting the continued growth of the Internet globally. At the midpoint of 2008, there were 168 million domain name registrations across all of the Top Level Domain Names (TLDs). This represents a four percent increase over the first quarter of 2008 and 22 percent growth over the same quarter last year.
More…

Thanks to the following sources:
http://domainnamewire.com
http://www.xconomy.com
http://blogs.zdnet.com
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com
http://news.directtrafficmedia.co.uk
http://www.techcrunch.com
http://tools.devshed.com
http://www.darkreading.com

This entry was posted on Friday, September 5th, 2008 at 7:34 am and is filed under Weekly Digest / Industry News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.