Papa John’s has sold over $1 billion in pizza online.

Perhaps the recent $2.6 million deal for Pizza.com isn’t as outlandish as I thought.

Papa John’s pizza has sold over $1 billion in pizza online, the company just announced. $400 million of that came last year alone. It has spend $15 million developing its online ordering technology. What’s another $2.6 million?

Just about every pizza chain with more than a half dozen restaurants allows online ordering, and many provide incentives (such as discounts) for customers to order online rather than call. Pizza Hut claims its online orders have grown sixfold in the last three years, according to the AP article.

It still strikes me as an interesting move for one of the major pizza companies to buy Pizza.com. These companies live and die by the brand. They’d rather have people go to PapaJohns.com than Pizza.com.

I have my doubts on whether the $2.6 million bid at Sedo was legitimate and if the deal will go through. But I’ll be more than happy to “eat” my words.

Tags: pizza.com

Telecom company gets domain name related to mobile phone partnership.

Qwest, the smaller of the big telcos in the United States, was a little lax in picking up domains related to its new deal with Verizon.

Since February, rumors have been swirling that Qwest would dump Sprint in favor of Verizon as its partner for providing mobile phone service to customers. The news became “official” earlier this week.

But it wasn’t until Tuesday that Qwest picked up two domain names related to the deal: QwestVerizon.com and Qwest-Verizon.com. Why did it wait so long? Either it didn’t think about it until then or it was scared the media (ahem) would be able to confirm the deal.

These are both bad excuses. Companies need to have a corporate policy for handling the registration of domain names in a timely manner. They also need a third party (such as a proxy service) to register the domains in a different name and host them on a separate DNS so that prying eyes don’t catch on to what their up to.

Frank Schilling benefits from television screw up (again).

Peter Askew over at Domainer’s Gazette made an astute discovery earlier this week: ABC News featured one of Frank Schilling’s parked domain names in a news segment, thinking it was an actual web site.

The news segment is about parents getting alerts about what their kids are doing (e.g. in school), and discusses the web site “Parent Connect”. The film crew recorded the site ParentConnect.com. There’s only one problem: that’s not the actual web site. It’s a domain name owned by Schilling.

It’s quite funny watching the reporter discuss what you can do on the site as the camera pans over different keyword links that lead to paid search results. Check out the video.

This isn’t the first time one of Schilling’s domains has benefited from confusion. In 2004, Vice President Dick Cheney mistakenly told millions of viewers during a debate to visit “FactCheck.com” to read about the “lies” his opponent was making. He meant to say FactCheck.org. Schilling owned FactCheck.com. Schilling’s servers melted under the traffic, and he had to forward the domain to another web site (which happened to be critical of Bush/Cheney).

Schilling commented on the increased traffic after the post:

2008-05-05 33460 hits 23226 unique

…much much smaller compared to factcheck. That traffic was dangerously large.

I bought parentconnect.com in January of 2003 in my “locked in the house, long hair days”, long before these folks got the sparkle in their eye to create a similarly named product. Events like this make you feel like a farmer, who has owned a homestead for a really long time, and gradually the city is brushing up against your borders.

As far as money, Yahoo and Google smartprice the heck out of volume spikes like this, so it’s not as glorious as it looks.. It might pay for bandwidth

Tags: Domain Parking, Frank Schilling, peter askew

Despite a turbulent year, SnapNames is still #1 for expired domains.

37% of respondents in Domain Name Wire’s third annual domain survey use SnapNames more often than other expired domain catching services. This is the third year in a row that SnapNames had led the charts, despite a very challenging year for the service.

After being acquired by Oversee.net, SnapNames lost key registrars Network Solutions and eNom. The two registrars formed a competing drop catcher called NameJet. The drop in premium inventory may be part of the reason SnapNames fell from 47% of the vote in 2007 to 37% this year.

There are two new services on the charts this year — and one no longer on the list. eNom’s ClubDrop ceased operations as it moved to the NameJet platform. NameJet is used most often by 15% of the domain industry, according to the survey of 841 people. Afternic also joined the expired domain club with domains dropping from Melbourne IT. Afternic took 8% of the vote.

The graph below shows the complete results for 2008. Numbers from prior years do not equal 100% because defunct drop catchers aren’t included.

[View survey results here.]

Tags: Afternic, eNom, namjet, Network Solutions, Oversee.net, Pool, SnapNames, tdnam

Domain company reports sharp drop in domain parking revenue.

Domain name portfolio holder, registrar, and parking company Dark Blue Sea today reported a massive drop in parking revenue compared to last quarter. The company generated $1,370,000 from parking its own portfolio, down from $1,661,000 last quarter. That’s an 18% drop in just one quarter. A year ago in the same quarter the company pulled in $1,949,000 from parking its own portfolio of domain names.

Customers using its Fabulous domain parking service earned about $3,000,000 in revenue last quarter after DBS took its 26% cut.

The company blames overall economic conditions, increasing transparency of PPC advertising, and the collapse of advertising arbitrage for the drop in domain revenue. Below is an excerpt from its report (emphasis added):

Industry analysts are now concerned about the cyclical exposure of the US online advertising industry to an economic downturn. Whilst online advertising is still one of the most cost effective methods of advertising, it is also one of the easiest to cancel. And cancelled online advertising can lead to immediate impacts through the keyword auction and Coverage, Relevancy, Quality, Price mechanisms outlined above.

Over the last four or five months, the Company has observed a general reduction in the ad spend of a number of large advertisers that have historically purchased the Company’s direct navigation traffic. We have observed this through a partial reduction in price but more significantly through a decrease in Click through rate. This reduction in these advertisers appears to be partly due to the weaker economic environment but is also linked to some significant structural changes that the Search Ad Networks have been making.

Attracting major brand advertisers is a very important strategic initiative for the Search Ad Networks. In an effort to attract these brand advertisers, the Search Ad Networks have tried to make the process of advertising less opaque. In particular, they have given advertisers more flexibility (opt-in and out-out) on which websites their advertisements appear – a very important issue for brand advertisers. This has led to some advertisers opting out of appearing on direct navigation websites.

This is a great analysis of what we’re seeing in the industry right now, and it comes from a company with plenty of data to back it up. Perhaps the most interesting insight is how easy it is to cancel online advertising. Although online advertising is easy to track and calculate an ROI (something people want during a recession), much of it can be canceled with the click of a button. TV, radio, and print ads are often contracted for far in advance.

The silver lining? DBS sold $1,003,000 worth of domains last quarter. That’s down from the prior quarter but up 3x from the same quarter last year, and its agreement with GoDaddy should boost sales over the next quarter.

Tags: dark blue sea, Domain Parking, fabulous, GoDaddy