Yahoo Search Marketing, also known as Overture, is scrapping the strict bid-for-placement system it invented.

When Yahoo rolls out its updated search advertising system later this year, the highest bidder will no longer be guaranteed to show up at the top. Yahoo is switching to a system similar to Google and MSN, that takes into consideration both the bid amount and click-through rate of the ads. This should help with relevance while boosting Yahoo’s revenue.

Yahoo Search Marketing pioneered the entire pay-per-click search engine market when it originally launched as GoTo in the 90s. Google stole the concept but made it much better. (Google paid Yahoo a nice sum of cash to settle patent infringement suits).

Changes at Yahoo are closely watched by the domaining community. Most paid parking services use Google as the ad provider, but many (including Parked.com and Dotzup) use Yahoo. The general consensus is that Yahoo delivers a higher bid per click but lower click through rate. Hopefully Yahoo’s new system will focus more on how users interact with ads than how Yahoo editors view them. Google’s system lets users decide what’s relevant, whereas Yahoo employees a team of editors to determine what’s relevant. The wisdom of the masses always prevails.

[tags]Yahoo, Google, Adsense, Domain Names[/tags]

A politician in Hawaii has bullied a political activist into giving up his domain name.

In May I wrote about a law New York was trying to pass that would protect politicians’ names as domain names. In retrospect, the New York law was not so harsh: it would only punish someone who registered a politican’s domain name with the sole purpose of selling it. Although I don’t think states should regulate domain names, the New York law was rather narrow.

Imagine my surprise today to see that a blogger in Hawaii gave up domain names related to Hawaii state Rep. Bev Harbin. Harbin sent two letters threatening civil lawsuits if blogger Jon Asato didn’t agree to stop using BevHarbin.com and BeverlyHarbin.com. Asato couldn’t afford to defend himself so he gave in.

It has become established precedent in UDRP decisions that celebrity names are protected but politicians domains aren’t.

Harbin threatened Asato using a Hawaii law passed in 2001 that was stronger than the US Congress’ anti-cybersquatting law. The Hawaii law was more restrictive than the US law because it didn’t require complainants to show that a domain was used for profit. According to a Hawaii House report at the time:

“A cybersquatter could cause harm without intending to profit by placing a person’s name on the Internet, along with information that could tarnish or disparage the person.”

Of course, this law was passed by legislators with the sole purpose of protecting themselves. The law flies in the face of first amendment rights. Unfortunately, the American Civil Liberties Union of Hawaii couldn’t take Asato’s case because its docket was full at the time. It’s a shame Asato’s story didn’t make it to the domain name community and other first amendment proponents earlier, as I’m sure the community would have stepped in to assist him.

I recently asked NameDrive president Ed Russell about recent developments at his company, including IDN support and the $300,000 sale of Blackjack.de.

DNW: NameDrive has quickly become one of the most popular domain parking
services. How many domains are you currently monetizing? How quickly has this grown?

NameDrive: Since our launch in September 2005, we have shown extremely rapid growth, with Google saying we are the fastest-growing third party reseller their Adsense For Domains program has ever had. Within 6 months, we’d already been voted ‘Top parking program’ in Domain Name Wire’s survey, so we’d obviously hit home with our client base as well as our advertising partners. If you look at the number of domains on our nameservers via DailyChanges, you can see that we have over 150,000 .com, .net, and .orgs on our system alone. Factoring in the TLDs from Europe (where we have very strong market presence) and URL forwarded domains, it adds up to several hundred thousand domains parked with NameDrive. After some teething problems back in September, we have never let our growth get ahead of us and we have constantly been adding server space to cope with the new load. We have recently increased our server capacity fivefold to ensure that the pages snap onto the page wherever in the world they are viewed from.

DNW: NameDrive launched IDN support in February. I’ve seen varying degrees of “IDN support” at other domain parking services. How does it work at NameDrive?

NameDrive: If you look around IDN communities, such as IDNforums.com, you will see that IDN domainers are arguably the most passionate domain owners out there. They have invested a great deal of money in domains which have little traffic now but will very probably be extremely valuable in the future rather than the present, much like the early domainers in the 90s. NameDrive always wants to be at the forefront of domain monetization technology and therefore set out to provide the first-ever full implementation for IDN parking.

We were the first company to allow users to add domains in both Unicode and Punycode; we were the first company to show all IDNs correctly on the parked page and, we are now the first company to provide full IDN support, including keywords, related searches, as well as portals in Japanese, Arabic, Russian, Korean and Thai. This was a huge implementation project and we’re delighted with the results. Traffic is still building on these domains, but we are well ahead of the competition in being ready for the future of International Internet traffic.

DNW: Congrats on your brokerage sale of Blackjack.de. I’ve seen different amounts for this sale. Did the sale include Craps.de, and what was the total sales price?

NameDrive: Thanks. As some people know, our principle founder has much experience as a broker, and while we don’t deal actively with day to day brokerage, we have excellent contacts to some of the biggest buyers in the industry and are always proud to work on such big deals, blackjack.de being the biggest-ever reported.de sale. Blackjack.de and Craps.de sold together as a package deal for a total of $315,000, where the lion’s share of the price was taken up by Blackjack for $300,000.

DNW: Speaking of your “Park and Sell” brokerage, this is something fairly innovative in the domain parking world. What volume of domains are you selling through the “Park and Sell” program?

NameDrive: We know that finding a buyer for a domain can be a long and laborious process. By having contacts with competitive, accredited buyers, we can facilitate the process considerably and offer an excellent opportunity to sell single domains or entire portfolios. Though we have only recently launched our program, we receive several emails on a daily basis from domain owners looking to sell their domains through the P&S program, and do sales in the range of $10,000 a week on average. This is a number that we expect to increase significantly as we continue to increase our visibility, ramp up our efforts, and close out the larger level sales that we are working on (these deal can take months to hammer out). Already we are putting the finishing touches on a healthy .co.uk deal that should be made public in the next few weeks.

It is also important to note here that the vast majority of offers on domains come through the parked page. Our customers have informed us of several large, 5 figure, sales which have gone through via the link on their parked page. We allow this link to take the sale away to any sales page you like, be it your own sales page or a public sales platform, so park and sell’s total volume is probably much higher than what we even are aware of.

DNW: What do you consider to be the biggest threat to NameDrive and the
domain parking industry in general over the next three years?

NameDrive: Three years is a long time in this industry, if you consider that NameDrive itself is barely 10 months old. The domain parking industry is not so much a domain industry as a traffic monetization industry and, while the channels which monetize traffic may flux and wane, the traffic itself will only continue to grow in the future. We prefer to see the coming possibilities rather than the threats. Threats can endanger current channels within the domain monetization industry, but traffic as such will continue to exist and we always aim to be at the forefront of traffic monetization.

Thanks to Ed for taking the time to update Domain Name Wire on its progress.

FTC defends availability of Whois, and you should too.

The debate over availability of Whois information continued this week during the Morocco ICANN meeting. FTC Commissioner John Leibowitz presented several examples of how Whois helped the FTC shut down fishers, scammers, and various illegal activities. This is a hot topic, and ICANN CEO Paul Twomey discussed at Domain Roundtable the pros and cons of making this data available .

Most domainers would like to shut down public access to Whois. But there are a number of reasons why the domain community should support open access to accurate Whois information:

1. It allows people to contact you about buying your domains and vice-versa. How many times have you wanted to buy a domain and the only way to contact the owner was to look up the domain in Whois? I’m shocked when people owning quality, generic domains hide behind Whois privacy as it makes it more difficult for buyers to contact them. (Unless they really don’t want to sell.)

2. You can research research buyers and sellers. If you are buying a domain on DNForum, it often makes sense to check the identity of a seller through Whois before completing a purchase.

3. It provides a verification mechanism for domain exchanges like Afternic and Sedo and domain parking services.

4. You can still use a Whois privacy service under the current “open access” policy if you have a true need for protecting your identity. (Privacy services are also being debated.)

There are some obvious drawbacks to having an open Whois system. Perhaps the biggest is the amount of spam and phone calls you get by having your information open to everyone. Sadly, the Whois database is misused by some of the world’s biggest companies, including Yahoo, for sales purposes. But there’s any easy way to fix this. ICANN could create an e-mail forwarding system for Whois e-mail addresses. For example, I could register my domain using my true e-mail address and ICANN would mask it to be domainnamewire-com@icann.org. This masked e-mail would automatically forward to my real e-mail address but allow ICANN to track abuse. You could also change this masking address if it became favorite prey of spambots. ICANN could do a similar thing for phone numbers but this would be expensive. Phone numbers are probably not necessary and could be hidden for use only my law enforcement.

This isn’t a simple debate, but domainers should think through the consequences before jumping on the Whois privacy bandwagon.

Over 10 million .de domains registered, .eu approaches 2 million.

Some people say the recent .eu domain launch was the most successful launch in history. Others say it was just a sham speculative event. Either way, .eu registry EURid is making a mint. .eu registrations are approaching 2 million.

As a country code domain, .eu does not fall under ICANN governmental policy. Another country code domain, .de has become one of the most popular domains on the web. .de now has over 10 million registered domains according to a recent new story. As of the end of May it had 9.921M domains registered, so registrations are continuing to grow. Nearly 300,000 of these domains are IDNs. International domain names are proving a growth driver for .de domains and other extensions such as .com — a real boon for registrars. .de domains also sell well on the aftermarket. Just this past week NameDrive announced it helped sell Poker.de for $300,000.