A satirical article about domain names jokes about demoting .org to a “dwarf domain”.

Need a break from your Thursday afternoon? Click on over to TheSpoof.com for a humorous article poking fun at the recent decision to demote Pluto from its major planetary status:

CERN, SWITZERLAND — An uproar took place in the digital world when the Internet Engineering Task Force demoted .ORG sites to the status of “dwarf domain” at its sixty-sixth official meeting in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. IETF chairman Brian Carpenter read aloud the resolution and asked for a show of hands. The resolution passed by what Carpenter described as “a slim but decisive margin.”

The historic vote by the IETF ended years of controversy after cyber-squatters called for more top-level identifiers such as “.XXX” and “.GEO”. The move threatened to add another 250 million entries to the Domain Name System (DNS).

According to the new definition, a “domain” is (1) anything on the Internet that’s massive enough to hire a professional webmaster; (2) that has a purpose of its own and is not a satellite of some other domain; and (3) that routinely clears stale content from its website…

iMonetize.com has launched a number of domain services, including a domain parking optimization service that covers most major parking companies.

If you’re a frequent reader of this blog, you know I’m a fan of TrafficClub. TrafficClub is a domain parking service that automatically optimizes your domains across various parking services such as DomainSponsor, Adsense for Domains, and Skenzo. There’s a new player in the domain optimization space: iMonetize.com. In addition to escrow, auction, and other services, iMonetize offers an optimization service that includes all of the big-name parking services. I recently asked Jerry Nolte of iMonetize about his service.

DNW: First, please tell us about iMonetize: who is behind iMonetize, why was the service created, when it launched, and the key services offered.

Jerry: iMonetize.com is the culmination of several companies coming together and working under one roof, some of the key players are as follows:

-IPNIC.COM an ICANN Accredited registrar
-INTERNET TRAFFIC SIGNAL - Domain Name Monetizers & Domainers

While the base technology has been used and tested for several years, the culmination of the companies didn’t occur until early this year as a Private BETA Site with only a few select larger domain holders testing it for us and our own portfolio. iMonetize actually opened to the public about 6 months ago and actively started advertising about 1 month ago and has been very well received. We are trying to create the 1st truly one stop shop for domainers by offering escrow, auctions, PPC monetization across multiple providers, Sales, Management Page, and the 1st domain theft alert system.

DNW: I’m a big fan of parking optimization services like TrafficClub. Your parking service also auto-optimizes across various parking programs. How does this work?

Jerry: We park with all the major providers over 1 month’s time in a kind of “Round Robin” fashion (split the traffic equally across all providers for 30 days) then after the initial time we look at who makes the most money per day on each domain and point the domain to that service each day from that time on until you or we decide it needs to be re optimized again (if it stops making as much money or if 6 months to a year go by and bids could be different or if we add more PPC providers to “the mix”) and then the whole process start again. With this method on our own portfolio we have seen an over 250% increase as opposed to just sending it to 1 or 2 providers manually. We also have a staff dedicated to making sure your names are pointing to the highest paying keywords/terms on all the providers so it is a fair shake across the board.

DNW: It seems like iMonetize is another middle man between the domainer and advertising provider. The ad network takes a cut, the parking service takes a cut, and now iMonetize takes a cut. How do your parking customers come out ahead? What kind of revenue share can customers expect?

Jerry: We only take a management fee on the PPC of between 5% and 15% but most of our clients see a 50% to as high as 250% increase in earnings using our “per day” technology. This makes our measly fee unimportant. We also negotiate the highest payout possible with each provider, (I mean think about it, unless the PPC providers pay well they don’t get traffic so it is in their best interest to give us a Higher revenue share then most people can get on their own, let alone we are partnered with some PPC providers that the smaller/newer domainers normally wouldn’t even get into).

DNW: You currently have over 10 parking programs in your system. In order to optimize a domain effectively and test it across all of these services, what amount of traffic does the domain need to receive?

Jerry: Obviously the more traffic it receives the better it will perform, but I would say if it gets at least 10 hits a day it should do very well. Less will also do fine but it would need at get at least 10 clicks in one month to optimize fully. And lets be honest, if it isn’t getting at least that much traffic I don’t think it would make much $ anywhere it pointed!

DNW: A lot of domainers prefer not to change the DNS server for their domains and just park by forwarding. Does iMonetize allow this?

Jerry: While we do have a redirect available, we strongly recommend not using it because some of the services we use are DNS based. If you use the redirect instead of the DNS servers you will only hit 1/2 of the providers we offer, hence not fully utilizing the services we offer.

DNW: What additional services is iMonetize planning for the future?

Jerry: We plan on adding “blind” Offers (being able to offer people money for any domain you want without them knowing who is sending the offer), portfolio sales, drop service, and much more.

Every day it seems like a new parking service hits the web. iMonetize appears to be a different company that wants to do more than just park your domains. Look for an unbiased review of iMonetize’s PPC optimization in a future post.

A problem at the .es registry shows the importance of stable registries with good technology backbones.

Web sites using Spain’s .es domain disappeared from the world for a couple hours Tuesday. The problem was with the .es registry, Esnic, which is the equivalent of VeriSign to the .com and .net world. Think about the money that would be lost if something like this happened to a major domain?

From news reports:

Madrid, Aug 30 (DPA) The biggest blackout in Spain’s internet history had shut down websites, e-mail and other services using the domains for at least two hours.

Tuesday’s interruption was caused by a software error at Esnic, which manages the country domain name .es, from the word Espana meaning Spain, reports said Wednesday.

The blackout affected more than 400,000 websites. It was described as the biggest ever affecting a country domain for technical reasons.

‘Spain simply vanished from the net,’ said users who had been unable to access Spanish newspapers, bank accounts or chatrooms.

Verisign recently released its Domain Name Industry Brief.

The briefing discusses recent trends in domain names. Verisign is the registry for .com and .net domains and therefore has access to a rich data set.

Among the more interesting data:

-As of the end of Q2 2006 there were over 105M domains registered. This is the first time a quarter has ended with over 100M domains registered.

-The top ccTLDs are .de (Germany), .uk (United Kingdom), and .eu (European Union) respectively. VeriSign discovered growth in a number of ccTLDs due to registry promotions and liberalization of registration requirements:

Several ccTLDs experienced very strong growth as a result of a more commercial and marketing-driven strategy. For example, .es (Spain) grew nearly 400 percent year over year driven by liberalized registration requirements and marketing. In addition, .be (Belgium) grew 119 percent year over year driven by a volume promotion, a rare tactic among ccTLD registries. France, long known as being among the most restrictive in its .fr domain name registration requirements, continued to liberalize its registration policies and opened registration to individuals in late second quarter; .fr grew 93 percent year over year.

-The VeriSign report referenced Dotster’s successful Happy Hour promotion:

Nearly six million new .com and .net domain names were registered in the second quarter. This represents a slight slowing in the growth rate between the first and second quarters and a 26 percent increase year over year. The growth was driven, in part, by strong marketing efforts. Registrars drew promotion concepts from different industries in the offline world. For example, one registrar pulled the time-tested “happy hour” concept from the bar to the Internet as it offered domain name registrations for very low prices for an hour on a designated day.

-Renewal rates continue to inch upward. 85% of domains that were renewed in previous years were renewed again, whereas 65% of domains going through their first renewal cycle were renewed. The chart below shows .com/.net renewal rates (source: Verisign).

Note that .com and .net renewal rates are significantly higher than new TLDs such as .info. The low cost of registry some of these “new” TLDs, couple with their use as “throw-away domains“, leads to lower renewal rates.

-60% of .com and .net domain names resolve to a web site, 26% resolve to parked pages, and the remainder do not resolve. Note that Verisign’s definition of a parked page is a site with one web page. Many parked pages may actually be considered realweb sites by this definition.

You can see the entire briefing here.

Business 2.0 has a new article about the rising value on non-.com domain names.

.Com is king. We all know that. But it seems like every week we see huge domain prices for non-.com domains. Of particular interest is .de, which frequently rings up 6-figure sales.

A recent Business 2.0 article discusses this trend. The article reveals (for the first time, I believe) that Hotels.eu sold for $330,000 and Shopping.eu sold for $200,000 back in July via Sedo.

The article points to a few hot international markets:

And in the latest twist, domain investors have been bidding up prices of domain names around the world. The dot-com ending - “.com” - is still the Rodeo Drive of the Web, but as Internet usage spreads around the globe, the demand for suffixes like .eu (European Union), .es (Spain), .cn (China) and .br (Brazil) is heating up, too.

I haven’t seen any sort of “trend” for .br domains, but there’s been lots of news about .es and .cn domains lately. The big question on .eu is whether that massive speculation of the domain will actually reduce its value: too many domains registered for resale rather than use.

Sedo is the undeniable king of international domain sales. The article quotes Tim Schumacher of Sedo:

Tim Schumacher, CEO of domain-name trading website Sedo, says that, like stock investors, domain investors are looking to diversify. And one way to do that is to invest in non-dot-com domains from elsewhere in the world. Several American-based registrars are offering ways to buy domains from other countries, but of course it takes some research to figure out which ones might make sense to gamble on.

Schumacher argues that the trend is just beginning, and in many countries the market has huge potential. A key reason is that in many parts of the world, dot-com is not the preferred domain suffix. In Germany, for instance, companies advertise their .de Web addresses more prominently than their .com addresses. “It’s really a local thing,” he says.

Keep in mind, however, that many countries have restrictions on who can register their domain names. Canadian domains (.ca) are popular but you must have an established link to Canada to register. There are ways around this, such as setting up a foreign entity there, but many would consider this unethical.