The Death of Overture
Tuesday, January 9th, 2007
Yahoo’s new search marketing platform will eliminate Overture as a domainer’s tool.
“Overture” is a well-known term to domainers. Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) purchased Overture, a pay-per-click search marketing company, and renamed it Yahoo! Search Marketing. But the Moniker “overture” has stayed in the domainer lingo.
More specifically, the domain industry refers to the “Overture Score” of a domain as the number of times the domain was searched for on Yahoo properties in any given month. For example, if a domain had an “Overture plus extension” score of 100, then 100 people typed the domain name with the extension (e.g. domain.com) into a Yahoo-related search box during the month. The theory is that if that many people mistakenly typed the domain into a search box then many more people managed to type the domain into the browser. Thus, the domain gets a lot of type-in traffic.
Although an unwilling participant, Yahoo has helped bid up the value of domain names by providing third party data about type-ins. For example, the typo expired domain Voyuer.com sold for $112,100 in 2005 thanks in part to its 2,549 Overture+Ext score.
But the gravy train of valuable data is coming to an end. Late last year Yahoo released its long-awaited “Panama” update for search marketing. It is a completely overhauled search marketing system. Among the changes is removing specific data about the number of searches a particular keyword receives. Instead, advertisers only see a bar graph with one to five units indicating the amount of traffic:
Furthermore, advertisers can no longer search for a particular keyword. Advertisers must input at least three keywords to generate results and these results may not include the actual keyword searched for:
For now, access to search data is still available to advertisers who have not migrated their accounts to the new platform. Additionally, the free site inventory.overture.com still offers the data, although the site is down more than it is available.
The era of Overture scores is coming to an end.
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Wow, that’s a big change. I really like the Overture site. I use it a lot as one of mine research tools to search and evaluate possible domain names before I purchasing.
The new format resembles the google keyword research tool. I would steer towards the google version only because you can type in one keyword instead of three.
Overture was cool, but the site definitely suffered from some major lag. I started using google exclusively a couple of months ago for this reason.
One thing is for sure, the death of overture leaves the door open for someone to create a new scoring system that domainers can rely on. The hard part will be pulling it off without having access to the numeric search stats.
[...] http://domainnamewire.com/2007/01/09/the-death-of-overture/Â [...]
It is really sad. The tool was a daily part of my life. I need to look for an alternative now.
Wordtracker.com will sort you out.
Mike Mindel
CTO
Wordtracker
Mike, although many people rave about WordTracker, it does cost money…which Overture didn’t
Also, can you shed some light on where the data comes from? If I recall correctly it’s from a much smaller data sample.
[...] The Death of Overture I for one have relied on this tool, so what does this mean for all of us as it relates to value on keywords, and domain prices? The Death of Overture Tuesday, January 9th, 2007 Yahoo’s new search marketing platform will eliminate Overture as a domainer’s tool. “Overture” is a well-known term to domainers. Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) purchased Overture, a pay-per-click search marketing company, and renamed it Yahoo! Search Marketing. But the moniker “overture” has stayed in the domainer lingo. More specifically, the domain industry refers to the “Overture Score” of a domain as the number of times the domain was searched for on Yahoo properties in any given month. For example, if a domain had an “Overture plus extension” score of 100, then 100 people typed the domain name with the extension (e.g. domain.com) into a Yahoo-related search box during the month. The theory is that if that many people mistakenly typed the domain into a search box then many more people managed to type the domain into the browser. Thus, the domain gets a lot of type-in traffic. Although an unwilling participant, Yahoo has helped bid up the value of domain names by providing third party data about type-ins. For example, the typo expired domain Voyuer.com sold for $112,100 in 2005 thanks in part to its 2,549 Overture+Ext score. But the gravy train of valuable data is coming to an end. Late last year Yahoo released its long-awaited “Panama” update for search marketing. It is a completely overhauled search marketing system. Among the changes is removing specific data about the number of searches a particular keyword receives. Instead, advertisers only see a bar graph with one to five units indicating the amount of traffic. Domain Name Wire » Blog Archive » The Death of Overture – The Domain Industry’s News Source __________________ http://www.wordshift.com [...]
In regards to WordTracker, it is affordable if you have to have that kind of data. The Google AdWords Keyword Tool is very, very useful as well. The Overture Tool was getting unusable lately anyway.
Another alternative is the KeywordDiscovery – Keyword Research Tool Paid like wordtracker – but with lots of features and has a free trial that you can use to access the top 10 results for any keyword.
Cheers
David
Try http://www.keywordspy.com