Name Intelligence show leaves the Seattle area for fourth show.

For its fourth Domain Roundtable (DRT) conference, Name Intelligence (parent company of Domain Tools) is moving the conference to San Franciso. The event will take place at The Palace Hotel April 18-21.

I caught up with Name Intelligence’s Jay Westerdal and Susan Prosser to get a preview of the upcoming event. Prosser is organizing the conference.

What will be the overriding theme of the next Domain Roundtable?

Understanding that conference attendees gain the most with networking and from what they learn and earn, the theme is Network, Learn and Earn. There are roundtables of SEO understanding and methods, domain valuation, DomainTools education, portfolio management, and others. All of these are geared for the audience to learn how to earn more. The facility itself is ideal for networking. The exhibit area has been designed with networking alcoves and lounge areas for everyone to gather and mingle -and network. Thus, our theme: Network, Learn and Earn.

DRT 2008 is scheduled to start on a Friday and end on Monday. Most domain conferences, including your previous ones, took place during the work week. Why did you make this decision?

We knew we wanted to hold a DRT in the spring time and in a location outside of Seattle. Finding the location was the first priority considering time of year and attraction for host cities. San Francisco seemed a natural fit. The city is very tech savvy which opens up the local attendee base; it hosts a lot of events however not many Domain industry events; and, is a very
attractive city to explore. Finding a time then that would work with current events already set on the calendar, in a facility that was attractive for hosting, the best option available was a weekend. There are two major conferences being held in San Francisco surrounding ours. AdTech is prior and Web 2.0 is following our DRT conference dates. Both of these conferences draw similar audiences. We have already had feedback from attendees of either AdTech or Web2.0 stating they will extend their stay to attend DRT.

[Editor’s note: here’s a tip for those attending. I’ve stayed at The Palace Hotel. Nice ambience, fairly good (if dated) rooms, but the parking is a whopping $48 per night. There are public garages in the area that charge only $20, so look them up before you go or take a cab. On the plus side, by holding this event on the weekend the hotel rates are cheaper than normal.]

What do you have in store for the auction at DRT?

After setting the bar high with the first simultaneous Live and Online Auction, we need to continue to be the leader in this area. We are making improvements to the interface for customers in submitting and managing their domains in auction. The auction will have 250 domains. Plus, we are adding a new option in the DomainTools Auction system for DRT attendees a guaranteed submission into the auction. This submission will also have no reserve restrictions. There are a couple of other pieces being added that will be disclosed later.

[Editor’s note: I’ve received an update that the 250 domains do not include the guaranteed submissions from attendees. DRT hopes to get over 500 attendees. ]

Who is managing the show for Name Intelligence this year?
Susan Prosser is now managing the Domain Roundtable. She has been in production and operations for twelve years. Susan worked with Ray Bero and Jay Westerdal, founders of Name Intelligence, at the internet company Interland. At Interland, Inc. (now Website Pros), she was Site Manager and Director of Production and Operations for their data centers located throughout the U.S.

Special interest group suggests that non-refundable $.20 fee is not enough to stop domain tasting.

The Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse (CADNA) released a report today about expired domain drop catching. It’s an interesting report and contains good data, although I don’t agree with all of its conclusions.

CADNA hired Zooknic to study 17,000 randomly selected domains dropping on September 18, 2007. Of those names, 100% of the .net and .com domains released were registered by the end of September. Only 21% of the .org domains were registered. Many of the domains were registered and released, and many were released more than once.

The study found that Demand Media’s eNom was the most involved with domain drop catching. It registered 33% of the domains. eNom retained 1,254 domains by the end of September, the report study concluded. Other active registrars included BelgiumDomains, CapitolDomains, and DomainDoorman.

Since these latter three domain registrars are well known for cybersquatting, it was easy for CADNA to draw the parallels to domain dropping and cybersquatting. But the report suggests that all expired domain catching is bad and is associated with criminal activity.

CADNA concludes that a non-refundable $.20 fee charged for each registration isn’t enough to stop domain tasting. I agree that it won’t completely stop tasting. It will, however, curb tasting and dramatically cut kiting. At $.20 per 5 day period, that’s $14.60 per year for a kited domain. CADNA points out, and I agree, that even if domains couldn’t be monetized in the first five days (as was incorrectly suggested on Domain Tools’ blog last week), this would not eliminate domain tasting. I agree; simply monitoring traffic during the 5 day period is probably enough to determine whether the domain will be profitable if registered.

CADNA suggests adding an additional fee of at least 50% of the domain registration fee for any domain returned during the add-grace period. Furthermore, registrars would have an even higher return fee if they return greater than a certain percentage of registered domains.

I think this goes too far. There are legitimate reasons to return domain names. Registrars deal with credit card fraud daily. A competing registrar or criminal could easily start charging domains to a bad credit card to run up costs. Instead, a fair way to resolve this would be to make the $.20 ICANN fee and any additional fees kick in only after a certain threshold has been met (e.g. after 3% of all registered domains are returned.)

Let’s not forget that .Org has successfully curbed domain tasting with the implementation of a small fee. Perhaps that is why only 21% of .org domains were registered (correct me if the fee wasn’t in place in September).

See the entire report here (PDF)

Google is smart, and it proved it with its “we are not evil” approach to domain kiting.

I knew those engineers at Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) were smart. But they also have smart PR skills.

Last week, Google decided to let the world know it was going to stop monetizing kited domains — those domains that are continually dropped and re-registered during the 5 day registration grace period. It found a mule to report this to the world and show how Google was a great company. (The initial report said that Google wouldn’t monetize domains less than five days old. This was incorrect — they will only stop monetizing kited domains.)

And we bit. The story got 944 Diggs. The Associated Press picked up the story: Google was good. It wasn’t fair to monetize these domains. So it would stop doing it.

But then some smart people started asking questions. Sahar Sarid asked why Google would suddenly stop doing this, after not bowing to pressure from lawsuits. Bret Fausett pointed out that just one domain taster was making millions each month.

So why would Google stop serving ads?

Well, it turns out it wasn’t such a “change of heart” and “do no evil” after all. You see, the day prior to this story breaking, ICANN’s board voted to change the fees for domains to include a “return” fee on domains returned during the five day registration period. I hadn’t read the minutes from this board meeting yet, as hadn’t anyone else with a voice. (What, you don’t get juiced up to read the latest ICANN board minutes??)

So Google learned that ICANN was going to effectively make domain kiting unprofitable, and decided to come out ahead of the news and say it would no longer monetized kited domains.

It was brilliant, and almost everyone fell for it.

[Editor’s note: I wrote this article for publication Wednesday morning. In the mean time, Domain Name News followed up with Google and clarified Domain Tools’ originally misleading report. Adam Strong did a great job following up on this issue and analyzing what it means for domain tasting and kiting. You need to read it. And you need to add Domain Name News to your RSS reader as well.]

Read Domain Name Wire from your mobile phone at DomainNameWire.mobi.

Readers can now get the latest domain name news via their mobile phone at DomainNameWire.mobi.

Reading blogs on mobile phones can be difficult, but now visitors using a mobile phone (Blackberry, Treo, et all) to visit Domain Name Wire will be presented with a modified version of the site that loads quickly and renders properly on small mobile screens.

OK, so you don’t actually have to use the domain DomainNameWire.mobi to access the site. It just forwards to the main site, and your mobile browser will detect the mobile version. But I figured as a domain site I should use the .mobi extension

Here’s my mobile readiness score from mTLD before making this change:

Ouch. Not so pretty. Here’s the new score:

Not perfect, but much better. I tested in on my Verizon Treo 755p and it renders very well. Almost all graphics are stripped out except for those inside posts.

Want to make your web site mobile friendly? Get the WordPress Mobile plug-in from Alex King.

New services show the trend continues, but are automated site generators the future of domain parking?

In September 2007 I wrote about DomainEmbarking.com, a service that generates a parking page that looks more like a real web site than a parked page.

For a brief history of automated site generation, here’s a snippet from that article:

A few years ago savvy entrepreneurs figured out they could mass-develop web sites based on niche keywords and penetrate search engines. A number of software programs were released that auto-generated 1,000 page web sites. Most of these generators would take a few keywords you submitted, generate a list of related keywords from Overture, and then “screen-scrape” search results and news articles that included those keywords.

And it worked for a while. I used a program to create these sites and started earning over $1,000 a day. But then search engines like Google started cracking down on two fronts. First, they told Adsense publishers (like me) that these sites didn’t meet their quality expectations. There went my grand a day. Second, they tweaked their algorithms to kick out these mass-produced sites. For example, they took into consideration how quickly a site grew. A site that appears with 1,000 pages of content on the first day probably isn’t legit.

There are a couple more services now, including one with venture backing, that offer enhanced parking services that automatically generate web sites based on domain names. Will they thrive where past efforts have failed?

Rob Monster thinks so. His Monster Venture Partners, which also backs Healthcare.com, Patents.com, and SharedReviews, just funded EVOLanding.

In its own words, EVOlanding is a next-generation domain monetization platform built around its ability to rapidly generate topic-relevant, media-rich websites.

Examples of sites using the platform include StockTrades.com and DoubleTonic.com.

Pictured: landing page for DoubleTonic.com

EVOLanding CEO Geoffrey Nuval is quick to differentiate his product from auto site generators. “Other ‘next-generation’ services currently out there are not very much different from the automated site generators of yesteryear,” said Nuval. “Their main purpose is to trick search engines into bringing them traffic, but just like a traditional parking page those visitors very rarely return as there is no real value provided to them.”

Nuval says EVOLanding has built its architecture with a sophisticated semantic engine so that it can provide relevant, specific content and create a unique website that users actually return to. The company has deals with content partners such as Shopping.com, Epinions, and Podcast.com. The company shares revenue with domain owners.

A competing service is WhyPark.com. WhyPark is different from traditional parking companies in that it gives domainers 100% of revenue. Domain owners pay a one time fee of $99 to create and host up to 100 domain sites.

WhyPark founder Craig Rowe claims that 33% of traffic WhyPark domains receive is organic search traffic. Even better, 20% of the traffic is from repeat visitors.

Rowe also differentiates his service from auto generators of the past. “The pages are by no means static and each domain ultimately becomes a niche, themed site with its own unique blend of content,” said Rowe. “We use search engine and web development best practices and keep an eye on webmaster guidelines.”

So is this the wave of the future? Will traditional domain parking be replaced by these new services?

There are a couple things working in their favor. First, click rates on traditional parking pages might wane as web surfers become familiar with them. Also, more and more domain owners are registering domains that don’t get type-in traffic and must attract search engines. With a team of on-staff engineers managing search engines, these services offer hope that they will succeed.

But questions still remain. Will search engines try to eliminate these sites from their indexes? Will they find “footprints” in pages to remove them?

Ironically, the key to success may reside in limiting its success. The more auto-generated sites, the more overlap…and the higher likelihood that the search engines will take notice. For its part, EVOLanding has only accepted about 8%-9% of domains submitted to its system.

Regardless, it’s worth considering these services for your domains that don’t receive much type-in traffic.