Live report from DOMAINfest in Los Angeles.
DOMAINfest 2010 kicked off this morning in Los Angeles with the first of two PITCHfest contests.
The judges were Eric Liaw (Technology Crossover Ventures), Adam Rioux (OCTANE360), Frank Schilling (Name Administration, Inc), and Ron Sheridan.
Updated: AdMarketplace won the competition.
Here are the presentations:
Samantha Frida from VeriSign – discussed VeriSign’s pending delete DNS traffic report. VeriSign releases reports on all DNS traffic for domains in pending delete status to registrars. Since VeriSign is the .com registry, it gets all of the traffic query data. (By the way, this is the tool I was referring to that would basically squash small domainers from getting expired traffic domains at reg fee. After tasting ended, some of these domains were available. With this report, registrars now have access to this data and can register the domains. Unless the registrars pass the data along, domainers can’t get access to it. Part of the reason Frida wanted to introduce the product was to urge registrars to share the data.)
Frank Schilling brought up the issue of it only being for registrars. Most other panelists said the same thing.
Jeremy Lopez from Elephant Traffic – company launched last year. They are basically like Sendori, sending domain traffic directly to advertisers. They monetize your domains if they can earn 25% more than your current parking company for the domain, otherwise the traffic is routed to your parking company. Compared to Sendori, they say that they are more transparent.
Feedback was that it has been tried before, the key is what’s under the hood. The panel would like to see it succeed. Ron pointed out that what they’re doing is difficult and very hands on.
Adam Epstein from AdMarketplace – 10 year old company with 100k advertisers. Introduced Ad Tag Cloud 2.0, where a number of keywords/terms are in a visually enhanced tag cloud. When you rollover your mouse on the keyword/term, the text ad shows, and then you can click on the ad. It’s a product for content publishers to compete with Google Adsense and its typical text ads. The ad format is available at PubMarketplace.com.
Feedback was generally positive, although the panelists pointed out its not for domain parking, it’s more of a content site ad block.
Michael Marcheses from Tempesta Media – Suite of domain technologies to find good domains. Long Tail Prospector predicts domain’s annual revenue from advertising, and assesses domain development ROI potential. Tempesta Media DMS is a complete domain development, promotion, and monetization platform that requires no work from domain owner.
Feedback focused on the site builder. Questions were around Google knocking sites out of its index (Tempesta says it uses unique content). Other questions were on the monetization side, which Tempesta doesn’t do.
The winner will be announced in a couple hours. I’ll update this story then.
