An update to my review of geo domain monetization solution.

It’s been over a year since I provided early results from monetizing domain names on Octane360.

I titled my review “Octane360 Takes Domain Monetization Beyond PPC“.

Although I’m still happy with my results on Octane360, a lot of things have changed since my original review — including the “beyond PPC”. As it turns out, over half of my revenue on the system is coming from PPC now.

The big change came when Local.com acquired the company for up to $11 million. Based on milestone payments the company has received since then (as detailed in Local.com’s recent annual report), Octane360 seems to be firing on all cylinders.

As a refresher, the service monetizes geo domain names such as CincinnatiPainters.com and LittlerockSiding.com. It creates a site for each domain that has multiple monetization methods: paid monthly listings, lead forms, and pay-per-click.

Local.com has a very strong PPC feed for local traffic and this has given a big boost to Octane360′s revenue stream. PPC from this feed now generates more than half of my revenue with the service.

I have just over 250 domains on the system. At any given time there are about 20-25 sold listings on the sites. Because of the sales commissions paid on these listings you make about $5 per listing per month. This is nothing to sneeze at — a listing sold for two months pays your entire registration fee for a year. If someone buys a listing directly on a site you get a much larger fee. I’ve found the churn on listings to be higher than I hoped, though.

Some of the domain names in my portfolio are hard to sell listings against (e.g. “prefab” domains), so I suspect other people are getting a higher listing-to-site sales ratio.

On the downside, Octane360 domain names aren’t doing so well in search. In my original review I reported that 90% of them were on the first page of Google for the exact match term. I even sold a couple of the sites to local business owners partly because of those good rankings.

But Google isn’t smiling upon the sites anymore. Now only a handful appear on the first page of Google.

That’s not necessarily a problem. My top 10 sites last month totaled about $100 in revenue with a median RPM of $1,166 thanks to listing revenue. Overall my RPM over the past month is $27, with $10.64 contributed from listings and $16.46 from PPC.

On standard parked pages I’d probably earn about a $10 RPM on these domains and get less traffic thanks to no search visitors.

In a nutshell, Octane360 is still a winner…even if it’s winning in a different way than I first imagined.

Government may block access to .xxx.

India’s government will block access to the .xxx top level domain name, according to an article in The Economic Times.

A senior official at the ministry of IT said that the domain goes against the country’s IT Act and Indian laws.

Other countries will certainly block the top level domain name, but this shouldn’t worry adult site operators. After all, many countries currently filter the web sites accessible within their borders. As long as adult sites aren’t forced to use .xxx this won’t affect them. (I don’t see a forced conversion as a possibility. Only the U.S. government would really be able to try such a thing given its special relationship with the root zone. Some congressman might propose such a scheme to appease his or her conservative base, but it wouldn’t go anywhere.)

But the article also quotes an Indian “cyber lawyer” who says this move could easily be challenged in court. He said it’s illegal to distribute adult content but watching it is permitted.

Take the article for what it’s worth — it also says .xxx registry ICM Registry is “set to make $200 million” and that it “has already registered about 250,000 domains…even before approval came in this month”. That’s not true. Even if the latter part was true, that wouldn’t come close to $200 million.

Startup with big funding bought Color.com for $350,000 in December.

In December I wrote about a GoDaddy-brokered sale of Color.com for $350,000.

We now know the buyer — a hot photo sharing startup with $41 million in funding from Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital, and Silicon Valley Bank before it even launched.

Jason Kincaid of TechCrunch describes it as a location-based twitter for photos. Here’s one scenario he describes:

Say you walk into a restaurant with twenty people in it. You sit down at a table with four friends, and start chatting. Then one of your friends pulls out their phone, fires up Color, and takes a snapshot of you and your buddies.

That photo is now public to anyone within around 100 feet of the place it was taken. So if anyone else in the restaurant fires up Color, they’ll see the photograph listed in a stream alongside other photos that have recently been taken in the vicinity.

I like the choice of Color.com for this company. On the downside the word is spelled differently across the pond. [Update: they also acquired Colour.com, which means these guys are even smart than I thought. Sedo auctioned Colour.com last month. It didn't hit the reserve but got up to $83,000. It looks like the got control of Colour.com around March 1.] But the upside is it’s a branded generic. The company will be able to earn trademark rights in the term given that it’s using it for distinct use (it’s not a site about colors).

Also, I just noticed that DotWeekly uncovered a while back that Color.com founder Bill Nguyen was the likely buyer. Now we know what he was up to.

This will be an interesting one to watch.

Jewelry giant goes after guy’s last name.

Tim Gordon registered Gordons.com back in 1995. It was an obvious domain name for him given his family’s last name.

But in 2011, more than 15 years after he registered the domain name, a Zale Corporation subsidiary that runs Gordon’s Jewelers filed a complaint with National Arbitration Forum to get the domain name.

Tim Gordon just won the case. The single person panel ruled that Gordon has rights or legitimate interests in the domain name (duh) and that it wasn’t originally registered in bad faith (no kidding?).

To be fair, Mr. Gordon started playing around with the domain lately to take advantage of visitors who were looking for the famous jeweler. He set up parked pages with DomainSponsor.

He claims he didn’t think about doing this until a representative of DomainSponsor contacted him and suggested that he use the jeweler template “because that is one of their top revenue producers”.

There are some other aspects of his response that probably draw his defense into question. Had he hired a lawyer he would have answered the complaint better. But the end result is he won.

Utah company files trademark application for .vote.

Will .vote be among the applications for new top level domain names filed later this year?

A Utah company filed a trademark application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office last Friday for .vote for “Domain name registration services”.

[Update: this is a refiling of .vote. The USPTO refused an earlier application by the company.]

The applicant is Pack Holdings, LLC, a company that has scarce record on the internet. However, another company that pops up in a Google search for the Utah address is a political consulting firm. The group does “get out the vote” calls, fundraising, volunteer training, etc.

It’s not entirely clear if this is the same applicant and there is a non-profit that was registered at the same address.

I could see how this could be used for a number of political purposes. But the big winner will be the owners of vote.com.