Is Microsoft looking to buy into the domain market? It could be a winning strategy.
You may have read a few rumors lately that Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) may be getting into the domain name business.
The last time I talked to a Microsoft representative on the record, he said the company was very interested in the domain channel but had no immediately plans to provide an ad feed to parked domains.
Would Microsoft be so bold as to buy up hundreds of thousands of generic domain names? It’s plausible.
Microsoft has lagged both Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) in search. It has invested lots of money trying to improve search and even launched its own pay-per-click ad network. The search efforts haven’t paid off. So Microsoft decided to buy marketshare but Yahoo rebuffed it.
In other words, the company is having trouble improving to get market share and trouble buying market share.
But there’s one avenue in which the company could buy up search traffic: generic domains. Owen Frager’s suggestion that Microsoft may be looking to buy portfolios from Frank Schilling, Kevin Ham, and Marchex* (NASDAQ: MCHX) actually makes some sense. Microsoft could just forward the pages to Microsoft search results alongside its ads if it wants to. It could buy a lot of traffic to its search product in little time. This would make Microsoft search relevant again, and potentially be a lot cheaper than buying Yahoo.
We know Microsoft is interested in the domain channel. Time will tell how it plans to engage with it.
*I own a nominal number of shares of Marchex.
I wasn’t suggesting just asking since it’s always been a matter of time. And yes Microsoft is buying domains and parking them with themselves. Here’s 3 of about 9,000 examples I can show you:
tokyo.org
oatmail.com
intunetogether.com
more here- just plug and play:
http://fragerfactor.blogspot.com/2008/06/microsoft-accelerates-domain-sweep.html
I had presented several examples on Rick’s board months ago
Yea they could, but they are as dumb as dirt.
For example, the radically change hotmail every two years for no apparent reason other than to annoy people.
Almost as dumb as aol.com
Go to aol.com and quickly click on Mail.
Belive it or not it brings you to Yahoo mail.
Would Microsoft be so bold as to buy up hundreds of thousands of generic domain names? It’s plausible.
They alredy on of the world’s most hated companies. Being known at the world’s largest “cybersquatter” won’t help their image.
Notice I put it in quotes.
I think MSFT should buy Ask.com myself.
I think the best deal would be for Ask.com to first redo their own advertising network and expand it internationally.
Ask needs to start expanding their OWN advertising channel, not Google’s. You’d think that Ask has a good number of advertisers since they are the 3rd or 4th biggest search engine, but they are terrible. We had their feed, and cancelled ON THEM, since they had barely any coverage, and extremely low CPC for the coverage that they did have. And they didn’t even support North America, all they support is USA. Not even Canada.
Microsoft is completely lost. They barely syndicate to content partners, and they do not syndicate to any search partners that I know of. I think they need to wake up and start syndicating out to search partners and domain parking companies. Unfortunately, statistics show that 80% of all parked domain name revenues are from typos, at the very least. And I don’t believe Microsoft will open up a domain parking channel because they are so much against typos.
Anyway – I think Ask and Microsoft are doomed when it comes to domain parking. Even if they do start syndicating, it will take them at least another 2 or more years to do so. Yahoo is slowly slipping away altogether, and Google doesn’t like handing out any feeds anymore. So that leaves us all pretty much trapped.
What was the name of representative? Probably its just that someone wants to sell his stocks with profit. The news itself has no substance.
@ Owen: tokyo.org belongs to Microsoft? How do you read that from whois privacy?
@ Eiermann – Your comment doesn’t make any sense. If you take the time to click the link about what the representative said, you’ll see who it was.
Microsoft has lagged for years now in internet innovation. But I don’t count them out. They launched Xbox and took big market share. Not to mention Windows continues to be a global leader as well as Microsoft Office.
Moving into the direct navigation direction via generic domain names would be a wise investment direction in my opinion. In fact, Microsoft need to make this move soon and in a big way, or else get beat to the punch again by any number of big players who are looking closely at our industry.
They are so far behind at this point, not sure what they can actually achieve. They were more interested in lawsuits against.. in many cases rightfully so.. domainers. But they lacked any real foresight about search/traffic.
Mike,
Why would Microsoft buying up Generic domains make them a cybersquatter? If they were trademarked domains, or typos of TM domains that it is another story.
By definition, Generic is Generic.
Kelly
that is why I put it in quotes. That is what they would be called. I’m not saying it but the rest of thw world would. The rest of world would want to know why MS is warehousing hundreds of thousands of generics.
The term cybersquatter isn’t going away and we are not going to change the meaning of it.
I read your initial post too quickly.
Still, we will either change the meaning of cybersquater very quickly or domaining will cease to be our way of life. It is up to us to do the damage control, as a unified group or individually.
As Rick Schwartz said to Etan at Traffic once “Don’t understand why you guys rent when you can own.”
Wow MSFT is already n the domain business. That is big news. Would be smart of them to buy someone up and would be great for us domainers too.