Acro.net - Technology Rants & Raves by Acroplex®

Ever since I started registering domains with the intention to develop or resell (the option to monetize was added much later) I decided to stick to the same basic principle: if it’s in the dictionary, it’s something I can use. If I can use it, others can. If others can, then I have established the motive to register or purchase it.

I can honestly say that the selling potential of dictionary .com, .net, .org domains - the original TLD triad - is a sure winner. As long as I don’t need a dictionary to establish what the word means! Of course, there are dubious spellings or common typos, but the bottom line is that a positive dictionary word serves its purpose well, in real life and in the online commerce world.

I recall buying Gravity.org for a mere $105 on DNForum, at a time when everyone else was looking to buy domains with type-in traffic or typos. I’ve stuck to my guns of picking up dictionary domains as often as I can and this principle has paid off in the long run, more times than I can recall. Four years ago, Gravity.org was sold to a nice guy, who has since then developed it into a beautiful web site depicting his literary work.

Later on, I discovered a great source of such dictionary domains in the form of a well-known parking guru who decided to do what was best at that time, having had thousands of domains that generated little parking income and had renewal fees to be paid. I managed to pick up a lot of these domains in private transactions or via forums; others I bought on eBay and via direct communication with their owners.

There were so many dictionary domains in these days between 2002-2005 that could be had for as little as $20 to just over $100 - I became more organized when such sales would occur, by keeping Notepad open to paste into it the entire list and then I’d delete quickly the names I did not want. I found that to be faster than pasting over the ones that I might want.

It’s shocking even to me, that one such domain that I picked for $50 at a “feeding frenzy” sale on DNForum three years ago, was just sold for a whopping $6,000 via Sedo. Then again, I’ve had other such large sales of dictionary domains in the past - but none resulted in such a high return on investment. I will have to thank my traffic guru seller for this. By the way, it’s an .ORG!

It’s often frustrating trying to sell dictionary domains with inherent potential at reseller forums; the expected responses immediately inquire about traffic stats. When the brand is built around a domain that cannot be misspelled or mistyped, the traffic shall come. What won’t come again, is an abundance of dictionary words in the original three TLDs.

Frank Schilling, in his last blog post in months made this monumental statement:

A few years back I was approached by a company and encouraged to place my domain names for sale through their marketplace. I was given a host of reasons why this was a good idea. “These names don’t make any money”.. “ Selling the names will actually improve my overall portfolio’s value”.. “Selective pruning is just prudent”. Shortly thereafter, a second domain marketplace called. They suggested I sell my names through ‘them’ and that I should cap my purchase prices at $5,000 because that was the limit of automated credit card processors in their scenario.. They even sent me a list of names that I should sell.. tens of thousands of them that don’t make enough to cover their renewals.. and If I could get $2,000-$5,000 each wouldn’t that be Fabulous?! The problem as I looked through my list was that many of the names they suggested I sell were pretty good. I’d pay more than 2-5k for many of these names if they were dropping at auction. I politely declined their offer.

One should employ additional means of measuring the potential value of a domain, other than its visitor figures, and dictionary domains maintain a strong reselling potential regardless of the existing traffic. An experienced domainer will soon acquire a “gut feeling”, an “on-the-fly” evaluation ability that only comes after several successful transactions - and a few monumental failures.

At the same time, one should ensure that a solid business plan is in place; for which I recommend the services of a qualified Certified Public Accountant (CPA) so that every dollar earned or expended is accounted for. I know that I will paying a whole lot more in taxes next year.

What is the domain that resulted in an 120-fold ROI ? You’ll have to keep your eyes peeled on Sedo’s sales for that, in the next few days

From behind the iron curtain of a middle Eastern nation known for its anti-American sentiment, a self-proclaimed hacker seems to be the perpetrator of a series of recent, high profile purchases of domains - using stolen credit cards.

Using proxy servers located in Iraq, he took control of a Network Solutions user account and its main domain, Get-Hosted.com. Then, using either a credit card associated with the account or other stolen credit cards, he made purchases of domains offered for sale via the Network Solutions marketplace. These domains are brokered by two major players in the domain after-market field, BuyDomains and Fabulous.

Apparently, he tried the fraud scheme first at Fabulous, as their domains are typically priced lower. After testing the waters of his process by making several small purchases, he turned his attention to the higher-priced domains offered by BuyDomains. A week or so later, his appetite was large enough that one of these purchases made it on DNJournal: DomainTools.net was sold for $4,088.

Fabulous reacted quickly, reversing between 5 and 6 purchases of about $350 each and regaining control of the domains within days of the incident. The perpetrator, having gained experience from this test run, then decided to alter his process; the roughly 6 large purchases he made from BuyDomains were immediately transfered out to the compromised Network Solutions account and WHOIS protection was added.

Having used stolen credit cards - in other words, other people’s money - it was time now for the hacker to capitalize on the value of the assets; an estimated $25,000 worth of domains. Not too shy about declaring his location (Iraq), he created two accounts at DNForum and offered the domains for a quick sale, at extremely low prices. These aged or otherwise generic names were being offered for $200 to $500 each, with a couple of others seeking offers.

The DNForum sales thread about one of these domains, xdev.com, had a short lifespan; the domain was still listed for sale at Afternic by BuyDomains with a hefty $9,700 price tag on it. And yet, the seller was eager to take any amount of money, ranging from $1,500 up to a BIN price of $5,000. After all, he never paid a penny out of pocket for these domains. The DNForum community was quick to determine that the sale was extremely suspicious and to alert the moderators about the ongoing scam.

Other domains offered for sale included Getting.net, DomainTools.net, DoTrust.com and OrbitPay.com - all of them were being offered at unreasonably low prices. Thankfully, DomainTools.com maintains historical data on domain ownership; it was easy to see that all these domains followed the same pattern: they were sold recently by BuyDomains and were instantly transferred to Network Solutions, to an account with WHOIS shield.

It’s probably the first time that several major players in the domain market were involved as the direct victims of a scam:

• BuyDomains and Fabulous were defrauded, giving up domains in exchange for stolen funds
• Network Solutions & potentially Afternic were used as a Trojan Horse to facilitate the purchases through their respective marketplaces
• Sedo was consequently used by the scammer as a point of sale for some of these domains

Additionally, Visa and Mastercard obviously had to reimburse funds and to reverse charges to the legitimate owners of these credit cards.

Currently, all of the domains appear to have been recovered in a special trust account at Network Solutions. The investigation is ongoing, with regards to the legal ramifications of this act which could amount to tens of thousands of dollars in billable time. It would not be surprising if finally the FBI and Interpol are involved in this case.

Over the course of recent years, Internet scams have proliferated into segments of the global market that were left untouched by traditional crime. It’s imperative that international politics ensure a smoother relationship and cooperation between nations, instead of leaving predatory “black holes” such as Iran, Iraq and North Korea. These criminals operating from such countries feel untouchable by the lack of law and punishment in their own countries and often engage in these acts as a “sport” or a “hobby” - gaining bragging rights among their peers.

However, when other people’s money is involved, it’s not a game anymore.

In my early domaining days I was simply pointing my domains to a web form for visitors with an interest in purchasing, to leave their contact information. This went on for several years and I can easily say I lost several thousand dollars this way. In 2004 I shyly started using the parking service of Sedo.com, slowly adding more names until my account was upgraded to Sedo Pro.

Now, I sometimes have the reputation of an outspoken guy in online forums. That’s true; I will stick to my guns until the battle smoke clears up, but I always strive to be objective and accurate to the circumstances surrounding my point of view.

Sedo’s services and interface have substantially improved over the past four years. They offer a variety of templates with a customizable image and the editing is quick. There are some drawbacks that I should mention first - just to get them out of my system.

• Sedo does not support meta tags, such as description and keywords. It really hurts a domain in the long run, especially one that competes in Google for term relevancy. Sedo made a statement that Google asked them to do that and I simply cannot believe this statement.
• Adding domains is easy as long as the WHOIS info matches that of the account. For the most part, it works well. Sometimes, especially on a Friday afternoon, the domains will be delayed and added to the account the following Monday. Unless that Monday is a public holiday in the US, the UK or Germany.
• Changing the domain keyword is a pain; it takes up to 3 days for that to happen as they are manually approved.
• Google feed. Sometimes payments are extremely low, sometimes they are decent. Fluctuation has earned Sedo the term “yo-yo revenue”.

In mid-2007 I started using Parked.com right at a time that their feature list exploded: Custom templates, full-featured meta tag customization, addition of custom content including images & video. The guys at Parked.com really listen to what domainers need. Did I mention that their keyword parser - the code that splits a domain name into intelligible words - has no close competitor? I fed it the domain NATIONWIDEMORTGAGELICENSINGSYSTEMANDREGISTRY.COM and it properly split it into “Nationwide Mortgage Licensing System And Registry“. By the way, this is my longest domain and it does get type-ins.

Parked.com has some negatives, so I will list them here:

• Yahoo feed seems a bit sketchy after they implemented the “TQ” factor, some oddball quotient that pretends to judge the quality of traffic, awarding accordingly more or less money per click. I branded “TQ” as “Thieving Quotient” and it’s one Yahoo feature I clearly dislike.
• Template flavors seem to alternate unpredictably between single-click and two-click; the former awarding more money per click than the latter.
• Downtime. Sometimes it’s unplanned or with short notice, but it happens more often than necessary. Compensation does occur though.
• Donny’s special attention to all things Parked seems to backfire when criticism reaches a certain critical mass. He just takes things personally and the various such threads, mainly on DNForum.com become true battlefields. Still, he said once he’d buy me a beer so I think he’s a cool guy after all.
• No escrow services.

The things I like about Sedo include their unified approach as a company: nobody takes things personally, they do care about the customers despite certain complaints. They are very cordial on the phone - and trust me, I am not always the most soft-spoken person on a business call. Sedo offers great escrow service that almost never fails to deliver for both parties. Anonymity is implemented but for obvious reasons of not bypassing them, but why would one bypass the security of an affordable escrow service? Once one gets the hang of what keywords work best, it’s easy to change multiple domains via forms. Sedo pages load fast and certain template schemes seem to be really popular with visitors.

The things I like about Parked include the exquisite template customization, ability to add content and images, the intelligent keyword management and the visibility it provides in search engines via the meta tag management. Addition of domains and keyword modification is instant! Customer service is prompt and quick as well.

So, to recap: Sedo or Parked? I use both and it seems that domains that get lots of visits but few clicks at Sedo can be customized and perform well in Parked. One should try both PPC companies and preferably, split their domain portfolio among both. Currently, Sedo has a great geo-auction that will last for a total of 7 days, aptly titled “Around the World in 7 Days”. I have listed two of my domains there, Constantinople.com and Aegean.info - both with a reserve that matches the quality of the domain.

Now let’s go out and make some money!

When I was growing up as a teenager, my friend Mike would always say that one should seize every given opportunity by being alert and prepared. During our trips to downtown Athens’ “Silicon Valley” shops where all the new gadgets, computers and software first appeared, Mike would bring with him a small chunk of cash - “just in case“. Indeed, on several occasions he bought a computer peripheral or a new software game that existed in only a single copy. Sometimes he’d resell these at a nice mark-up. Mike would have done well on eBay - if it were around in the mid 80’s!

In today’s fast-paced, global community, opportunities arrive and go in bursts; the chances to get more things done diminish as the world economy and markets are interconnected, non-stop, 24/7. One has to split their sleeping pattern in order to achieve maximum alertness during the times that people from other timezones are actively promoting their offers and items.

The 6:30 am Domain Gold Rush days are long gone; nowadays domains worth more than their registration fee are rarely released to the general public, without being auctioned through a variety of after-market vendors, like NameJet, SnapNames and Pool. But one can still find great deals at various domain forums, where the sellers and buyers actively trade. At DNForum - the biggest domain name community on the Internet - one can find domains being offered at fixed prices, negotiable prices and …outrageous prices. The key to getting good deals is to keep a trained eye onto these sales.

Power naps help. Sleeping 30 minutes to 1 hour in the middle of the afternoon or early evening, helps restore the alertness and the ability to sustain oneself into the small hours of the night, before bed time. As I am writing this article at 2:15am, I am still plentifully energized by today’s power nap for a couple of more hours. This helps me keep in touch with the European and Asian markets that are active and several hours ahead of Eastern US time.

So there you have it: keep an alert eye, use the best resources, take power naps. Let the power grabs follow!