Looking for Domain Ideas? Scroll Through Recent Patent Applications
I’m on the side of the fence that thinks almost every good dot com in the world is taken. Notice how I said almost. There are opportunities to take advantage of that involve recent technologies and news. While I would rather spend my time making money to buy higher quality domains, I do like to try a little crap shoot every now and then. One of my favorite places to look is through recent patent applications.
I am not a name squatter. My point is not to try and take names from the patent applicants but rather to get a lead on new technology and ideas. Free Patents online lists each week new applications for patents. While some of these may have been applied for many months ago, none of them have received and may never receive patents. I get a kick out of some of the application so even if I don’t find a domain I usually get a chuckle. Here are a couple I found recently and to truly appreciate their beauty you should download the files that accompany the patent
Basketball Net with Tassels: The prettiest basketball net I’ve ever seen. Looks like a chandelier for your basketball court. For those times when you want to entertain on the court
FlavorFresh: A system to keep and transport produce and keep it in “just harvested” state. First thing that came to mind was justharvested.com. It IS available and I thought it was a nice name. FlavorFresh on the other hand…..taken. Interesting idea but I’m not sure how they’re going to inspect the truck using this method.
Fishing Lure Urn: What a better way to show off our dearly departed Uncle Charlie than to put his remains in a giant fishing lure urn. And yes fishinglureurn.com is available
Method for Determining Value of a Website Visitor: I actually found this one interesting. Didn’t understand a damn word it said but interesting
ZipJimmy.com I bet you never thought of this one. A condom with a zip tab to prevent “leakage” of the condom. An awful patent………..awfully painful
Slingshot Pouch: There has to be a market of at least 7 people that still use a slingshot. I have to admit the thing really hasn’t been improved in 2000 years so it’s probably due for a technological upgrade. Yes slingshotpouch.com is available
Wednesday’s Dropping Domains and Auctions
September here we come. Had all time sales records in ad income on my sites and domain sales in August. I sold just a few names but sold over $10,000 in names this month which for me is great. Did a little over $1200 on my adsense accounts which is also the best I’ve ever done. I need to do more and I have a bunch of sales of names I should be closing on here in the next few weeks. I also have two sites ehort.com and marathonfinder.com that my friend Mike are building out that I hope to have ready for the world soon. So as you can see looking for a HUGE September. Now onto the names
DogsPuppies.net Tons of searches but pays poorly (.35 CPC) Good one to develop
Concordance.com A PR6 domain.
LearnRussian.net Great click through on Learn Russian ads. How do I know? A Russian guy told me
Pdspp.com Nothing special here but 1992 domain so for that reason it has value
vivirmessenger.com godaddy says it gets over 100k uniques per month. Even compete says it gets 25K so Godaddy could be right. Good price for this type of traffic
Moolets.com 25,000 links and a PR5 is the reason behind the $2000 price tag already
Flashoutlet.com Another big price at Godaddy expiry. PR5 and DMOZ listed
Wow That Was Fast
First of all let me point out this is not a paid post. If you read my blog you’ll know I shoot straight from the hip and say it just as I see it. Good and Bad. I’m the first to criticize and the first to praise. Today I have praise for Rob Monster and Epik.
Rob has gotten used to my constant emails getting on him about things I’d like to see with my domains. To make it worse on Rob, I only had two with him. Yet despite my rants and raves, Rob always answers and does his best to make it right or at least give me an answer as to why. Would I like to see improvement? Sure, so would he, but things take time. One thing didn’t take time though, getting my domains to the top of Google.
I did Rob a favor a few weeks ago and he kindly traded the favor for a free development of a domain. I had just purchased bookbag.org for $400 and liked the amount of searches the term was getting. I figured the org actually worked for a school type item and the price seemed fair (what I paid for the domain and the free development) so I chose that as my freebie. That was just a few weeks ago and it’s already on the first page of Google and making a few dollars a week. He’s already gotten on the front page for my domain robotic pets but that was easier because there aren’t a ton of sites for that term. Bookbags has millions and yet there it sits.
I still have issues with Epik but they are all things that can and probably will be worked out and I certainly can’t argue with the results. Once you are on the front page of Google you are opening a big can of whoop ass. Especially on a big online buying term like book bags. Good Job Rob but don’t think this will slow down the “Can you do this/check on this for me” emails.
PS: Alabama Grad and not Virginia Tech fan. Easiest pic to grab
Tuesday’s Daily Dropping Domains And Auctions
Yesterday, DomainShane hit 100K uniques. I’m sure some of the bigger domain blogs get that in a week or month (I used to get that on a good DAY at my old blog) but for me I’m proud. I have a lot more fun and domaining in me so I’m going to keep humping it. Now onto the names. Not very much on the board today but that’s been more the rule than the exception
ABCRtys.com PR6 and tons of bidders. PR6s don’t come around very often and thus the high price
Goos.com Before you click, guess what you think this domain is up to at the auction. Now look………WOW! Loved the name but too rich for my blood
23Y.com Not my kind of domain but I actually like this one. Michael Jordan may have caused this love for 23
F***Sheep.com It’s a real dirty name but the only reason I am pointing this out is the fact that Google says there are no searches for this and THAT I don’t believe. Do they not include searches from the south?
Femp.com Auctioning at Sedo. I loved the name and see that others do as well, pushing this name over $5K with less than 24 hrs left
Don’t Blow Your Load Times
As a website developer there are many things we think of when designing a site. We want it to be nice looking, user friendly, full of good content, and optimized for revenue generation. There actually needs to be one thing that moves in front of those two, load time. All data points to the following. Users are not patient. They will not wait for more than four seconds and will simply leave if they deem a site too slow. In today’s era of fast connection speeds, their patience is less and less.
Here’s what Google found
The Effects of Slow Download Times
Even small changes in response times can have significant effects. Google found that moving from a 10-result page loading in 0.4 seconds to a 30-result page loading in 0.9 seconds decreased traffic and ad revenues by 20% (Linden 2006). When the home page of Google Maps was reduced from 100KB to 70-80KB, traffic went up 10% in the first week, and an additional 25% in the following three weeks (Farber 2006). Tests at Amazon revealed similar results: every 100 ms increase in load time of Amazon.com decreased sales by 1% (Kohavi and Longbotham 2007). Experiments at Microsoft on Live Search showed that when search results pages were slowed by 1 second: (Kohavi 2007)
- Queries per user declined by 1.0%, and
- Ad clicks per user declined by 1.5%
After slowing the search results page by 2 seconds:
- Queries per user declined by 2.5%, and
- Ad clicks per user declined by 4.4%
As a former owner of a site that took forever to load (this one) I realized the value of solid hosting. I’m not saying a fast site will pay for the more expensive hosting but I can guarantee that poor hosting and slow load times will turn away users and revenue.
Here is a test I did to see how some of the top domain sites load. I threw mine in there for fun.
1 domaining.com 73.41 KB 4.07 seconds 0.06 seconds 2 namebee.com 76.67 KB 1.49 seconds 0.02 seconds 3 elliotsblog.com 52.59 KB 0.07 seconds 0 seconds 4 fragerfactor.blogspot.com 201.26 KB 0.26 seconds 0 seconds 5 thedomains.com 59.37 KB 1.5 seconds 0.03 seconds 6 domainshane.com 66.68 KB 1.6 seconds 0.02 seconds 7 domainnamewire.com 51.7 KB 0.81 seconds 0.02 seconds 8 morganlinton.com 42.4 KB 0.73 seconds 0.02 seconds 9 domaingang.com 44.35 KB 1.28 seconds 0.03 seconds 10 sullysblog.com 39.48 KB 2.29 seconds 0.06 seconds
Digg Commits Suicide and A Former Internet PowerHouse Fades Away
Do you hear that sound? That’s the sound of the Venture Capitalists invested in Digg being hit in the stomach. That nauseous feeling they all have in their stomach is caused from the recent change of Digg from it’s original design of user submitted content to it’s new look filled with major publisher content. A move that has single handedly ended the popularity of the site in one week.
It looked like a great move. Revamp the site, integrate major online publishers with the user submitted ( I use “user” lightly, it was always power users) content, and make a little more money. The result is t major publishers pushing all the original submissions out of the way and creating a slow, regurgitated display of the top Internet stories. A look you can get already get on ten other sites like Google News.
Five years ago if you wanted huge traffic to your site there was one site that could deliver. Digg. It was every site owner’s dream to get to the front of Digg. It meant tens of thousands of readers to your site and hundreds of links. While this meant huge numbers of users for Digg itself, the site wasn’t nearly as profitable as sites like StumbleUpon that had a revenue model that allowed website owners to buy views. So Digg decided to start offering publishers the ability to go straight to their front page.
The result over the last few days since the change has been amazing. In the history of the Internet their has never been a mass exodus of users from a major site. Every story , regardless of content , is full of comments stating user’s anger about how much they hate the new site. “This Sucks” and “Digg Sucks” are the most common term used in each and every comment on the front page. To add to the problem, the recent criticism has led Digg to mass ban users who are complaining. Sifting through the comments you will see hundreds of “this account was closed”.
Many a site or company has tried to redesign a brand. The often used example is New Coke. More often than not, the companies end up going back to the original design or concept after a major proportion of consumers showed their dislike of the change. Digg most likely isn’t going back. The reason. Kevin Rose spearheaded the change and there is nowhere to go. The site was stagnant and was getting its butt kicked by Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. He and his investors feel that Facebook and Twitter have stolen their thunder and saw this as a last attempt to stay relevant in today’s online world. Why they would try and become the same thing as the companies that are eating their lunch is beyond me. Supposedly their was a ton of recoding put into the new site. New coding that actually slowed the site down and presented the user with what investors wanted, not them.
So Goodbye Digg. As a owner of sites that you helped build and a formerly dedicated user I say thank you. Thank you leading the net to what it is today, I wish you could have joined us. To the investors I say I’m sorry. I’m sure your next investment will do better. If you’d ever like to get in touch with your former users, we’ll be over at Reddit.
Let’s Take a Look at the Top 50 Startups and Their Domains
I often feel that domainers put way too much emphasis on a domain name and it’s relation to a company’s success. I am a businessman first and a domain investor second. A domain to me is merely a tool to reach potential customers for my business. I can really get a feel of the importance of domains by looking at new tech/Internet startups. Startups meaning newly created companies or companies with limited operating history. These companies were created in the recent era of the Internet and chose names based availability is today’s domain climate. Like any company, their internet presence is a huge part of their persona and we can get a feel what today’s companies feel is the value of name and the domain that accompanies. Here is a look at the top 50 startups according to LouisGray. Here’s and my comments and opinions about their domains
- Foursquare http://www.foursquare.com Notice to see they didn’t go with the number 4 but that’s because it was registered 6 years before this name
- Spotify http://www.spotify.com
- Automattic http://automattic.com/ I don’t know the exact history but I would venture a guess that they changed the name of the company because that particular domain was available. (they are the wordpress founders)
- Posterous http://www.posterous.com
- Blippy http://www.blippy.com
- SlideShare http://www.slideshare.com
- Tumblr http://www.tumblr.com Again, would have been tumbler if they had any money to buy the domain
- TweetDeck http://www.tweetdeck.com
- Square http://squareup.com/ Some think they should have purchased square.com but I like this better
- Quora http://www.quora.com
- CinchCast: http://cinchcast.com/
- Sports Blog Nation http://www.sbnation.com
- Bit.ly http://www.bit.ly Proves publicity and functionality can overcome an unusual tld
- my6sense http://www.my6sense.com Perhaps my least favorite of the group
- Thing Labs http://brizzly.com/
- Plancast http://www.plancast.com
- Seesmic http://www.seesmic.com
- Lunch http://www.lunch.com Great generic put to use
- Gowalla http://www.gowalla.com
- DropBox http://www.dropbox.com As easy to remember as any of the names and perfect name to match its function
- Lazyfeed http://www.lazyfeed.com
- Hunch http://www.hunch.com
- Ecademy http://www.ecademy.com
- Xobni http://www.xobni.com
- Tweetmeme http://www.tweetmeme.com
- Feedly http://www.feedly.com
- Klout http://www.klout.com
- Justin.tv http://www.justin.tv The people of JustinTV.com are seeking a million for their because they know their name gets mad traffic because of the tv ending
- Amplify http://www.amplify.com
- OneRiot http://www.oneriot.com
- Lijit http://www.lijit.com
- Echo http://aboutecho.com/ The worst domain of the group. I understand echo.com was probably taken but of all the names that’s what they went with?
- MyLikes http://www.mylikes.com I’m sure they would much rather have had likes.com
- Outbrain http://www.outbrain.com
- DailyBooth http://dailybooth.com/
- Gist http://www.gist.com
- Soluto http://www.soluto.com
- Tungle http://www.tungle.me Me must be so proud, of course they would rather have tungle.com
- Qwotebook http://www.qwotebook.com Trying to be too cool here. Tons of traffic lost to quotebook.
- Regator http://www.regator.com
- Untitled Startup http://www.untitledstartup.com/ I guess this is as generic of startup name as you can get
- Twazzup http://www.twazzup.com/
- The Cadmus http://thecadmus.com/
- Branchr http://www.branchr.com Here’s that r thing again
- Graphic.ly http://www.graphic.ly/ and a bit.ly copy cat
- BlockChalk http://blockchalk.com/
- FitBit http://www.fitbit.com/
- RockMelt http://www.rockmelt.com/
- Live Intent http://www.liveintent.com/
- Fabulis http://www.fabulis.com My nomination for second worst domain. I can only imagine how many times they have to spell this out to people
What I get out of this list and their domains is this. Most of the companies would rather put their money towards company development rather than a domain name. Some have even gone as far as picking a company name based on available hand registered domains. Developing a top startup is rarely done with a generic name but rather a name that is individual, original, and can be branded. I used to think a name should tell customers what you do but after looking at startups over the last 10 years, many of the best companies have names that give you no hint of their business. Long and short, a name is a name and as long as customers enjoy your business, they will find your site, whatever the name is……or at least that seems to be their approach
9 Signs Your Domain Nest Egg May Have Salmonella
I spent most of the past year building a bankroll to buy some solid domain names. Names that have value unto themselves but also the ability to generate cash flow. Along the way I’ve realized that too many domainers hold an enormous amount of absolute junk. Junk that is not going to serve them well, no matter how long they hold.
Who am I to say what is junk? I can answer this one pretty easily. I am the person that the internet is trying to reach. I have money and use the internet daily in my life. The internet is a pretty simple concept. People reach a domain either by typing it in or finding it through a third party. You are looking for domain that will give an extra boost in the quest to reach those visitors. The domains I see most people owning are giving absolutely no help. That’s why a domain has value, no more, no less. Here are a few signs your name sucks
1. You have to tell people what it could stand for. If the post offering the domain for sale has a “could stand for” in the title, drop the domain value to almost nothing.
2. You have a tld that I’ve never heard of. If I have never heard of it then I can guarantee most of the world hasn’t heard of it. You’re going to need a heck of a website to offset that crazy country code
3. You have a hack. You know what hack stands for? I’m going to give a lot of traffic to the dot com. There is a reason the successful hacked domain websites end up buyin the dot com. Hacks are for hacks
4. You have two word domains where the two words don’t many any sense together or even by themselves. WealthilyCatholics.com is yes, two dictionary terms, but together they make no sense, and wealthily for that matter isn’t that strong
5. Any brandable domain that isn’t a dot com is worthless. If it’s brandable why in the world would you brand anything but the dot com and if the dot com is already branded, then obviously it’s not your brand anymore.
6. Anything with two hypens in a row. One hyphen can work but two hypens in a row? Worthless. or should I say worth–less
7. Backwards keywords. Some say Google doesn’t know the difference, I think they do. I know the domains make no sense. I know people may be looking for “little black dress” but do you really want the name dressblacklittle.com? This is a time when you have to take valuate and estibot estimate with a grain of salt.
8. Anything dot mx. I can guarantee you that no Americans are typing this in. Heck, even Mexicans barely use it. I think these have very little value
9. You combine more than two of the above. “YROUYMTT.mx Could stand for “You Really Open Up Your Mouth This Time” Very popular Mexican Saying” You laugh but these types of names come up all the time.
Friday’s Daily Domain Drops and Auction
Sorry about the bad link earlier. Not sure what happened but that’s the beauty of the net, anything can go wrong at any time. Here are today’s name
InstantKarma.com Great name and a PR5. I think this one will do well
Mable.com Plenty of uses for this one. Name or business and easy to spell. A nice 5L
SierraDenali.com I know a trademark problem here but some people don’t care. Lots of searches and nice CPC. Valuate value at $7500 and no bidders
USSR.net “You don’t know how lucky you are”
AWise.org A pr6. Not into pr domains? then move onto the next
NoSpit.com A PR 4, DMOZ listed name. I see a certain use for this name but then again I have dirty mind. I guess it could also be used as a porn site. What? I was thinking of a no spit chewing tobacco as my first thought
CoverTwo.com For this price a great football name
