Owen comments on the "SEO Guru Provost Nails It" post:
""Zillow- nope that’s not it .. It’s that they do not use "house values" as keyword copy.. That they don’t match the other words ..That they use cutesy invented words like zestimate rather then plain english that explains what they do. I could fix this in a NY Minute- do it every day- took a long time to learn. That said, having a press release about knowing the value of your home and staying informed which is not branded zillow but goes to a generic url can get to the top as well and Zillow is irrelevant until they get to the page. Too many companies waste the limited word count that compels a click by talking about themselves and their buzz words rather than make an offer that a customer cares about.
Every Google listing should be a like a classified ad. They need to be rigged that way. It takes seo copy skill which is very different from all the metatags, text anchors and other techy things seo experts think matters more. I do this with PDF docs on a server that has no facing content. Has nothing to do with HTML.""
So I got to thinking about Google, Domains, Traffic, Zillow and companies like theirs. Companies which build wonderful platforms, which exert great collective energy to create a mousetrap, a service, a website.. Zillow has "the buzz" and "press zest" because the site was conjured up by Rich Barton, the former Microsoft executive who created Expedia.. That site became a big hit. I think Rich and his team will do it again with Zillow, but had they acquired a large bucket of generic real estate domain names for $50 or 100 million, they would have placed their company in a much stronger lifetime position. Why?.. because they would have made it harder for others to bid for traffic at Google, Yahoo and MSN. Why is that? It has to do with the traffic cycle and eco system.
There are only so many generic intent domain names with type-in traffic. Names like SarasotaRealEstate.com, HouseHunting.com or HomeAppraisal.com. Anyone can own these names and use them as they see fit. These names deliver high quality type-in-traffic which comes for the descriptive nature of the words which make up the name. Buy one of these names and you get 20 or 30 visits a day. Work to acquire 10,000 generic names like this and you sit on a gusher of 6million to 9million targeted unique visits a month!
In today’s traffic ecosystem the majority of generic keyword style domain names are marshaled by hundreds of middlemen, parking companies, redistributors, subsyndicators etc.. and all this fancy plumbing leads domain name traffic back to the two dominant keyword marketplaces at Yahoo and Google where that traffic is sold to sites like Zillow on a per-click basis. Had Zillow bought "the cow" in the form of thousands of generic domain names, they upset that eco-system by removing supply from the marketplaces. Point SarasotaRealEstate.com to Zillow and that traffic is no longer available for Trulia to bid on at Yahoo.. You could argue that every time a high quality domain name gets sold and developed or redirected to another existing site that the price for the remaining traffic quietly goes up.
That is one of the reasons I babble about buying a generic defensible type in traffic domain name to compliment your brand. It reduces your lifetime traffic acquisition and marketing costs.
It isn’t practical for every start-up to spend $50mm buying buckets of high quality domain names of course.. But if you were sure you had a hit on your hands and if you had the grand-master like foresight to think eight steps ahead of your peers, it would help seal your success and make it harder for others to follow in your wake if you did.
To stay on the real estate theme I just realized the domain business is paralleling the mortgage business in a way. The big aggregators of domains are like loan originators, who can sell the mortgages on the secondary market in certain packages. Some lenders like to portfolio their loans while others use the hybrid approach and portfolio some mortgage and sell others in the secondary market. I think someday in the future these large domain companies and certain individuals like yourself can sell targeted packed domain packages for hundreds of millions to a few billion dollars based on the secondary market demand of big companies who didn’t originate enough domains. The interest on a loan parallels the traffic on the name. The higher the traffic compares to a higher interest you locked your borrower into. Just a Sat morning musing.
***FS*** Interesting comparison Phil.. thanks!~
As more and more advertising budget comes on line, the real commodity is “Eyeballs”.
Anyone that can supply “Eyeballs” is going to get revenue stream and that is going to be an expensive overhead for the advertisers.
As they seek to cut out the middleman to drive their cost down, then value of the source of the “Eyeballs” is going to go up.
Once they realise that sourcing “Eyeballs” either means playing ever more intricate games on SEO against search engines that really don’t want you there in the first place or simply owning the generic domains, then the trend in domaining pricing in the aftermarkets is a no brainer. Ever more people looking to buying increasing streams of traffic at ever higher auction bids mean domain owners become very rich.
The only problem that therefore remains is getting hold of domains that are going to deliver the goods. Value in a domain is largely inherent. It cannot really be created or destroyed, except by big budget branding or perhaps by changing the perception of the value of an extension, which is an incredibly difficult thing to do.
Greetings Frank,
As a continuous reader, long-term domainer dating back to early 2000 and firt-time poster of your blog I am in definite agreement with your comments regarding DIRNAV traffic potential.
We are in process of constructing a local-specific social networking/entertainment site for the Chicagoland area.
As being a domain investor/flipper long before turning to development, it was imminent to acquire many local properties that shall help us benefit over the competition.
As a result we have built (and continuous add) much locally-delivered traffic to our dormant properties for our soon-to-be open-for-business site.
Examples such as:
BarsInChicago.com
Chicago2Nite.com (& 2Nite.com too)
ChicagoMatch.com
IllinoisCommunityCollege.com
IllonoisDriversLicense.com
IllinoisRentalPropety.com
IllinoisSenate.com
& 500+ others
The power of our local traffic easily delivers well into the tens of thousands of generic visitors any given month.
That is one hell of an arsenal that SHOULD inevitably take the competition by surprise upon launch while keeping our traffic acqiisition cost greatly below the industry average.
Great job on the success of the blog!
Jason
As they say about traditional prime real estate “Location, Location, Location”. I believe that once most descriptive gTLD and ccTLD, single word and phrase, domains are controlled by individual aggregators the secondary market, for said domains, will gradually transform from sales to leasing. By then, everyone in the market will realize the true value of said virtual real estate and will be more reluctant to let go of such a secure profitable asset.
Btw, the language set is necessary to sync for RSS feeds. If there are people that subscribe to info about house values and they use zestimates as the term, they will not leverage the power of Google to deliver their message to the right prospects in the right places rather than wait for them to come to you (whether by direct navigation or seo or both). Also if they buy content adwords, this is contextually linked, not keyword driven, so if Forbes has a great article about house values the ads surrounding it will omit Zillow purely on a robotic lack of match between house value and zestimate.
Something else_ Housevalues.com is fundamentally flawed and loosing money. They make someone register and wait to be contact be a real estate agent who bids for the leads per zip code. There’s only follow-thru if they have a rep paying for the territory the lead is in. Then they call to try to make them your agent (even though you were just curious about the info. which over time could develop into a lead as those mailers you get do). Then HV puts you on spam and sells your name to anyone who buys it.
Note that in the paid listings is another Google blemish- someone else impersonating house values by using their keyword as a headline and directing to a .net with a dash. When a poor egg goes to respond to the expensive TV campaign and mistakenly types housevalues.com into the search bar, they get introduced to this imposter. We all argue about tms etc./ but what if this was rumcakes.com five years down whehn you were investing in TV. Every domainer who wants to succeed is now facing their own demons against them.
Btw, when I saw this opportunity four years ago, my sister, a realtor was spending 4K a month to download recent sales data onto postcards that were printed and mailed monthly at $3800 expense. We went door to door with cookies and flowers and shook hands with the neighbors and collected their email address with the promise that we would keep them informed without any pressure. A script was written and the mailings go out like clockwork monthly and generate a dozen leads. This is a good idea but needs a personal touch and an offensive strategy by the local realtor who us being Googled out of the equation by these offers.
Hi Frank,
I hope you will agree that, today we need to really educate the general business on the (wall) street about the benefits of ‘Direct navigation’ and generic domains, until then it will be hard to make them ‘get it’ imo.
I just started a campaign to promote generic domains using my DuckEggs.com business as an example.
Here is a catchy and funny banner to educate the business and make them ‘get it’!
http://img72.imageshack.us/img72/433/duckeggs1ds6ev8.jpg
Here is more info on the campaign for your reference, and the press release:
http://www.DuckEggs.com/domains
Your comments are highly appreciated on this campaign which can benefit all of us domainers and the business people alike.
Thanks in advance,
Sai Pola.
President
http://www.DuckEggs.com