Subscribe
Tim Oreilly on his Domain
November 30th, 2007 by 
Jay Westerdal
One of the blogs I love to read is Tim O’Reilly because he covers a lot of technical moving and shaking which is going on. In one of his posts this month Tim talked about Bill O’Reilly and how people confuse Tim with Bill. Both guys have rather large public profiles however Tim runs a technical publishing empire and Bill hosts a TV show on Fox. Tim went on to describe how visitors direct navigate to Tim’s Oreilly.com site and see all the technical material yet they still think that the site has something to do with Bill.
One of Bill’s visitors writes in to Tim:
Is this just a website to make more money for O’Reilly????? How can I get in touch with him? This is very important!!! I am more interested in the news than in buying something. Please contact me.
This goes to show how direct navigation effects everything on the Internet. People instinctively type in where they want to go. This behavior can not be un-learned, typing where you want to go will never fade away. This is a strong indication that investing in generic targeted domains is always a good move. If people want something they will simple type it in. By controlling the domains we control what people see, currently our domain monetization industry makes about a Billion Dollars a year. But if you extend the reach of what you call the Direct Navigation industry you will see that it effect not just domainers but other people that build companies on good intuitive domains. There is a certain boost to the marketing effect of a company that builds a business on a preexisting intuitive brands.
If you want to learn about things to do in San Francisco why not just type in SanFrancisco.com and see what appears. As time goes by all the intuitive brands on the Internet that are simple parking pages will morph into the things that people think they should be. The path of least resistance is a law of nature. All things have to obey it. The majority of hikers take the past of least resistance. Water always flows downhill and Internet Traffic always types in what it believes is the most intuitive brand.
The Chicken and the Egg can be argued for hours at length regarding domain names. Does a site exist because of its name or does a site exist because someone invented the brand. Most sites exist because someone branded them however a lot of developers build sites because the domain demands it. Those domains will themselves into existence.
The successful domainer is the one that hears the call of the domain and allows it to exist. The domain practically does the rest of the work.
Posted in Direct Navigation |
10 Comments »
Three Florida Registrars were named in a lawsuit by Dell on November 16th; all this is just coming to the surface now. Those three registrars are BelgiumDomains, CapitolDomains, and DomainDoorman. They also have a few sister companies such as Netrian Ventures and IHoldings.com that were named too. Dell personally named Juan Pablo “JP” Vazquez because he was on the incorporation paperwork for most of these companies. Dell has a feeling there are 10 other John Does as well that could be related and is seeking the true identity of those companies as well as naming them in the suit. John Berryhill sent me over a copy of the lawsuit today and I have been reading through it. You can read the 
In my last post I covered the 
A lot of people wonder how to file a case against a domain owner. Instead of going to court there is a process built into the ICANN process. Every domain owner agrees to be bound by the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) when they register a top level domain such as DotCom, it is part of the contract that most people never bother to read when they are buying a domain.
When a domain is about to delete at most registrars they will switch the DNS over to the registrar’s name server. If the domain is getting good traffic then the registrar may renew the domain for themselves or they may just monetize the domain while it is in the deleting queue. However when a domain has never had DNS before and this switch over triggers an event in our database saying that it is a new domain. It is actually sort of amusing. The first time we see the domain is right before it deletes. It has exist for 3 years but we are just now seeing it. The owner even paid the renewal fee last year. The likelihood that the domain has traffic is actually very low. Thanks to registrars trying to make money off of expiring customers they are helping expose the longest of the long tail. We never would have known about this domain or the fact that it had existed for three years without this broadcast event.
A few more Holiday domains are occurring this week. Yesterday I talked about 
Of course when the weekend is over we will head into 
Happy “Scott Day” Day. I bet Scott’s traffic is up today. I know I visited just to check out who the owner of the Thanksgiving.com domain was. The power of generic holidays is awesome. They always get a spike on their day and then they go dark for about 11 months. The traffic slowly builds up next year about one month before the holiday actually takes place. I visit these domains just to see who owns them, then I see it is someone like Scott and I put my checkbook away and go back to enjoying the Holiday. Have a happy 
I get this questions a lot, “Does parking your domain hurt your domain’s resale value?” The answer, Yes. You will be hurting the Internal Search Engine scores attached to the domain. Search Engines are more temporal then you would imagine. It is not about having the best site right now, it is often about having a history of being the best site. Credibility doesn’t come overnight so don’t expect your search engine rankings to either. By parking a domain that you plan to develop you are really de-optimizing the domain for future development.
However, I want to stress there are ways to mitigate the damage that parking can cause. If you want to trick a search engine into indexing a parking page you might be messing with fire. These search engine are smart and can see when you are just serving ads. Robots.txt should be used to exclude the entire site or the parking portion of the site from the search engines. If a domain name is robots.txt’ed off from the world it if very unlikely it will get put on a blacklist.