DomainTools Blog

In April, we launched the Registrant Alert service. This is an extremely valuable service. It can save tons in time and money. Jay points to an example of the service in action: alerting him when he was about to lose a domain due to expiration. Another scenario that can be far more hazardous, time consuming, litigious and expensive for domain owners is the possibility of losing a domain to theft. Registrant Alert can circumvent such a situations and useful in other proactive measures.

The service has been available now for a few months with great success and positive feedback. We feel the service is so valuable to domain owners that we are giving it away for free.

All DomainTools members who have a confirmed email address on their account will receive a Registrant Alert on the confirmed email. By default, this alert is sent to the email on account. Users can also subscribe to RSS for notification instead or in addition to. To find this alert service, go to My Services in your DomainTools account and then Registrant Alert. Changes to method of notification are set here. Also, you can change the Nickname of the query by right-clicking, choose Nickname and edit it. However do NOT edit the specific query to anything other than the default settings, it will charge you units. The system will assume this is a new query. A pop up notice warns you of this along with an estimate fee of the new query.

DomainTools members are receiving this for free on their own email with no Units deducted. If you implement the service for other alerts, the unit cost varies by the level of activity of the registrant being monitored.

Users can unsubscribe as well, if chosen, in the same service area. Choose the alert and then turn OFF or delete completely. However, why would you want to remove a system that could alert you of possible harm to your business?

I have been playing with Google Ad Planner for about a week now and it is by far the best third party metrics tool out there. I can now directly query Google for how popular a website is and how many users they have. I have found that if a website doesn’t have more then 3,000 visitors a month then Google doesn’t list the website inside the tool. So… You can see how well really good parking pages are doing by using this tool. Oddly though, Google.com and other Google domains are removed from the tool! I guess Google only wants you to know the traffic of everyone else except for themselves. That is a bit hypocritical that I can see Yahoo.com but not Google.com.

I highly suggest signing up for the beta and taking this very powerful tool for a test drive because it totally kills Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast. I am not sure how Google measures the traffic because they are a third party and they can’t actually track users unless they are directly auditing ALL users of a website. They must have several panels they use. Could they be using the Toolbar data finally? I doubt that, Google has always stayed far away from actually using the Google Toolbar for evil.  I can’t wait for the API! (Google, If you are listen, the world wants an API). DomainTools currently grabs data at Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast and displays those stats on the whois record if the domain has enough traffic to show up.

I Google is using analytics data if you have shared it with other Google projects. I remember signing some digital waiver a few months ago on analytics, I trust Google and I am not too concerned where the data would be given out in detail. I don’t really care if people know what traffic we get in summary mode.

Here are some FAQs directly from Google that explain the data better.

Q: Where does Google Ad Planner demographic data come from?
A: Google Ad Planner demographic information is provided by third-party market research data, opt-in consumer user panel data, and algorithms that improve the demographic estimates. (Demographic data is currently available for the United States only.)

Q: How is the data in Google Ad Planner generated?
A: Google Ad Planner combines information from a variety of sources, such as aggregated Google search data, opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in external consumer panel data, and other third-party market research. The data is aggregated over millions of users and powered by computer algorithms; it doesn’t contain personally-identifiable information. In addition, Google Ad Planner only shows results for sites that receive a significant amount of traffic, and enforces minimum thresholds for inclusion in the tool. For more information about how Google protects privacy, please refer to our privacy policy.

I am pleased to welcome Tim Chen to our company. Tim is our VP of Corporate Development at Thought Convergence. As many of you may know Tim has worked in online media and advertising for ten years, including the last 2 1/2 years as the VP of business development and domain acquisitions at Internet REIT.

Tim is well experienced in the domain space and comes with a lot of knowledge and skills in dealing with domain monetization and acquisitions. He will be helping us execute on our strategic plan of growth at Thought Convergence. Tim will be involved in all the business units ranging from DomainTools to TrafficZ.

Prior to his tenure in online media and domains, Tim spent 4 years with JP Morgan as an investment banker in NY and SF. Tim has an MBA from Stanford University and a BA Economics from Harvard College in Philadelphia. Originally hailing from Rochester, NY, Tim is an avid surfer who loves the outdoors, the Buffalo Bills, and building great companies.

The Domain Ecosystem that we at Thought Convergence are building will range all the way from new registrations to sales and auctions in the Aftermarket.

We just released a new RSS Feed Management system to DomainTools that allows subscribers to monitor alerts and other services using RSS feeds instead of email updates. Email alerts have bugged me for a while because they clog my inbox, RSS gets announcements out of the inbox and in a more usable area. We are not getting rid of email alerts on anything, however going forward everything on DomainTools that can email users will have its own micro-feed. All micro-feeds of a certain type will have grouped-feeds where a person can subscribe to a bunch of micro-feeds all contained in one feed.

The flexibility that RSS extends to our users is that they don’t need an email client to monitor our alerts. One of the obvious uses is setting up a scheduled web process to check the RSS feed and do something based on the results it finds in the RSS location. The more obvious use is plugging those feeds into an RSS reader like Google Reader.

We have two types of RSS feeds available on all things. The first is a rich-HTML markup RSS feed like you would expect in an email. The other if an XML style that is strictly for parsing by a computer on the other side and is designed for only computers. This will allow more computers around the world to interface with DomainTools.

This release only has four group feeds available right now, but in the near future we will be releasing the Domain Monitor alerts and other missing products to the Global Feed as well. We are very committed to RSS feeds on every service we offer.

Just a quick security note: Do not share your RSS feeds with other people, there is only one RSS access key per account and you are giving away all your RSS streams to every feed you have if you give away just one stream. If you make this mistake, just login and reset your security key inside the RSS Feed Management System. It will be impossible for people to guess your key which means all your RSS feeds are secure unless you disclose the RSS feed URL to the other people.

We just got an outdoor sign installed on our building in Los Angeles. For those of you that missed the announcement Thought Convergence is the new parent company of Name Intelligence/DomainTools.com.

If you want to drive by and check it out the address of the building is 11300 W Olympic Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90064.