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Millions of Addresses, Thousands of Sites, One Business
An anonymous reader writes "A New York Times piece looks at a rising power in the 'new internet bubble' that you may not have heard of before. The business, an outfit called NameMedia, has made a concerted effort to quietly purchase vast tracts of 'real estate' on the internet. The ultimate goal is to provide additional advertising and page views for content sites. 'Behind this suddenly active business category -- which includes companies like iREIT in Houston, Marchex in Seattle, and Demand Media in Santa Monica, Calif. -- is the recognition that not all Internet users turn to a search engine when they are confused about where to find something online. Rather, 5 percent to 10 percent of people will simply type in a name that sounds as if it might suit their needs. The so-called direct search or direct navigation approach is seldom fruitful for users, nor has it been particularly profitable for owners of the sites that they visit. An obscure Web address may have four or so visitors a month, and perhaps half will click on an ad.'"
I think I speak of everyone, when I say: WTF
To which Devil did they sell their soul to get click through rates like that?
They really show Google ads on these pointless pages?
If I did that my adsense account would be terminated.
>An obscure Web address may have four or so visitors a month
Dude, I need to invest in this.
except this time its the fastest way to get infected with spyware/adware
At the end of the day all of us pay for the clutter created by domain names which exist only to capture page views. Presently to put a domain on line you just need to pay for registration and hosting on two DNS servers. The distributed nature of DNS takes care of the rest.
Should a way be found to make domain squatters pay the true cost of their collections?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The only reason you buy thousands of domains is in the hopes that one of them becomes really popular and you can extort^Wscam^Wsell it to someone who will do something with it. I dunno about the rest of you, but when I google for hard to find products and I land on search engine bait websites, I just hit the back button, I don't click on the ads or worse, buy anything from them.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Not only does it sound like last week's article on that domain-squatter idiot, but actually, it is domain-squatting (well, almost).
Yay!
It may be a source of information but to me it is more of a frustration.
Eventually many times i figure out the best way is - Google it.
Whatever the case may be, these sites are sometimes set on Windows machines over cafes as default pages to attract customers.
Business indeed, just IMO spamming in a more holistic way.
-- "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" - TAE --
What to do with such Lusers, they might become the reason for a call for an Internet Users Licence.
This could mean more than 5 - 10% of visitors to a(ny) site are lost souls as these idiots would need many attempts to get to their goal...
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
--
Simon
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
(doesnt it?) On the contrary. Only losers do fp. Practically every slashdotter on the planet thinks "what a loser" each time we see those lame fps.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
So now this kind of domain squatting has become respectable? Yeah right.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
No, you'll find that it means you've committed a faux pas by trolling, and, in fact made a fool of yourself.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Need I say more
There are still people who don't use search engines? Even the idiot who sends me tons of emails with FWD:FW:Fw:FW:FWD:FWD in the subject line knows about Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.
Quit feeding the troll you idiot.
...wasn't this up last week?
2 0202
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/23/22
aM
Yes, I'd have to say that the number of people who want to talk about 1957 Mustangs constitute a "niche".
One Business: p0rn
You are wrong in your first assumption - the domains are bought from an already popular niche. This isn't gambling or cybersquatting
And regarding clicking - you probably assume that others do as you do - But this isn't true - these sites enjoy around a 15% CTR, and actually it creates a win-win situation. The users, instead of getting a name error (useless), click an advertisement which is often relevant to their initial request, the target site gets a visitor (which is targeted due to the initial related type-in), and the owner of the site gets some money from google. Nobody is scammed, everyone are happy and get exactly what they want. The user- a relevant site, google and publisher get paid, and the target site gets a well targeted visitor.
My Starcraft 2 Blog
A week ago we had the story of a similar scumbag, Kevin Ham. from that FA at CNN Money: So they're both the biggest. Journalisic exaggeration aside, it's disturbing that these parasites are celebrated by respectable financial reporters. These assholes are filling up the web with automatically generated pseudo-content, polluting search results to the point of uselessness. They're web-spammers with the same line of justification that email spammers used to use, they're "offering products that people might be interested in". A pest on both of them.
So much for "Do no evil."
:-P
I guess it needs to be "Do no evil unless it makes Google money".
They should also include malware along with the google ads on these spam domains.
You see, the malware will break windows, but that's ok because it will create work for anti-virus writers, who in turn will have more money to spend on bread in the bakers. The baker will buy shoes benefiting the cobbler.
Everyone in society therefore benefits from domain squatting scumbags.
Adblock http://.googlesyndication.com/*
This isn't the first time I found snarkiness by being recruited. In late 1999, a spammer called me at a new job, thinking I was someone else who was about to pay $295 for 1M "electronic ads"; I begged off, saying I was a sysadmin, and he went right into an excited pitch. When I asked, "Is it legal?" he seamlessly launched a "not yet" diatribe, complete with the "forest industry conspiracy," e.g., they'd lost so much money with the lowered paper sales since the introduction of computers into the workplace...
I happened to actually do some piece work for a search engine manipulator shortly after that, fixing code that was supposed to generate doorway pages. Between realizing what I was contributing to and finding an interesting (not to mention full time) gig, I had about ten peeks into what they were doing and how they did it. The guy claimed to be getting $5K/month to keep one particular doctor at the top of "houston plastic surgeon" searches, and he said he'd learned everything he knew by attending quarterly seminars sponsored by the big pre-Google search engine concerns.
"Press to test."
(click)
"Release to detonate."
Yeh,
and practically every real human looks at the rest of the bs in the posts and thinks "what a shower of wankers!"
One of the things we do with SiteTruth is filter out sites like this.
SiteTruth is looking for the name and address of the business behind any web site that's selling something. If we can't find a name and address in a place most users would look, it's an illegal business (see California B&P code section 17538, European Directive on Electronic Commerce, etc.) So they get a rating - a big red circle with a bar through it. And they go to the bottom of the search rankings.
If they do give a name and address, we look it up in business databases, and try to tie it to a corporation or a business license. "Millions of Addresses, Thousands of Sites, One Business" is something we can see - if huge numbers of domains map to one real-world business, that just screams "domain spammer".
We're still in alpha test, so you have to go to our web site to see this, but in time there will be toolbars to squelch this junk at the browser level.
Think of it as "spam filtering 2.0".
I'd set up a wget and drive up his bandwidth bill, but with most of the bytes on the page being served by Google instead of the squatter, that's sort of useless. Any better ideas?
Yeah, when I tried searching for Bill Clinton in 1998, whitehouse.com gave me good results!
This is a business model which is designed to look good on paper, and appeal to investors. After that, it doesn't look so hot. Here's why:
... psh... I know bloggers that do this well and they're not raising millions in venture capital. Even if his average rate of visitors is 4x or 8x as high, the valuation for his company is far too high.
First off, they call addresses like "DailyHoroscope.com" the top-tier equivalent of "Oceanfront Real Estate", by which I suppose they mean "oceanfront" as in Haiti -- because last time I checked, 14 letter domain names were about as hip as AOL email addresses.
Secondly -- the number of URL's is completely irrelevant. 750,000? I could generate 750,000 all numeric (or random text-string) URL's right now -- so without a measure of keyword quality the total number of owned URL's is purely a carrot for investors (which apparently has worked).
Thirdly -- let's say for the sake of argument that all those 6,000 "photography related" URL's he owns generate an average of 50 visits per month (I'm being generous). A *very* good click through rate would be 2% -- which equals 1 click per month. So let's redux: 6000 sites * 50 visits each = 300,000 visits. 300,000 *.02 = 6000 clicks.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Who's idea is it to try to legitimize domain camping?
Anyhow if only domain campers could get the same treatment as base campers in FPS games. When discovered, they should be treated accordingly.
ICANN's "domain tasting" policy really aggravates the problem - if you make a "mistake" registering a domain, they'll give your money back if you return the domain name within something like five days, even if the mistake was "didn't get enough random hits to make money from my banner ads." So some of these litterers will think up names that seem to make sense, and some of them will just combine lots of random terms, but either way they'll buy the names, see if they get enough hits, and return the names that don't win. They may need to pay the registrars a bit for handling them, but not much.
Even more annoying than the content free all-banner-ads pages that are trying to get hits from keywords in the domain names are the ones that have some kind of robo-generated or plagiarized content (e.g. links to sites that might or might not have content) that's trying to attract search engine hits as well as dumb-typer hits, because it can provide enough imitation of legitimacy that Google doesn't block them, and therefore can crowd out the results that have actual content.
But the random-typist hunters get Extra Lucky, because the people who got to those pages are more likely to want to see the results of the avertisements (compared to people who got to the pages from Google and found they were bogus), so they're much more likely to click through on ads that look close enough to what they want - and Google Adwords is good at placing ads that are the best match available.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If you want to see the details of that business model, read the 10-K filing of Marchex, the publicly traded domain farmer.
Some highlights:
It's not a very profitable business. You'd think that, given how little they actually do, they'd be making sizable amounts of money, but they're not. They have substantial revenue ($127 million), but their operating costs and compensation eat up almost all of that.
I am absolutely irate about this.
-Darkshadow (There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.)