Paul Twomey Keynote Speech – Live from Traffic DownUnder 2008

Paul Twomey is the CEO of ICANN. His speech mainly focused on stability, resiliency and security of the Internet.

IDN ccTLDs

• Draft implementation plan posted for 45-day public comment period ending December 8.
• Many issues to be resolved.

Protective Measures (that ICANN provide)

• Timely de-accreditation and transfer of names to accredited registrars.
• Compliance audits, surveys, reports – transparency and accountability.

Registrar Accreditation Agreement

Substantative changes developed in cooperation with the community include proposals for:

• Stricter enforcement provisions
• Improved data protection and notice and education requirements
• Shared compliance responsibilities

Data Escrow, Data Accuracy and Warehousing

• Over 95% of all domain name registrations are with a data escrow provider.

RegistrarFly Issue

During the RegisterFly issue, we were trying to looking after the registrants;  one of the issues we had was to identify the registrants.

What Does The Future Hold?

• Global economy will be a major factor in the foreseeable future?
• Fastest growth and greatest potential lies in Africa, Asia, Middle East
• New gTLDs and IDN TLDs will bring challenges to do business around the world.
• Explosion in multilingual, multiculturalcontent, ideas, social and business interaction, education, things we have not dreamed of.

The Internet of the Future

• Internet and the domain name space are rapidly evolving.
• Wider variety of devices used to provide services.
• Evolving new services – banking and financial services – based on proximity
• Evolving new products – smart objects, RFID embedded objects, Internet enabled as standard
• Evolving new products – RFID technologies
• Convergence of other uses with devices
• Wide variety of devices used to provide services
• Increasing demand for products and services by developing countries

ICANN stands for a single, stable, globally interoperable Internet.

Mike Fiol on Community Development – TRAFFIC Downunder 2008

Mike is the Managing Director / Analyst at DomainConsultant.com. Some key points from his presentation include:

• The creation of a big booming voice.
• Create an Political Action Committee with a shock and awe approach
• Create a Labor Union with a focus on creating a “bill of rights”.
• The industry needs a figurehead.

The industry has a huge base of individuals who when combined could serve as a powerful community.

Creating a successful community requires implicit involvement of the industry as a whole. It must not be a vehicle to drive competition. It should drive action and sales and education. It should serve to protect the individual owner while reaching out to a new generation of leadership.

The presentation reminded me about the good old days of the Internet where we had a bunch of people with no direction. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Mark Klein – Industry Standards & Self Regulation

Mark Klein is the Director of Business Development at Sedo.

• Sedo has a had a 60% growth in revenue from 2006 to 2007.
• 50% increase in transfers from 2005 to 2006, 2006 to 2007.
• Key message from the presentation is that the community must adopt standards.

Disturbing Factors

• Artificial traffic
• Non commercial traffic
• Trademark violations
• Irrelevant keywords
• Unethical domains

Parking Providers should:

• Fraud prevention
• Conversion tracking
• Rights protection program
• check keyword relevance
• Blacklisting of unsuitable domains

Standards and Self Regulation

• What is considered an impression?
• How is a click measured or counted?
• RPM, CTR, Earnings per click

Michael Collins on Managing Community Risk – Live From Traffic DownUnder 2008

Michael Collins is the Executive Director of the Internet Commerce Association (ICA). He spoke about a variety of subtopics within the industry. You could sum it up by this statement:

We all know that domain abuse is real and this community must help stop the abuse to protect its assets and income.

The industry should:

• Respect for human suffering and victims of tragedy
• Protection of names of persons

Domainers must move away from the dark side.

As the new gTLDs and TLD are introduced, we must be careful about precedents and issues that may arise. eg: Verisign asking for special conditions.

UDRP cases reference other UDRP cases – we can help Domainers appeal UDRP decisions when it comes to precedents.

Domainers need to be organized to respond to threats to the industry when they occur – before the adversaries have momentum on their side.

Domain Economics With Dan Warner – Live From Traffic DownUnder 2008

Dan Warner presented on Domain economics covering the basics of supply and demand, inputs, risk and outputs.

One excellent point that was made is that “original thought” is the difference between using a search engine and type-in traffic. For many people it was one of the those lightbulb moments, where you thought, yeah that makes sense.

Key points:

• Should we go build that new thing that looks cool but wont make money?
• What should we build today, tomorrow or never build?
• The industry does a lot of non-commercial things. eg: ego, demands etc..

Statistics

• Single transactions have no value as data
• Need to look at total ROI
• Without evidence, assumptions have no relevance
• If you cant show that you can get consistent results, nobody will give you any value (meaning you are worth less).

Business Framework

• Finance
• Cost cutting
• Risk
• Growth

If you have high risk, like developing with a shotgun effect, that will significantly increase your risk.

Domain names only have two outputs:

• Traffic (Commodity Cash Flow)
• Future Rights (Sale Value)

Development has no value only output variants such as cash flow and sale value.

Most traffic has only a transient value:

Type-in Traffic

• Behavior (experience)
• Technology (mediation)
• Alternatives (subscription)
• Evolution (fundamentals)

Referred Traffic

• Search (algorithm)
• Social (human)
• Linking  (hosted)
• Spruiked (inbound)

Banished Domains

• here today -> gone tomorrow

Rate of Sale

• Nothing has value until it is sold
• Rate of sale is based on feedback from the market
• ROS is between 1% and 5% per year
• Opportunities that exist today might not be here tomorrow
• All domains are not created equally
• What is that dollar worth today vs in 10 years time?

Michael Gilmour Talks Risk – Traffic DownUnder 2008

Michael had a fantastic speech and covered off a variety of metrics and calculations. Keep your eye out on Whizzbangsblog for the presentation. In the meantime here are some key points:

Risks vs Business Models

• Risks depend upon the business model being adopted.

• Each business model has its own risk profile that will or will not suit the domain owner. For example: stock items, high value sales, traffic and development.

Risks To The Domain Name Industry

• Advertising aggregators (Google / Yahoo)
• Traffic Aggregators (Parking)
• Domain Sales Models
• Regulatory and Legal

Regulatory and Legal Risk

• Every domainer needs to evaluate their portfolio from a legal risk perspective.
• Asset protection is crucial to long-term success.
• ICANN & Registries will change the rules.
• Get rid of those domains that are unprofitable and with legal risk

Revenue Share

• Google is paying less for traffic
• Based on calculations looking at the mean (curve) the average cost of traffic is 27.9% (what Google pays network partners) and the domain Industry gets 17.6%

Rules For Dealing With Advertisers

• Quality: Google and Yahoo will smart price your whole portfolio up and down.
• Watch out for fraudulent behavior.
• Do not put high paying non-performing keywords on high volume low CTR traffic.
• Match advertisers to traffic.
• Its no longer good enough to set a keyword and never touch the domain again.
• Think about how our behavior effects the advertiser.

Measuring Performance

Parking companies use different metrics. For example, how is an IP address measured?

• 18 Hours – Parking Company 1
• 24 Hours  – Parking Company 2

TRAFFIC – Conference Dan Warner Introduction

Dan Warner – Introduction

After a great intro, Dan pays tribute to the Rick bobblehead.

Here are some key points:

• In this industry we are all land owners. We are really more friends and compatriates than competitors.
• We all have limited resources and can only do so much.
• We are here to share knowledge and perspectives.
• People look at our industry through different lenses.

Live From Trafic DownUnder 2008 – Day 1 Activities

As you know, I was here a month ago basking in the glorious sun. Would you believe that its pouring with rain? What the?!?!!

Today was all about the activities. I chose Lemans Go Karting (yep in the rain). Here are the results from a race with my “Yellow Team”

1. Kathleen 55:08
2. Craig R 55:39
3. Simon (me) 55:41
4. Dan K 56:88
5. Jochen 56:88
6. David H 57.25
7. Greg 59.08
8. Tim C 61.34

I’ve included below a few photos and quick movies. Wave to the camera kids!

Getting On The Plane To Traffic

Cant get any more live than this!

Domain Names And The US Election

Obama has change.gov and McCain has RepublicanForAReason.com. Many Internet marketers are commenting that RepublicanForAReason.com is too long and hard to type. I’d have to agree.

It took another Domainer to figure out that RepublicansForAReason.com wasn’t registered, so its now parked at Sedo. I wonder who the (now former) Republican staffer was who forgot to register that one?

Perhaps it was Senator Ted Stevens, former chair the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation? Here is Ted explaining what happened: