• 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

Here are the stats:

• 3,810,000,000 page results for “rss” in Google
• 20,000 unique views a month.
• $750,000 USD reserve

Nora Nanayakkara, director of business development at Sedo stated: “It’s not often a name with such pertinence comes onto the market. As well as being short and memorable, the name has a widespread meaning. It’s a fantastic opportunity for an online media company to acquire it and grow its readership.”

To be honest, I can’t see how this will get $750k. Lets just wait and see.

Fast forward a couple of weeks and its been announced that Sam Nunez will handle Product Development, Marketing and Strategy.

You’ve just gotta love those warm, fuzzy, cuddly Germans.

It appears that Nunez has been around the traps. He has worked at both Oversee.net, Ask.com and SGI.

“I look forward to helping Sedo strengthen its market position in the global domain name marketplace,” said Nunez.  “Sedo will continue to leverage its tremendous success with online auctions, as it extends other services such as live auctions, globally.”

Good luck Sam. We will be watching closely to see what pops out of Sedo.

Edit 29/8/8: A point of clarification. I’ve just been contacted by a representative from Sedo who tells me that Sams role is purely product management and Matt is still an advisor with Sedo.

This morning I received an email titled “Wishing Well Promotion:: Win Cash and Promote Change!“. At first I thought spam, then I thought “promote change” - that sounds like CNN’s “be the change” promo…. so I opened the email from Sedo.

At the top of the email was a picture of the world, a large green leaf and a little African child. Wow, the marketing guys really picked one issue from each category for this promo! It looks like something from an NGO like WorldVision.

So what’s the bottom line? Well, if you spend 1,000 USD/EUR/GBP or more, Sedo puts $10 into a bucket (Wishing Well). At the end of the month half of the money in the “Wishing Well” is given to CHF International “in response to the drought occurring in Ethiopia“. The other half will be given at random to a buyer or seller who closed a transaction through Sedo during the month of August. What the? Am I living in the twilight zone here? What we have is - drought in Ethiopia vs large latte at Starbucks. Hmmmm… Some people might find this hard to believe, so here is their landing page for the promotion with all the info.

So let me get the straight - domainers buy stuff from Sedo for $1k and Sedo gives $5 to charity and the other $5 to a domainer. Great concept around the charity, but very BAD execution. It should be a competition OR a charity.

Here is an extract from CHF International which explains how much $$ is required:

• $300 provides a family with proper sanitation;
• $600 provides a year’s supply of food and water for one growing child;
• $1,000 repairs an existing well that will provide 400 people with clean water;
• $7,000 builds a new well, which could save the lives of 800 people;
• $12,000 builds a new school building, providing children with valuable education.“

Sedo, why don’t you donate 100% of the funds to the charity? $5 is nothing to a domainer. If you really cared, you would give it all to charity.

Don’t get me wrong - conceptually this is a great idea. I believe that Western countries and wealthy individuals have an obligation to give something back to society. I personally donate to several charities on a monthly basis.

Sedo should be congratulated on making the first step as they didn’t have to do it. There is now an opportunity to get it right and set an example to the rest of the industry.

Sedo listed www.cj7.asia and www.cj7cares.asia as “successful” examples, with cj7cares.asia receiving more than 500,000 users “within a few days of the campaign”. I’d never heard of CJ7 before… so when I typed it into google I got IMDB and Wikipedia links at position #1 and #2 followed by Sony Pictures at #3. It turns out that CJ7 is a SCIFI/Fantasy movie for kids.

The interesting thing is…. I couldn’t find any .asia listed in Google related to CJ7. However cj7.asia was listed on many press releases promoting the .Asia TLD. I wonder how much traffic is related to the press release vs the domain being indexed by the search engines?

Sedo writes:

“Now is the time to invest into the future. Make history and reap returns on the most prestigious virtual real estate in Asia.”

It’s obviously in Sedos interest to promote new TLD’s like .asia. That way the buyers can list the names on Sedo for auction. Provided they sell - everyone wins.