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According
to a new GroupM research report covered by Joe
Mandese in a column at Media
Daily News today (free registration required to read), the explosion in Internet advertising opportunities is
acting as a damper on the worldwide market for all forms of
advertising. That may sound contradictory, but the report
explains that new users are flooding onto the Internet so
quickly that ad price increases are not keeping pace with
audience growth. As a result advertisers are reaching more
people on the web for less money. The report also says that in
developed countries like the U.S., the Internet now
surpasses TV in ad spending increases (37% to 33%).
Posted July 31, 2006
The
Washington Post published an inaccurate and heavily
slanted article about Google this spring (prompting us
to detail the tactics used by reporter Leslie Walker to
fabricate the story in our May newsletter).
I had pretty much written off the Post as an unbiased news
source after that incident but this week they were talking
about Google again, this time in an article
by Yuki Noguchi about Google's AdSense program.
I was pleased to see that Noguchi stuck to the facts and
presented a straight forward account of how people are
profitably using the AdSense program. That kind of reporting,
uncolored by personal or corporate biases, should be the norm
but too frequently is not.
Posted July 30, 2006
A
new report on
real estate advertising from Borrell &
Associates (detailed in the Center
for Media Research blog) says "the proliferation of
"free" listings sites on the Internet portends a collapse in the
$6 billion print classifieds business, especially with the vast majority of home seekers now using the Internet to find a home. As home sales slowed, the Internet became the most-used method of selling a
home." The study says the shift to the web will help propel Internet real estate advertising to
the $2 billion level this year and push it past $3 billion by 2010, surpassing newspapers in terms of advertising market share.
The summary adds that there is a lot of room for growth since 61%
of agents do not advertise on the Internet and 87% of
agents are not buying keywords on Google or Yahoo.
Posted July 27, 2006
Enom
announced today that they have purchased BulkRegister
in a deal
that will make Enom the second largest registrar in the world.
The acquisition of BulkRegister gives eNom an additional 1.5
million domain names and 35,000 bulk membership
customers. That increases the total number of domains on the
Enom platform to more than 6.8 million. The combined
company passes Network Solutions to become second only
to GoDaddy in total names under management, according
to NameIntelligence.com.
Posted July 26, 2006
A
report from JupiterResearch
released today predicts that online ad spending will soar to $25.9
billion dollars by 2011. Approximately $12 billion
was spent online last year according to figures from the Interactive
Advertising Bureau. The report predicts continued gains
for search marketing which surpassed display advertising last
year with 41% of overall spending (display ads took 34%
of the pie). JupiterResearch predicts online ad spending will
jump 21% this year. Others expect an even higher growth
rate for 2006. Universal McCann forecasts a 25%
rise while research firm eMarketer says the number will
be over 33%. MediaPost's Online
Media Daily has more on this story (free
registration is required to read).
Posted July 25, 2006
Big
news on the .eu front today. EURid, the organization
that operates the .eu registry, has suspended 74 000 .eu domain names and has
sued 400 registrars for breach of contract. EURid says
the move was prompted by abusive behavior from a syndicate of registrars who have systematically acquired domain names with the obvious intent of
re-selling them for large profits. EURid said this constitutes
warehousing of domains and is a violation of their agreement
with registrars who allegedly set up front companies to
acquire the domains for themselves. The outcome of the suspended domain names now awaits a court decision. EURid
said it wants to make the names available for registration again.
More details on this story are available at TheRegister.co.uk
and IPWalk.com.
Posted July 24, 2006
Among
young people at least, the Internet appears to have
clearly surpassed TV as the preferred medium. According to a new
survey of more than 350 college students and
recent graduates conducted by Experience
Inc., 43% of the respondents said they
spent at least 10 hours a week online, compared to only 17%
who watched TV for at least ten hours a week. Newspapers and
magazines fare even worse, with only 1% of college age
media consumers spending at least 10 hours a week reading
publications. Experience, Inc. is a leading provider of career
services to students and alumni.
Posted July 23, 2006
Google
has been accused of not doing enough to stem click
fraud, but an independent report filed in an Arkansas court
Friday (July 21) came to the conclusion that Google has in
fact taken reasonable measures to fight the problem. This is
the case that advertiser Lane's Gifts brought against
Google in Miller County, Arkansas seeking compensation
for losses allegedly sustained due to click fraud. The two
sides (who have already come to terms on a proposed $90
million settlement that is awaiting court approval) agreed to commission the report as part of
the settlement arrangement. Alexander Tuzhilin, a
professor of information systems at New York University,
was chosen to do the study. He said, "Based on my
evaluation, I conclude that Google's efforts to combat click
fraud are reasonable." Tuzhilin added that indirect evidence he collected via discussions with Google's fraud prevention team supports the conclusion "with a moderate degree of certainty"
that the company's invalid click detection problem is "under control."
More on this is available at CNN.com.
Posted July 22, 2006
This
will be music to the ears of domain owners who earn
money through PPC (pay per click) advertising. Chris
Sherman, the Executive Editor of SearchEngineWatch.com,
predicts that prices paid for premium search terms will take a
huge jump in the years ahead as more brands adopt search
marketing. Sherman was the keynote speaker at the opening day
of MediaPost's Search Insider Summit in Keystone,
Colorado yesterday (July 20). He told attendees that big
brands have just now started utilizing search marketing.
Sherman noted that a recent study pegged search advertising at
about $5.75 billion, but worldwide ad budgets are
currently around $500 billion. "What happens if
the big brands decide to move just 10% of that half
trillion dollars into search marketing?" Sherman asked.
More details on Sherman's talk are available in Erik Sass's
column
in MediaPost's Online Media Daily today (free
registration is required to read).
Posted July 21, 2006
Oversee.net
has announced the acquisition of two more privately
held
domain portfolios. The small niche portfolios included CareerSeeker.com
and
DreamVacations.com, both of which have high traffic and
retention rates according to Oversee. The company says it
monetizes more than one million domain names and
has more than 100 million unique visitors per month. Oversee
owns leading domain monetization company, DomainSponsor.com.
DomainSponsor will be hosting the first DomainFest
Barcelona in Spain next week (July 25-26).
There is more info on that event in our June 30 post below.
Posted July 21, 2006
The
Miami Herald has a new
article out about direct navigation and the key
role domain names play in web search. The story focuses on the
experiences of Ft. Lauderdale domain investor Michael
Berkens and his company Worldwide Media. They own
more than 50,000 domain names that attract around 300,000
visitors a day according to the report. There are also
positive comments from major financial analysts like Jordan
Rohan of RBC Capital Markets (a close follower of
the domain industry who has been a featured speaker at the
last two T.R.A.F.F.I.C. conferences).
Posted July 20, 2006
Lee
Gomes, a writer for the Wall Street Journal Online,
posted an interesting story today about the extent to which
the .com namespace has been mined out. The article, "All
the Good Ones Have Been Taken - In Domain Names, Too"
details research done by Dennis Forbes of Vastardis
Capital Services (a New York mutual-fund service
company). Forbes sliced and diced the database of registered
.com domains to come up with stats that include the most (and
least) used words in domain names, the average length of a
domain name (13 characters) and much more. It's mostly trivia
but, hey, it's domain trivia, so we like it!
Posted July 19, 2006
Online
ad spending in
the second quarter of 2006 soared 13.8% higher than the
first three months of the year, according to a new study
conducted by Deutsche Bank in conjunction with MediaPost
(MediaPost requires free registration to read the full
article). Pricing also increased, with the cost of premium
inventory rising 6.6%, run of network inventory
increasing 3.6%, and paid search edging up 1.3%
quarter-over-quarter. Google dominated the paid search
market, garnering 65% of cost-per-click spending. Yahoo!
accounted for 25% and MSN took in 8%.
Posted July 17, 2006
According
to a new study from the Leichtman
Research Group, broadband internet access
providers in the U.S. had their best quarter ever in the first
three months of 2006, adding just over 3 million new
subscribers. In a survey of the top broadband ISP's
(representing about 94% of the market), LRG found there are
now approximately 46 million high speed Internet
subscribers with 25.8 million of those using cable and 20.2
million using DSL. DSL has been catching up rapidly and has
now added more subscribers than cable for the last six
quarters in a row. In the first quarter of this year, 1.66
million of the new broadband subscribers chose DSL with 1.4
million opting for cable.
Posted July 15, 2006
Ad
dollars continue to drain out of old line media and
onto the web, but radio doesn't seem to be bleeding as badly
as newspapers and TV this year. The latest revenue
report from the Radio Advertising Bureau
show that total radio ad sales from January through May of
this year dropped 1% from the same 5-month period
in 2005. Of course, no one in the radio business is doing
handsprings over going backwards, but with the huge boom in
Internet advertising things could be worse.
Posted July 11, 2006
The
website for the North County Times (a regional
newspaper serving the San Diego, California area), has an
interesting article
from writer Chris Bagley about how the domain boom has
produced a severe shortage of viable .com domains in the real
estate sector. Bagley does a good job of conveying the value
inherent in a good domain to his paper's readers so that they
can understand why prices can run into 6 figures. It is
encouraging to see mainstream journalists grasp what we've
known for a long time and pass that knowledge along to the
general public. We'll still see occasional mainstream articles
loaded with misinformation about this business, but as more
and more media outlets get it right, we're confident that the
man on the street will eventually understand why good domains
command the prices they do today.
Posted July 10, 2006
Macau.com
is one of the five biggest sales thus
far in 2006, having changed hands for $550,000
in February. MacauBusiness.com
recently released an in-depth article about the transaction
that includes an interview with the CEO of the new ownership
group. The piece offers some interesting insight into how the
high level deal got done and why the name was well worth over
half a million dollars to the buyers. There is also an
accompanying article about domain investor Chuck Yee
who owns VisitMacau.com and thinks it could go for $800,000
even though he hand-registered the domain in 2002.
Posted July 7, 2006
According
to IPWalk.com,
the .mobi registry has decided to extend the
trademark sunrise period for the new TLD, pushing the end date
back from August 22 to September 22. The site said the announcement
will come soon, noting that Alexa Raad, Dotmobi’s VP
of Marketing and Business Development, told them that
companies needed more time to fill out paperwork. Raad also
told IPWalk the registry wanted some extra time to reach out
to the business community and tell them how they can build a
new channel with .mobi,
an extension that will be devoted to mobile devices.
Posted July 6, 2006
Performics,
a division of DoubleClick.com has issued an
interesting report on Search
Trends for the 1st Quarter of 2006. The report
shows that web search advertisers are getting a better return
on their investment than ever before. Search ad spending
soared over 37% from the same quarter in 2005 while the
advertiser's sales rocketed by 72%! The report also
showed that web surfers are searching on a wider variety of
keywords with the number of keywords receiving at least one
monthly click or conversion shooting up 36% in the past
year.
Posted July 4, 2006
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