Supernatural Agency: Online business tales

If you don’t get the almost daily WIPO emails covering domain squatting disputes, it may be time to sign up and occasionally read through the decisions. Most are quite obvious but this one regarding boomerangvodka.com covers the issues regarding trademarks, timing and legitimate use of a domain. If you’re wondering whether you have infringing domains you might want to check this out. BTW, the complaint was denied.

Boomerangvodka.com is a parked domain so I question their decision that it is a legitimate business site, however they did legitimately predate the complaintent’s registration of the trademark.

Matt is the closest thing to an SEO spokesperson for Google. In this post he outlines Google’s policies on the use of subdomains vs. subdirectories in URLs. If you’re not clear on the difference here’s his explanation:

“Historically, it’s been kind of a wash about when to use subdomains vs. subdirectories. Just as a reminder, in a URL such as subdomain.example.com/subdirectory/ , the subdomain is “subdomain” and the subdirectory is “subdirectory” (also sometimes called a folder). If you’re still unclear, you may want to read my tutorial on the parts of a URL.”

As usual he is intentionally vague in how Google ranks these. It interests me because we’ve been experimenting with acquiring some domains that we can extend with subdirectories. An example is BestBarIn.com/Rochester (there is no site yet so don’t bother checking). Theoretically we only need the BestBarIn.com domain and then we could build out an entire range of cities using subdirectories. This would give us the advantages of geo-focused domains without having to buy hundreds of individual domains. It would also mean that that domain would become a very valuable property, assuming we can get search results for that keyword string (i.e. searcher enters query: best bar in Rochester and we come up). That’s the $50,000 dollar question, actually more like the $5mm question!

And we don’t know the answer. If you have any insight into this we’d really like to hear about it.

Oh, and read the comments on Matt’s post- a lot of people are wondering about this.

There are 1 billion Internet users worldwide right now. The remaining 5 billion humans on the planet are not connected. Right now the UN is working on getting the next billion users connected. The challenges include poverty, infrastructure and interference by various governments.

For domainers and the online advertising world the implications of this are huge, including:

• The enormous potential for growth on the Internet. There are a limited number of domains out there and those of us in the first billion own most of them.
• Potential ad spend growth online is far larger than any current predictions which are based on the existing user base.
• Sites and domains targeting global audiences with very different worldviews will thrive.
• Digital products will be the major growth sector because they do not require shipping and they can be priced to fit the demographics of a geo-location. The downside of this is piracy.
• Forget intellectual property as a business model. The only IP that will be protectable is your domain. Your content, ideas and business concepts will be copied over and over. Domains will become the currency that determines value on the web.
• Dot coms are the gold standard. As the web grows and piracy flourishes money will retreat to the gold standard. This always happens in times of great change.
• English, IMHO, will still be the primary language online, however processing power and bandwidth are going to mean real-time translation of site content. Think about this- a Mandarin speaker/reader visits one of my sites and Google auto-translates it on the fly. Can we auto-translate domains? I’m in flying car territory here…
• It took ten years for the web to hit one billion users. I’m guessing the second billion will hit a lot faster.

My biggest takeaway? Domains are the only safe harbor online, the biggest growth opportunity. Domaining is a teeny-tiny business right now. The ‘players’ argue amongst themselves over silly imagined slights and the entire domain blogworld is limited to a half dozen blogs. Watch for the big guys to enter this world, the Goldman Sachs, Warren Buffetts and hedgefund managers. When that happens our little crew of domain millionaires will find their world dramatically altered (of course they will get very rich in the process).

Here’s a scenario to ponder: What if Amazon got into the domain business? They have virtually every product imaginable to promote and huge amounts of user-generated content to leverage. They have enormous scalability and unlimited resources. It’s a thought…

Conde Naste announced they are shuttering 106 year old magazine House and Garden and its website because it is no longer a viable business. This raises a whole bunch of questions regarding domains with this kind of brand equity. What do they do with houseandgarden.com? This domain is potentially easily worth more than the print magazine, they have an incredible wealth of high-quality content, great brand, old URL, etc. Yet they shut it down?

Like the publishers who don’t understand the content value of their book backlists as online domain sites, Conde Naste obviously doesn’t have any idea what they are tossing into a dusty file cabinet. Someone could start a company, acquire these assets and build a very high traffic site made for high end advertisers and affiliates.

Opportunity knocks.