Bronte Media

Loyal time readers know I have long been intrigued with the direct navigation industry. The process involves buying up domain names that contain commercially related keywords and putting a series of text ads on them so that when a curious user types in the domain, hopefully they will click on the ad too.

Marchex, one of the largest firms in the industry and a publicly listed company on the NASDAQ has often said that besides from pure search, direct navigation is the highest converting sources of traffic on the web.

That maybe so, but like the broader search industry before it, perhaps the direct navigation industry is undergoing a sausagifying phase. That is, blending in junk with some of the higher quality meat to create an end product that is digestable. Here is a great manifesto as it relates to search.

The problem with dressing mutten up as lamb is that eventually people find out about it.

Go and read this post. In it Richard Ball of Apogee Consulting describes in detail of how an overwhelmingly disproportionate chunk of his spending was tied to one Google partner in their domain parking program: searchportal.information.com. It’s perhaps one of the most intriguing online marketing posts you will ever read.

The domain searchportal.information.com is owned by Oversee.net, which runs a large domain division of its own.

The nature of direct navigation is that a huge number of domains each refer a small amount of traffic, which in total adds up to a meaningful business.

Traffic referred from the domain did not convert for Richard. He speculates that it might have been artificially inflated through the use of arbitrage (i.e. Oversee buying or directing cheap traffic in the hopes they would click on one of the ads on searchportal.information.com) or spyware.

A lot of search marketers have opted out of the contextual network because of concerns over click fraud, however Google’s domain parked network - or direct navigation component - resides in the search network along with sites like Ask and AOL.

Richard also digs down further into Oversee.net (disclosure: I am a big fan of Jay Weintraub, who works at the company).

He points to a post that links Oversee.net with another company called Chesterton Holdings. A number of people have alleged Chesterton Holdings inappropriately monitors domain name whois searches and registers the name itself before the person intending to register it has the chance. Laughably, in the post the example given is registering domains that email spammers use to hawk viagra and other ‘pharmaceuticals’, so that when the ‘campaigns’ are sent out, the domains that are contained in the email land on direct navigation pages not owned by the spammer but instead by Chesterton Holdings.

Whatever the truth, the net result is that after reading through the trail of intrigue you hardly come away with the feeling, as an advertiser, of full confidence in the industry.

This quote from Otto Van Bismark has perhaps never been more relevant: “People who enjoy eating sausage and obeying the law shouldn’t watch either being made.”