Bronte Media

Long time readers of this blog will remember my early fascination with the practice of putting ads on domain names, now a big business and collectively called ‘direct navigation’ or ‘domaining’.

In fact, looking through my archives I first wrote about in June of 2005 with an initial dose of disbelief and then quickly an obsessive fascination.

In recent times there has been a little shake out with Google and Yahoo marking down domain ad pricing. Given two years of non-action, I thought why not give it a shot. Mostly to find out how it really works.

As a bonus, I thought I would write about the process as well, with all the gory details. The numbers wont be large, but they will be naked for all to see.

Namely I want to see:

- If anybody does really type in domain names that are outside of the obvious (e.g. sex.com)?

- How much will it help a site to rank in Google and other search engines, having the actual keyword phrase in the title of the domain?

- Are there still domain names you can buy off the shelf that have value?

So my initial toe in the water was to register over a 100 domain names related to real estate (since I figured that I at least know a little about it, and it was a good place to start).

How did I choose the domain names? I first downloaded a large CSV file that lists each city’s population by year from census.gov. I then paid a guy about $70 to run a whois search on every realestate.com combination and log if the domain was available or not. If not, when it would expire and who owned it.

So I had a big ass spreadsheet. Obviously newyorkrealestate.com and losangelesrealestate.com were taken. I then projected what each city’s population would be five years out, looking at historic trends. What I was trying to do was discover cities in the US that are sprouting up and so the domain would be more valuable over time.

I then paid $716.09 through GoDaddy.com to register the top 101 entries from my analysis. An example is the city of Centerton in Arkansas that is growing by about 18% year over year in population and should have about 20,000 people in 2012. Most of the cities are somewhere around 10,000-20,000 people.

What needs to happen for me to earn my money back? Well basically I need to earn $0.59 per month per domain through some sort of advertising.

How can I earn $0.59? Well here are my assumptions. I am guessing about 20 people a month need to visit the domain and 15% of them click through. At least in my initial implementation, which will be an exceedingly helpful page of sponsored links you always come across.

In the whois dump I found out there are two mini real estate domain moguls and one uses the domain parking service TrafficZ.com, so that’s what I’ll do for the first three months.

After that, I’ll develop a simple template with some pretty graphs with information from places like Zillow, Trulia and Homethinking. And the ads.

After 6 months, I’ll re-evaluate where I am and let you know what (if anything) works and what doesn’t and then change course from there.

My goal is to just get my cash costs back or on track to getting it back and not be supported by any sales of domains.

Is there anything I should do? Anyone I should work with? Will I bore you to tears with this series of posts?