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March 22, 2007

Comments

C_Sivertsen

Hi Frank, your blog is a great read!

As one Yahoo's largest customers, how have you dealt with their decline in the domain space overthe past few years?? Meditation?

Do you have a line in the sand for the success of Panama? Meaning do you ever think..."...if they don't get things ship shape by (insert date) i'm taking my biz across the street..."?

Chris

***FS*** I am not really one of Yahoo's largest partners anymore.. They have massively grown their biz since that b2 article came out.. but I think they are going to execute their way out of their problems. Failure is a funny thing. It destroys some folks but makes others stronger. I see Yahoo in the latter bucket.

Omar

Frank,

Great post.

What are your thoughts on Microsoft entering the paid search business? Is this something for domainers to look forward to?
:-)

***FS*** Will take time for them to build a base.. between here and there they may get discouraged and opt to buy Yahoo.. that would probably be fast and cheaper.. but not better from the 3 market outlook.

Rob Sequin

You suggest the big three buy 5% of publishers/domain owners.

Do you think any one of them would make a bid for your portfolio or that of Name Media or Fabulous?

They should buy 100% of the big portfolios then they own and control it all.

Possible?

***FS*** I'm glad you made this comment Rob.. on rereading my post this isn't me trying to get bought.. in actuality I would prefer to go last because I don't think the market fairly values generic over typo style traffic.. there is a premium for high quality generic names but not enough.. valuations still based on ppc. But the ad marketplaces do not own anything that can not be duplicated with money. The only thing that can't be duplicated are type in traffic domains and large scale content publishers (well content-pubs 'can' be recreated but not without considerable time and expense) I think goog, yhoo should look down at the 20% of their 'partners' generating 80% of third party revenue and make a decision about trying to buy in.. 5-10% is 'nothing' for these guys.. and then they'd have more control over future destiny. Not all publishers partners may take the bait.. but nothing begets nothing.

DNCatalog

"Years ago I chose Yahoo as a publisher partner"
This may be slightly off topic, but your post made me wonder what the advantage is of using only one partner versus trying both networks and using the one (on a name by name basis) that delivers the best results. I know that with a portfolio as large as yours, it would be difficult to scale and do with every name, but what would happen if you just took your top 1% (or top 50 or top 1000) most visited or best converting names and did this?

kamal

I like your philosophy, Frank, not only for business, but life.

Great job on this blog, it's quickly becoming my favorite.

Best,

Kamal

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