Seven Mile

Microsoft Values Facebook at 15 billion.. Domains Name Valuations in a Bubble

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=ah_myY3uN0pE&refer=home

I am consistently dumbstruck that deals like this barely raise an eyebrow, while individual domain names, the foundational elements of the Internet, get compared to tulip manias and bubbles.

It's a strange upside down world we live in.. Domain name monetization has been going on in much the same way since adult webmasters began selling monthly memberships to porn sites in 1995 (3 years after the birth of the modern web browser) ..  Today we have paid search monetization sites for virtually every product and service under the sun. Many are moving away from straight parking toward lead generation, arbitrage, content delivery and pay-per-unique implementations.

But these simple sites which for years have made money in the most benign of ways are 'bubbles' while the publicly listed internet economy, consisting of plates spinning on the ends of pool cues is accepted as foundationally sound and airtight.

All a fellow can do is smile, shrug and keep cashing those checks. It's too tiring and unproductive to pen a counterpoint to each person who don't understand.. or who doesn't want to understand.

Suffice it to say that the Internet has already crashed and burned once ..  domain names did not experience that shock..  If there is a redux of 2000/2001 you can expect domain names to perform in a similar manner as before.

I'm not so sure all of Facebook's 15 Billion will come out the same way.

Microsoft to Buy Some Open Source Companies

Ballmer used to say Linux is a cancer.

http://www.news.com:80/8301-10784_3-9800141-7.html?tag=nefd.only

I Dream of Rupert

I had the weirdest dream last night..  weird for several reasons. Firstly, I don't usually dream about the domain business (that I can remember) and they certainly don't wake me from my sleep at 4AM.

In this dream I was in New York, during some kind of conference and was meeting with Rupert Murdoch about a strategic merger..  A faceless female assistant or key staff-member (who is a mutual acquaintance in said dream) had arranged to bring Rupert by my hotel suite as he made his way to some other meeting. In the office of the suite we talked about the domain name business, how domain name traffic powers part of Google, Yahoo and drives a significant portion of generic-intenet Internet traffic.. Rupe tried to get his head around the concept that many of the companies he had bought and invested in had domain name underpinnings. He was quite clever, savvy and aware of things in my dream.

As much as I wanted to take this meeting to talk shop with today's William Randolph Hearst, Rupert had somehow heard of me (and the domain industry) and he wanted to take the meeting as well! It wasn't a love-fest meeting though. Rupert was the classic 2002 era skeptic.. He wanted to talk about charts and projections through 2012. He seemed hurried, synopsizing the domain industry's highlights and playing devils advocate, talking about fragmented interests and the difficulty of uniting a scatter-shot domain audience around a cohesive core or brand. It didn't seem like I was going to sell Mr. Murdoch on the benefits of merging a large domain network with his media content core.

I had several browser windows open during our discussion and suddenly, as we were in the wrap-up phase of our conversation (Rupert had his coat over his arm and umbrella in hand) it occurred to me to resize two of the open browser windows on my laptop...

What would happen if every time somebody typed one of our potent domain names they received a single split-screen of targeted paid search advertising, married to a relevant Newscorp media content page?  Type a cooking name and get a relevant food story from today's Newscorp newspaper...  Type Sportscores.com and get ads coupled with the sports section of Foxnews..  Type PersonalLoans.com and get a split-screen with related content from the WSJ..   Rupert's eye's lit up.  I explained how a mash-up of my traffic with his rotating content could turn the 30 million unique visitors we get each month into 60 or 100 million as people came back for more. Then we could ramp up our own Domain Sponsor style third-party syndication business to augment our own proprietary traffic with other domainer's traffic; making Newscorp websites the most visited on the Internet in about 6 months.

Rupert started talking about creating his own ad marketplace and the mechanics of our proposed merger when it suddenly occurred to me that I had already signed a deal to be sold to a less strategic company for hundreds of millions of dollars less than Rupert was offering..  Then I woke up... That's what you call a 'high-class nightmare' folks :)

I jotted down a few notes so I could remember to blog about it then went back to another dream about the playboy mansion.

It was the implementation in the Murdoch dream that still resonated the morning after. The content exists today..  the domain name networks exist today.. They are an invisible traffic source, generating hundreds of millions of unique visits a month globally.  How could Newscorp or another media content house elevate it's Internet presence and exert control over Google by injecting itself as a domain name network owner/sub-syndicator and marrying content to each and every page load?

Lawrence Ng should have a 'frank' conversation with Rupert's people :)

Firefox Takes IE Down Another Notch

Danno sends spicy headline and link:

""FYI...July 17

http://networks.silicon.com/webwatch/0,39024667,39167861,00.htm?r=1

Best,
Dan"""

***FS*** The way I see it Microsoft / IE have two choices.  They can clean up their act (browser) and stop gaming people's navigational intent via BS takeovers of your/my traffic to their "Live" property (this basically goes to improving the usefulness of their browser) .. or they can gradually perish as people like you,  I, Firefox, Opera, Safari and others work against them to undermine their position.  Nobody would work against them if they were delivering a better product or running a clean show.  If they choose the latter,  I expect even more nefariousness and acts of dsesperation as they go down at an accelerated pace.  Serious serious prediction.

Welcome to Microsoft! .. (volcano not included)

This is what I was talking about in question 9 on Aaron's blog; and recently when I wrote this post speaking to 'TLD platform leverage' .. the kinds of things that could ultimately rival or challenge the .com extension..

It seems I'm not the only one who's found his way to the Caribbean, Microsoft has invaded Monserrat!: http://neosmart.net/blog/2007/get-your-own-microsoft-domain-today/

Why is this important? Imagine if every Microsoft employee had email that looked like this: [email protected] .. an internal corporate account with a TLD extension that clearly identified the corporation. Microsoft would have to share with fellow Montserratians of course, but Google could push for the .goog extension and keep it for their tens of thousands of employees.. [email protected] would signify that you had reached Google.  No need to worry about cybersquatters out in the .com world..  let them do what they want there because only authorized people would get accounts or sites on .goog.

Quote from story: "How long before Microsoft sues to own the .MS tld and everything on it? (all your base are belong to us, anyone?)"

The bigger question in my mind is: How long before Google applies for .goog, IBM for .ibm, Coca cola for .coke ..and so on until every major global corporation has their own GTLD. Leaving .com to the mom and pops, generic holders and cybersquatters? It would take a generation to get traction globally, but it could "come to be" on the back of baby-steps like this.

Quote:  "You can purchase your own .MS domain name here; and just for kicks, check out http://google.ms/ Funnily enough, Microsoft.ms doesn’t load, and MSN.ms doesn’t even exist. Interesting…

Didn't get Microsoft.ms huh?.. And promoting the extension as part of a product!!?   Okay, okay..  so maybe I overestimated these Microsoft guys. Google on the other hand,  not so dumb registering www.google.ms

Microsoft Aquantive Purchase.. More than Meets the Eye?

http://blogs.business2.com/sloan/2007/05/why_microsofts_.html

Paul Sloan doesn't blog too often so when I see his blog update,  it's worth mentioning. Paul adds additional color to the 6Billion purchase of Aquantive.

Quote: "the point of this deal (and the point of Google buying DoubleClick, for that matter) is that it's no longer about search vs. display. The lines are blurring, ... Aquantive knows, for instance, that certain banner ads make people more likely to search using certain keywords...  Microsoft,  for example, should be able to tell a car advertiser running a display ad for a sports car exactly what keywords it should buy for its paid search campaign -- maybe "red cars" or "fast cars," and so on."

Hmmm ..  still sounds like 'not a lot of fireworks' for 6 billion.