http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9800958-7.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=NewsB
Could be Part of the "de-Silo"ing at Yahoo or it could just be that Ms. Dunaway has jumped on the employment opportunity of her dreams.. I like to keep an eye on Yahoo because this company is a sleeper if they can just organise the pieces they have better. Companies with high stock valuations and a "can do no wrong" sparkle, that's one thing. Companies with great assets who can't get any love .. that's an opportunity.
http://domainnamewire.com/2007/09/17/so-long-overture-scores/
Ahhh the 'goto tool'... Old timers in the domain industry still ask "What's the goto" when trying to determine the popularity of a given search-phrase with spaces between the words (apart), with spaces removed (together) and as a complete domain name (with extension). What these folks are asking is "How many times has this term been searched over the past month across the goto, (later called Overture and currently called Yahoo) paid search network? The answer to that question will determine whether a given phrase will garner organic, generic-intent type-in traffic when registered as a domain name.
I'll never forget the day when Garry Chernoff showed me this tool for the first time. My eyes lit up with wonderment at this window into the hearts, minds and souls of the Internet browsing public. Want to know what the most popular types of pie are? Just enter the word "pie" and see how many people search for apple, blueberry, cherry etc.. "American Pie" and "Pie Theory" always seemed to be the most popular pies.. but after a while you learned why that was..
It stood to reason that if some portion of the browsing public was so determined to find pictures of dolphins that they simply typed dolphinpictures.com into the search box at yahoo (recording one search in the suggestion tool) that those same people (and others) would type the domain-name in their browser address bar looking for the non-existent website that this powerful name describes.
I acquired the name when it dropped and was surprised to see 25 visits a day.. The people still come back, half a decade later.
That goto suggestion tool faithfully turned back billions of queries over the years and helped guide countless novice domain investors as they mined for untapped traffic veins. Many of those folks became "Fabulous"ly successful and created vast fortunes in spite of being late to the domain game. As word about this open software tool made rounds on the Internet it became much slower as parties ran monster lists against it, trying to harvest data. Surprisingly, Yahoo kept the tool open and unrestricted even after acquiring Overture.
Those days now appear to be "over" .. Several folks have reported the demise of the tool's monthly update and results appear skewed since last week. Thanks for the memories goto tool. We'll always have Wordtracker but you will be missed by many.
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 :)
I can't be 100% sure, but I just checked my stats and revenues seem to be fairly strong for a Monday in mid-July (the kids are still out of school after all)..
If Yahoo could do one thing right it would be to fix their keyword marketplace.. if Yahoo's sales force can get the bidders to return, (like in the heyday of Overture), that single action will gloss over all sorts of unrelated perceived bungling/mismanagement and lost opportunity elsewhere in the company (which they have taken heat for over the past year).
The stock price should rebound and Sue and Jerry will look like geniuses. JMO
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/12/yahoo-launches-suggest-search-feature/
Link on Techcrunch via DomainNameNews.com ... Nice.. and all.. but I sure miss the days of the old goto search term suggestion tool..
Before people started running bajillions of queries against it... Before the updates were delayed by a month.. before they renamed to Overture. Old-timers like me still say "How much Goto apart?".
This little tool right here made a lot of early domainers very very successful (Roy, Guido, Garry.. you know who you are). I still have a laptop bag with the logo somewhere. Ahhh memory lane... :)
http://www.siliconrepublic.com/news/news.nv?storyid=single8692
Quote: "By combining its huge audience, dynamic ad creation capabilities and deep knowledge of user interests, Yahoo! has developed a true innovation that will benefit agencies and its clients, especially companies with a large number of offers to present to many audience segments."
Something else domainers should be doing.. Harvesting click-in, click-out and IP data, session and user-agent info across all their names.. Log everything, sort it out later.
http://www.techanalyst.com/domains/beyond-the-googleyahoo-hegemony-the-future-of-domain-parking.html
Joe Davidson strikes a chord with this one. He points out that the power to change the pecking order in paid search is here with us, in our hands. The pieces are all here but nobody is putting them together to extract max-value. I've previously had thoughts along a similar vein.
In order to rival the Yahoos or Googles of the World you need to take a page from their play-book.. These co's each have functionality, utility and (most importantly) reach that is admired and respected the web-over.. Once you have a nucleus of your own (a search utility, a content site, a very large bucket of domain names), other elements are drawn to you and begin to orbit (traffic redistribution/syndication/direct ad deals). Then you use that cash-flow to increase the size of your nucleus (double-down, buy something bigger, expand) .. then draw bigger redistribution fish like what Ask.com is doing with its Google pass-through syndication deal. I would never sign onto a sub-syndication deal for my traffic but I would consider Ask.com, because they have the leading Google rev-share which they got by getting very big.
The key of course is to get BIG. Too many co's either cheap-out or fail to execute .. They buy one big asset then chill and roll up smaller inconsequential pieces. Even the big like Ask.com risk getting unseated if fail to expand as quickly as their competitors. One day somebody in the will 'go big' and move beyond domain PPC by changing the pecking order, utilizing the leverage described above.
Link also from Josh... thanks bro Josh!
I don't think Yahoo should try to be more like Google. I think they should try to be more like the companies they acquire..
Yahoo's problem (in my view) is that they often buy companies like Overture (their paid-search, monetization and keyword marketplace) and then make it more like Yahoo, taking away the sparkle that made the company acquisition worthy in the first place. In my experience dealing with Yahoo, there is not enough latitude given to key staff to allow them to go out and do things. If I ran Yahoo I'd allow for a culture that empowers those creative spirits within the organization, and makes them feel great about going to work each morning. That includes allowing its people to follow through on ideas that may not pan-out, without an oppressive layer of bureaucracy to water down the concepts and ideas that may ultimately evolve into significant revenue drivers..
If Yahoo could do one thing more like Google it would be to move quicker, and try more stuff. See the Google mapping thing below...
Jeff writes:
"Yahoo Photos with over 2 billion photos is shutting down:
http://news.com.com/FAQ+What+to+do+with+your+Yahoo+photos/2100-1038_3-6191167.html?tag=nefd.lede
I guess too many of these web 2.0 startups are kicking their butts."
That's a buying opportunity Jeff.. I wonder if Yahoo can sell the 2 Billion pix? Thanks for the link ;)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2007/06/12/cngoogle112.xml
I am consciously starting to use different search engines and experimenting outside of Google. I've been trying Ask.com (with the forest background skin), Yahoo.com and MSN.com, but not Live.com (my silent browser error search protest) .. I still like Google's results better, but would be lying if I told you I'm not worried about Google deliberately violating my privacy or that G's competitors are getting better.
I'm a frequent Google user but I don't like all that they are doing.. Some of the people I knew there are leaving and I'm worried that the culture will inexorably shift as the next generation of Googlers picks up the reigns, more consumed with the financial upside than the substance of the company. What made Google great was the passion and drive of it's first generation founding staff and its search algo.
Other companies are beginning to mimic the flavor of their algo and Google's success breeds problems as the passionate people take the money and run. SEO black-hats are like barbarians at the gate unleashing the force of software and dark energy to game their results to the top, spoiling potent results. As the core people cash out and newcomers fill their shoes, how will those folks feel about growing the company if GOOG's stock-price craters for 3 consecutive quarters? Will generation II Googler's passion fizzle when competitors start to school them?
Those are the sorts of things I ask myself and other professional Google users will ask themselves when stories like this point out that lady Google is not as "absent of evil" as they told us she was. Time will tell; I'm hoping for the best because I like this engine.
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