It’s once in a lifetime that I get a chance to write a headline like the one above. Yes, I’m turning fifty. I’m having a Hawaiian party tonight where Hawaiian shirts are mandatory….so Rick Schwartz and Rob Grant would be really happy with that choice. :-)

Turning fifty is a bit of a milestone and causes me to reflect on all of the blessings that I’ve received in my life. I have three amazing children, a drop dead gorgeous wife who loves and spoils me incredibly.

I also work in an industry which is nothing short of spectacular. Domaining has provided me not only with an income but with friends from all over the world. It’s great thinking that when I travel to a particular country there’s always someone there to catch-up on.

For those of you still in your twenties and thirties, trust me when I say that I don’t feel old at all. I’m still leaping off cliffs paragliding, kite surfing and I’m planning on hiking the New Zealand alps with Roselyn.

My grandmother said to me, “Michael, you only get old when you think you are.” Very wise words from one of the most amazing people I’ve ever known. In her retirement my grandparents criss-crossed both South America and Africa and even went through the Khyber Pass in Afghanistan. They also went to the top of the Iguazu Falls (make the Niagara look small) in a row boat and cross the Sahara desert in summer…..they were true adventurers!

So now that I’m hitting fifty I can only say, “Watch out! Here I come!” You thought I was full of energy before….you aint seen nothing yet :-)

When I celebrate my birthday this evening I plan on having a great time and even dreaming of the next fifty years (my grandfather made it to 100). I’ll also have a drink for all of my friends from around the world that couldn’t be with me physically but I know are with me in spirit.

Cheers!

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Michael Gilmour has been in business for over 32 years and has both a BSC in Electronics and Computer Science and an MBA. He was the former vice-chairman of the Internet Industry Association in Australia and is in demand as a speaker at Internet conferences the world over. He has also recently published his first science fiction book, Battleframe.

Michael is passionate about working with online entrepreneurs to help them navigate their new ventures around the many pitfalls that all businesses face. Due to demands on his time, Michael may be contacted by clicking here for limited consulting assignments.

There are a number of basics to business. The first is that you remember to collect the money and the second is to never forget the customer. It just so happens that for quite some time registrar, Enom, has forgotten both of these.

You'll have to excuse the little rant.......About 2 weeks ago I went to top up my account for my domain renewals. It’s a regular thing that I do and I wasn’t expecting any surprises. After clicking the “submit” button I was presented with the server error page below.

I’ve been around technology for a long time so although the error was annoying I wasn’t that phased by it. A couple of weeks later I decided to try adding money to my account again and I received exactly the same error. You would think that after a couple of weeks (at least) that any problems with the payment system would have been resolved.

Sighing to myself I dialled the help desk number and after pressing a series of buttons to select technical support I waited on the international call for around 15 minutes until I finally gave up. I then recalled the number and selected the options for sales support……20+ minutes later I was finally speaking to a support desk person.

They were actually quite helpful and indicated that my credit card had expired and that I needed to add the date to the profile part of the Enom system. I was a little confused by this as I said that each time I added my credit card for the payment I put in the correct expirey date and received the error page.

The person said they have known about the problem for a long time and that for some reason the expiry date for the credit card is pulled from the profile and not from the form you just filled in for payment……go figure?

I politely suggested that someone should really fix an error that crashes the website and the support person became…how shall I say…..less than helpful. Maybe he was just a little frustrated with the tech-teams lack of bug fixing....who knows? I suggested that I blog about my experience and point out to other Enom customers how to get around the problem and the support person thought that was a great idea.

What I would like to know is how long this problem has been going on for and why the heck the support people haven’t communicated to the development team about it? It’s clear that the support people have a work around….so the question has to be asked, why hasn’t Enom’s CTO fixed a problem that strikes at the heart of revenue collection?

Since Enom is holding the valuable assets of a lot of domainers…..what would happen if some of these domains began to drop because people couldn’t get onto the support team for the magic work around? My guess is there would be a lot of law suits flying around.

So Enom, my advice is to stop procrastinating and fix the problem rather than waiting around for a disaster to happen. It improves revenue, customer experience and stops potential legal issues.

In the meantime, if you are an Enom customer the work around is to update the date in your profile for your credit card before adding it again into the payments page.

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Michael Gilmour has been in business for over 32 years and has both a BSC in Electronics and Computer Science and an MBA. He was the former vice-chairman of the Internet Industry Association in Australia and is in demand as a speaker at Internet conferences the world over. He has also recently published his first science fiction book, Battleframe.

Michael is passionate about working with online entrepreneurs to help them navigate their new ventures around the many pitfalls that all businesses face. Due to demands on his time, Michael may be contacted by clicking here for limited consulting assignments.

So many domain owners get incredibly confused by all the different companies that want to monetise their traffic for them. Which one is best? How do I really know if they are better than another? What is the best way to run a test? All of these questions are vital if you wish to get the most out of your domain traffic.

In this article I will unpack the critical success factors of what makes a viable good traffic test so that you will always know that you are monetising your traffic with the right provider.

For a start, to eliminate any discrepancies in timing, all traffic tests need to be conducted simultaneously. What you don’t want to do is change your DNS to point to parking company A and then a few weeks later change the DNS to parking company B. The two separate periods of time introduce large errors in determining who is the real winner.

Without the proper tools, running a simultaneous test can be difficult but with a good partner this is eminently achievable. As an example, we find that at ParkLogic a number of clients use our services purely for benchmarking one monetisation source versus another. We’re happy to work with anyone on this.

The most important factor in a traffic test is understanding the definition of success. So many people fall into the trap of believing that revenue is the only metric that should be paid attention to. So is that the revenue for December or for September? Is that the revenue where there happened to be a 20% increase in traffic or not? Or how about the revenue when it just so happened that an advertiser paid more for the traffic by a mistake?

As can be seen, revenue, although important, is not the best metric to pay attention to during a traffic test. Many domainers have migrated to RPM (revenue per thousand visitors) in an effort to remove the distortions caused by variations in traffic.

For example, if you make $100 from 1,000 visitors then you have an RPM of 100. Let’s imagine that you did a test and you made $200 from 1,000 visitors from a different monetisation provider. Many people jump to the conclusion that the second monetisation provider is the clear winner with an RPM of 200…..and they would be wrong.

The problem with RPM is that it depends upon the views reported by each of the monetisation providers. Sadly, there aren’t any standards on reporting views therefore each provider has a different set of filters applied to the traffic which can dramatically change the number of views reported and ultimately the RPM.

It wasn’t so long ago that some parking companies used RPM more as a marketing tool to say they had the best in the industry! This was easily achieved by just filtering the traffic more aggressively, reporting less views which meant a higher RPM.

For a proper traffic test what we need is an unassailable metric that can be verified for each monetisation source that we wish to test. The only way to do this is to count the raw unfiltered traffic (ie. URLs) that we send to each monetisation provider for each domain and then see how much revenue that generates. This provides us with a normalised RPM (ie. nRPM) that we can then use for direct comparisons at any point in time.

Let’s take a look at some actual data for a domain (XYZ.com) across a ten day period of time (see below). Day 1 is the latest day’s data and Day 10 is the oldest. There are columns for URLs, nRPM and Revenue for 4 parking companies (1-4). The easiest way to understand what is happening is to read the table from the bottom up so that you can get an idea what is happening as the algorithms seek to move in on the higher paying revenue solutions.

Initially, the domain is only with parking company 4 and on day 7 forced sampling was implemented to expose the traffic to the other parking companies. At Day 6 parking company 4 was being beaten by parking companies 1 and 2. More traffic then flowed to those parking companies and away from two and 4 until parking company 2 began to perform and parking company 4 completely dropped out of the race.

In this example, the traffic flowing between the monetisation providers is very dynamic and moves around quite a lot due to the switching regimes being adopted during the sampling process. There’s a lot of moving parts and reasons why the traffic flows where it does but the whole time the algorithms are focused on increasing the domains revenue.

In the next article in this series I will really unpack how to conduct a structured traffic test and why most domain owners get this wrong.

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Michael Gilmour has been in business for over 32 years and has both a BSC in Electronics and Computer Science and an MBA. He was the former vice-chairman of the Internet Industry Association in Australia and is in demand as a speaker at Internet conferences the world over. He has also recently published his first science fiction book, Battleframe.

Michael is passionate about working with online entrepreneurs to help them navigate their new ventures around the many pitfalls that all businesses face. Due to demands on his time, Michael may be contacted by clicking here for limited consulting assignments.

Due to being a publicly listed company, Rightside, is a really interesting case study of the entire domain industry and in particular the new gTLD space. The company has accumulated enough domains that it is a good representative sample of the domain space.

So back in November last year I conducted an analysis of Rightside wrote an article (click here) that predicted there would be layoffs. I stated:

Eventually, the investors will come in and hack the expense line to pieces (ie. fire lots of people) to get the profits up since their returns are unlikely to come from capital growth.

I really didn’t want to be a prophet of gloom and doom but several days ago Rightside downsized by 6%. I am deeply sorry to those people that lost their jobs….it’s never a fun experience to suddenly find yourself without a pay check.

It’s clear that Rightside needed to get their costs under control and generate some profit for the investors. Sadly, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was another round of layoffs towards the middle of the year. The reason why I believe this is that fundamentally nothing has changed with the business.

The registry business is still a very small part of the overall revenue. nTLDstats shows that the new gTLD space is essentially following a linear line to the right and not exhibiting any sort of geometric growth. In fact, it could be argued that the Rightside registry has slowed down growth over the last few days…..but the data around this is inconclusive as yet.

It was originally hoped that the registry was where the company was going to get all of its sizzle from with the market. To get a good exit for some of the early investors Rightside really needed to move into playing the capital value game versus the incremental profit model to provide some sort of investor return.

The staff reduction is clearly an attempt for the management team to buy time for the cumulative effect of the registry business to ultimately have an impact on the bottom line. Such a move would have meant the board (which has a number of investors) is now resigned to play the long-term game prior to exiting their positions. This must of been quite disheartening.....

As I said in my previous post,Rightside needs some new technology that will rapidly scale. This means that any idea that involves either a long corporate sales cycle or a change in consumer mentality is out. The management team doesn’t have the time for the first nor the resources to tackle the second option.

I have a few ideas on how to do really scale but they would require a recognition that the current strategy is not delivering the results that are really required for big returns. Don’t get me wrong, in the long-term, Rightside will produce some great results….the challenge is whether the market will allow the company the time to continue moving forward in the same manner.

I should say that I do not own any shares in Rightside and would recommend that you seek professional advice prior to investing in any company.

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Michael Gilmour has been in business for over 32 years and has both a BSC in Electronics and Computer Science and an MBA. He was the former vice-chairman of the Internet Industry Association in Australia and is in demand as a speaker at Internet conferences the world over. He has also recently published his first science fiction book, Battleframe.

Michael is passionate about working with online entrepreneurs to help them navigate their new ventures around the many pitfalls that all businesses face. Due to demands on his time, Michael may be contacted by clicking here for limited consulting assignments.

I’m finally over my jetlag from attending NamesCon in Vegas and back sitting at my desk. If I was to summarise the conference in a single word it would have to be WOW! It was an incredible event that really started on the Sunday and went right through to the early hours of Thursday morning.

I had the privilege of speaking at two sessions, Domain Monetisation 101 and Domain Monetisation Masterclasss. It was standing room only during the sessions and I had a great time sharing some of my own experiences in the domaining industry as well as breaking down exactly what it means to monetise traffic.

As promised to the attendees please find the presentations that I went through below.

Monetisation 101	Monetisation MasterClass

We had five team members from ParkLogic and on the Sunday we had a chance to meet a lot of new faces at our table. During this time, we also demonstrated ParkLogic Next….which is really on the cusp of being released. A presentation on some of the many features of ParkLogic Next is below.

So why was NamesCon so good? For me it was all about the business and the many, many meetings that I was involved in. There was so much energy and excitement about the domain industry at the conference. The exhibit hall was packed, sessions were packed and the organisation just seemed to flow.

One of the great things about NamesCon is that it’s really kicked off 2016 in a major way. There are just so many opportunities from the many conversations that are a direct result of the conference. Not surprisingly, many of the best conversations were in the small hours of the morning at a bar or a restaurant.

Finally, I would congratulate the whole NamesCon team that made it so easy for presenters, sponsors and attendees. Richard Lau, Jothan Frakes and all of the many people that were involved did an exceptional job….well done! Now I just need to organise my early bird ticket to NamesCon 2017!

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Michael Gilmour has been in business for over 32 years and has both a BSC in Electronics and Computer Science and an MBA. He was the former vice-chairman of the Internet Industry Association in Australia and is in demand as a speaker at Internet conferences the world over. He has also recently published his first science fiction book, Battleframe.

Michael is passionate about working with online entrepreneurs to help them navigate their new ventures around the many pitfalls that all businesses face. Due to demands on his time, Michael may be contacted by clicking here for limited consulting assignments.