I’ve been reading a thread on NamePros that got pretty heated when Jackson Elsegood from Escrow.com, Matt Barrie (Freelancer CEO – Escrow.com’s parent company) and Rob Monster from Epik became involved. I don’t normally like to get involved in these types of squabbles, but I thought for this one I’d make an exception.

I would like to first state a disclaimer, I use Epik as a registrar and have been very positive in posts about the services they provide. I also use Escrow.com and Escrow.com has been a long-time sponsor of Whizzbangsblog. Now for this blog post….

There is a BIG difference between saying you provide escrow services and being approved by a governmental authority to provide Escrow services. Why is this? The governmental body has the authority and mandate to audit a fully licensed escrow service to ensure they are not only behaving in a correct manner but have the resources to backup any problems. There are incredibly large penalties for companies that don’t abide by the rules.

Anyone can put a shingle out and claim to provide an escrow service….I could be wrong but I would think that it’s only a matter of time before the governmental authorities stop them from doing this. If the authorities don’t stop it then it makes a bit of a mockery of governmental oversight.

That being said, my understanding is that Escrow.com does have governmental approval while Epik is not approved by any governmental authority. Regardless of whether it makes sense for the government to be involved or not these seem to be the facts.

When Matt Barrie (Freelancer CEO) challenged Rob Monster (Epik) on the state of the cash in Epik’s balance sheet it was a very relevant question. The only thing that can back-up a failed Escrow transaction is cash….not lots of other assets as claimed by Rob. For a start, the other assets take time to sell and may not be enough to back up a failed transaction.

I’ve had a long-standing reseller account with Enom for many, many years and being a bit lazy I really haven’t checked the pricing for a while. I had the need to register a .com recently and as is my habit I found what I was after and went through to my shopping cart. Boy was I in for a surprise!

I couldn’t believe it but Enom was trying to charge $13.50 for .com domain? Considering that I also use Epik for my personal domains I’m more familiar with paying $8.49. The difference doesn’t sound very much until you multiply it over a lot of domains…..suddenly that five star vacation is getting further away with every registration.

For those of you that are wondering why I didn’t just register the domain at Epik in the first place then you’d be asking a great question. Call it stupidity on my part and I mistake I don’t plan on making into the future.

When did all these pricing changes at Enom happen? I actually have no specific date but wouldn't be surprised if it related to being purchased by Tucows. There’s one thing for sure, the remainder of my domains at Enom will shortly be finding another home.

Understanding how targeted advertising works is a critical part of how domain traffic is monetised. In this article I’m going to attempt to unpack online advertising and to help shed some light in what has changed over the years.

Back in about 2002, when I first started investing in domains, I made sure that every one of my domains had an appropriate keyword attached to it. I had an underlying assumption that keywords influenced the advertising results and ultimately user behaviour via the click-through-rate (CTR). This approach seemed quite logical and I spent hours researching each domain and setting an appropriate keyword.

I remember attending a conference and hypothesized with the Google domain team that just because you owned pizza.com doesn’t mean the advertising should be about pizzas. I suggested that with an appropriate amount of research I discovered the advertising should be about raising a loan to start a pizza shop.

This was a hypothetical situation (I didn’t own pizza.com) but it did illustrate the importance of researching domains. What I didn’t realise at the time was that I was actually crossing the boundary between context sensitive advertising (ie. domain content) and psychographic targeting (ie. the user).

I just had a read of the changes that the Australian governing authority (AUDA) is looking to introduce to the .AU namespace. I must admit that I found myself quite perplexed that they have no idea what is going on in the domain space.

The single biggest problem with AUDA is they are the police, judge, jury and executioner of the .AU namespace. What do I mean by this?

AUDA actively trawls the .AU namespace looking for domains that may fall foul of one of their policies. When they find one, they demand the registrant justify why they should keep the domain and if AUDA is not satisfied with the response they turn the domain off.

Let me share with you my experience with this process. A number of years ago I used to own around 2,000 .AU domains, I dropped the lot of them and would now encourage anyone that owns a .au domain to do the same.

Even though I owned generic domains (ie. no TM violations) AUDA in their infinite wisdom decided to take a domain off me because they had researched the fact that a New Zealand company with a similar name to my domain may want to come to Australia. Completely ridiculous.

The fact that the New Zealand company didn’t exist prior to me registering the domain is beside the point. After complaining (and the domain turned off) AUDA then threatened to investigate each and every one of my .AU domains by using Google (a dynamic search engine) as the arbitrator of whether I could keep my domains. Like I said, I dropped the lot and invested my money in other namespaces where I had security over my assets.

I just read a newspaper article that suggested the “R” word is starting to be used in financial circles around the world. What’s the “R” word you may ask? Recession. If the world heads into a recession, then is this going to have a significant impact on domain investors earnings? You bet it will!

I remember reading an article posted by an industry blogger (not me) just post the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 that outlined that it was great being a domain investor because we were immune to the global meltdown. I must admit that I scratched my head and posted my own article that rebuffed this position.

The domain industry IS part of the global business community and in fact, in many respects we underpin much of it. When businesses are suffering then guess what! They spend less on advertising which depresses earnings per click rates and spend less (or not at all) as much on acquiring domains as they protect their cash.

Just this past week the German 10-year bond rate went negative. What this means is that you have to pay the government to look after your money. This sounds crazy until you realise that the recent issue was oversubscribed by 2.6 times. This suggests there is a flight of cash away from riskier higher yield paying countries (eg. Italy and Greece) as investors are more concerned about keeping their money rather than receiving earnings.