I had a great conversation with Kevin Fink, where he interviewed me at NamesCon 2016 on behalf of NamePros. I really enjoyed the interaction and look forward to chatting with the NamePros team again next week.

We cover a wide range of topics, from domain traffic monetisation through to sales and the impact the Chinese economy was having on the domain industry.

At the beginning of every year I like to think about the previous year and did any articles touch upon some interesting concepts that required further investigation. After trawling through my blog I came up with the below list of articles that I believe were some of the highlights of 2016 for me.

How To Conduct a Domain Traffic Test

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.

How to Conduct a Domain Traffic Test – Part 1

How to Conduct a Domain Traffic Test – Part 2

Selling Domains

I wrote a lot about how to sell domains in 2016 but there were a couple of stand-out articles that tried to analytically tackle the issue of pricing. The article endeavoured to relate supply/demand curve for keywords to pricing domain names. It was an interesting piece of work that I plan on following up in the future.

How Much Are Your Domains Really Worth? - Part 1

Challenges of Selling Domains – Part 2

Demand Based Domain Pricing Strategy – Part 3

Using Analytics To Price Domains – Part 4

Portfolio Optimisation

I wrote a massive twelve-part series on portfolio optimisation and how to get the most from your assets across the different domain business models of; stock items domains, high value domains, building a business and traffic. Here is the first article in the series to wet your appetite.

Part 1 – Why Domain Portfolio Optimisation Works.

A few other topics that were covered in 2016 include:

• Using domain traffic to predict Google’s quarterly earnings report in advance.
• A financial analysis of Rightside.
• An analytical piece on the state of the Chinese economy.
• A number of video interviews
• And of course…..my regular Saturday Musings about life.

I hope you enjoyed the journey we’ve had together through 2016 and that you are as enthusiastic as I am about 2017. I think 2017 will be known as the year of innovation and when the domain industry finally breaks out with some really great new ideas! More on that in future articles.

I would like to thank everyone that provided their valuable feedback on the 2016 articles and please don’t be shy in commenting/email/skyping me with your thoughts in 2017.

Earlier today I had the pleasure of interviewing Jackson Elsegood from Escrow.com. Jackson shared very openly about some of the developments that Escrow.com has done this past year.

Jack will be attending NamesCon at Las Vegas in January and is looking forward to meeting domainers to discuss how Escrow can further develop their services.

I’ve been wanting to write this article for a while now but I’ve been flat out building a new ParkLogic system. Back on the 12^th of October I wrote an article on the fact that I believed that domains could be used to predict a large chunk of Google’s quarterly results. Guess what! I was right!

For those of you that would like to read the previous articles these can be found at:

The Percentage of Advertising Revenues Google Pays Domainsers

Predicting Google's Quarterly Domainer Payout

In my analysis, I predicted Google’s Traffic Acquisition Cost to Network Members (of which the domain channel is a part) would be flat for Q3. I even presented the following chart predicting this number.

After reviewing the results presented by the Google quarterly earnings report the actual Traffic Acquisition Cost moved from 21.1% to 21.3% (ie. almost flat). This number can be seen in the below chart from the Google quarterly earnings announcement.

What this suggests is domain data can potentially be used as a predictor of a major part of Google’s earnings PRIOR to any announcements that they may make to the market.

A word of caution. Since Google’s results are in the billions and slight perturbations in some of the numbers used to calculate the result may result in a large swing in the prediction. With any luck, I can deal with most of these factors but more time is required to determine whether the prophetic nature of domain traffic can be consistently and accurately applied to Google’s earnings call prior to the call itself.

So don’t speed-dial your broker as yet and remember that this series of articles is as much about proving how valuable domain traffic is as about playing the stock market!

Stevan Lieberman is well known to the domain industry in his capacity as an intellectual property lawyer. What not many people know is he is also an investor and entrepreneur.

In this interview Stevan shares about some of his investments and the progress he is making with his latest business - Digital Candy. I hope you enjoy watching the video as much as both Stevan and I did sharing from one side of the world to another.