The Big Issues in the Domain Industry – Part 4

In this article I’ll be addressing the final domain business model, traffic monetisation. As well as being valuable to advertisers, domain traffic drives many of the opportunities received from potential domain buyers. Contrary to popular opinion, traffic is the lifeblood of the domain industry…..not domain sales.

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One of the keys to greater domain sales is to leverage your domain traffic. If you sell all your traffic domains, then expect there will be a commensurate drop in domain sales. In Part 1 of this series I discussed using your traffic for your own sales rather than providing it for free to the marketplaces and have it potentially result in another person’s sale.

Traffic monetisation is a way to generate additional funds to cover renewal costs and contribute to your profitability. Many people wrongly believe that traffic monetisation is dead. It’s not. I personally know of many people that earn thousands of dollars a day by focusing on building their domain traffic portfolios. For those of you that disagree….I’m happy to have a chat about purchasing your traffic domains.

The major difference between traffic monetisation and domain sales is traffic monetisation tends (not always) to generate less revenue per domain but that revenue comes in month after month. Domain sales tends to be very lumpy and unless you have a very large portfolio it’s difficult to achieve a consistent income – this also makes planning exceptionally difficult.

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Saturday Musings - Getting Out of Your Financial Mess

Do you ever feel like everyone seems to be putting their hands into your wallet and helping themselves? Bills and taxes keep on rising and living is more and more expensive each year while your pay continues to shrink in size. There seems to be less left over for you to enjoy life.

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Many years ago I read a fantastic book that I would highly recommend to anyone…..and no, it wasn’t my book, Battleframe (although it isn’t a bad read). The book was “The Richest Man in Babylon” and the author illustrates a number of principles about managing money through stories…..it’s really a compelling read.

The first point he raised was, “Pay Yourself First”. What this means is keep some of the money for yourself……not your bills but for you. If you need to negotiate with creditors and pay them over a period of time then do so but whatever you do pay yourself now. An amazing thing will happen, you will pay off your creditors and also manage your expense line appropriately.

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vanclute
Here is a PDF of the book for free: https://ia800307.us.archive.org/2/items/RichestManInBabylon_650/the_richest_man_in_babylon.pd... Read More
08 July 2017
mgilmour
Thanks for that! It's going to save me a lot of money :-)
09 July 2017
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What to do in the Coming Financial Earthquake

I’ve written a number of articles over the past year on the looming problem of the Chinese debt situation. It’s currently just shy of 300% of GDP and this doesn’t bode well for domain investors reliant on cheap Chinese capital to purchase their domains at hugely inflated prices. So should we really panic?

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I saw the following charts in a recent Bloomberg article that puts the Chinese debt problem into perspective. What’s interesting about this chart is that China’s flatter line shows that it’s not getting as big a GDP bang for its debt buck compared to some other nations. Also notice that Germany is retiring debt even while sharply increasing its GDP per capita.

GDP to Debt

The USA is continuing to increase debt while getting a lot of GDP per capita from it.....but the debt still continues to increase. At some stage the piper has to be paid and if the current trends continue it will be more when not if.

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HRMInc
Wow. I sure hope you're wrong Michael... but we are taking your comments very seriously and and planning accordingly.
01 July 2017
mgilmour
I hope I'm wrong as well.....
03 July 2017
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Video - Thoughts on Development

As a part of the 10 year anniversary celebrations I discuss my thoughts on development. I hope you enjoy this second video in the series.

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I have developed a lot of different websites over the years using a large variety of software platforms. From this experience the current suite of content management systems (eg. wordpress, Joomla etc.) lack a number of key components that domain investors require if they are to scale their development effectively.

In the video I discuss a number of the projects that I'm working on that endeavour to solve many of these problems.

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Guest — Niz
Thanks for the Video Michael.. GoodLuck with your projects..
25 April 2017
mgilmour
Thank you for that!
26 April 2017
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Domain Traffic Predicts Google Result

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 12th 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!

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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.

Prediction of Google Results

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.

Google Results

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!

Lieberman and Greenberg

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vanclute
I would be quite intrigued to see what other aspects of the public stock markets (or any other tradable market) might be able to b... Read More
13 December 2016
mgilmour
I think there are a lot of things that can be derived from domain traffic. The reason being is that domain traffic represents user... Read More
13 December 2016
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