Sendori is a newly launched service that most of us will never see – and they could make sure we don’t end up seeing web pages defiled by the putrid stench of domain squatters either. That’s the most charitable way to look at this very interesting Sunyvale company. Sendori will auction off redirects from parked domains through their servers and to sponsored advertiser pages.
There’s a $2000 minimum buy-in for advertisers and the company is just expanding beyond very small beta tests now. Advertisers bid on a per-visitor basis. Sendori is currently running on angel funding.
The company’s patent pending technology will use cookies to ensure that visitors are redirected to the same page for 30 consecutive days even if the winning bidder has changed. Sendori will also track sales conversion rates for visitors it redirects to your site, it will allow advertisers to geotarget redirects and it will (try to) monitor and block click-fraud automatically.
The idea is that “domain portfolio holders,” as they are called in polite company, aren’t effectively able to monetize their domains right now with AdSense or other ads placed on those domains. Sendori believes that conversion rates are much higher when visitors are directed to a page with a single vendor’s recognized brand than it is on a page full of ads. That makes sense to me.
They believe that 10 to 15% of web traffic is via direct navigation or entering URLs – though keyword.com type URLs as Sendori will auction must be a fraction of that traffic compared to just typing in Google.com or your webmail URL.
Advertising on parked domains is undeniably big business though, and redirects from squatted domains as a form of advertising itself could likely be big as well. Sendori founder Ofer Ronen assured me that the domain buying industry has cleaned itself up quite a bit since the early days, though he said an estimated 20% of it is still made up of misspelled brand names. (Ronen cites Jordan Rohan of RBC Capital Markets on that number.) While brand advertisers must be frustrated about domain squatters throwing ads on pages mistaken for theirs -imagine their frustration when they find that those pages are up for auction. Perhaps they should just pay the squatting piper.
The company says it will prohibit adult themed domains from participating but may create a separate marketplace for those types of sites at a later date. Classy.
None the less, I think their strategy is a relatively good one. Perhaps they will redirect me away from parked pages to something topical and I’ll be able to forget that this whole part of the industry exists. There’s certainly money to be made with such a plan.
there are definitely two sides to this coin, but i personally think a service like Sendori is going to be a big net positive.
Sendori could make it so that Acme, Inc. *could* have acme.com at a MUCH cheaper rate than having to pay whoever owns it. some domain squatters are real jerks – and demand 100’s of thousands for their domains (as most of you well know). this service could make it so even if you dont have that kind of cash, you can still get the re-direct to your site.
on the flip side, its *possible*a service like this could make it even harder to buy a domain you want – but quite frankly the prices squatters ask for are already way too inflated. if anything, Sendori could help drive that price down since paying to get a re-direct will be much cheaper than outright buying the domain in most cases. it is encouraging for me, since next time i want a domain and the owner says “sorry, 100k” i’m not SOL
This is a great idea. There have to be other parking companies doing this. If not, they should be kicking themselves right now and getting their programmers to work…
I’m sure lots of advertisers want to pay for this traffic… *yawn*
Folks at Google and Yahoo already are well aware their advertisers are annoyed by most of the incoming traffic from parked pages.
Giving a consistent and high-quality user-experience absolutely key to aligning the interests of publishers, advertisers and users.
Marshall,
Do you know Mike A. cofounded Pool.com? one of the biggest/leading companies serving the domain industry? Nothing wrong with the domain industry IMO, just thought its funny that you are so ambivalent (maybe negative?) about it.
Oh boy… Marshall KNOW THY EMPLOYER. I’ll take that as you have no idea what you are talking about, and need to add some comments.
http://www.doma...om/speakers.php
“Michael Arrington
Editor and Founder, TechCrunch
Michael Arrington is editor and founder of the popular web 2.0 blog TechCrunch. Prior to founding TechCrunch, his background in the domain industry is immense, having founded Pool.com and consulted for domain industry giants like VeriSign and SnapNames. Michael will be talking about developments in the domain aftermarket space and building out domain names.”
I think most domain squatters won’t try this until proven. But I still think that this is a very limited market.
P.S. David, I’m a very happy user of your OpenDns.com
Thanks for the notes but I think and speak for myself alone. Take it or leave it.
Start up of the week. Hey, Marshall; do we have an award for these guys.
You certainly do.
“‘Tis better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.” — Mark Twain
Well, if you can wade through the whiny rhetoric and unsubstantiated statistics of this “article,” you can find what sounds like an outstanding opportunity for domain investors and advertisers alike.
“… an estimated 20% of it is still made up of misspelled brand names …”
Where does that stat come from?
I like donuts
I guess I was wrong about domain squaters not being stand-up people!
Most of the stats cited here are estimates provided by Sendori.
Good luck Ofer. Good to see it’s finally up and running.
“Most of the stats cited here are estimates provided by Sendori.”
Thanks for the info, I’d be interested to learn where they get their stats…
I think the term “domain squatters” is a misnomer, especially as it applies to the spirit of Sendori’s service. While I am not claiming that there are no instances of less-than-scrupulous folks out there who try to make a buck by trading on another company’s name, many domain investors are focused on the direct-navigation aspect.
It’s the reason companies like Barnes & Noble own “book.com” and “books.com,” or Honda owns “motorcycles.com” – prime generic keywords that perfectly describe the goods or services they offer, but without being their trademarked company name.
Owning a domain like that is owning a premium piece of cyber real estate. It’s akin to owning land in downtown Chicago, New York or Tokyo, for example. Sendori’s service, if it works, would give cyber-realtors an outlet for charging “rent” on their “property,” just like developers charge rent to business owners.
I see a comment above along the lines that “jerk domain owners” try to charge outrageous amounts to buy their domains. But think of it this way: if you owned an undeveloped plot in the heart of a major city, how much would you sell it for?
Sucks to be old (bad eyesight) or dyslexic I guess.
Can you imagine – googgle.com, goooggle.com, goooogle.com (with Adsense) googglle.com, googgglle.com..
all redirecting to Baidu !
I had this exact same idea for a service about 4 months ago, it will be interesting to see how this site does…
The 20% figure came from Jordan Rohan of RBC Capital Markets. He is an analyst that covers the domain business.
He spoke at the TRAFFIC EAST 2006 conference, and estimated the percent of industry revenues that come from misspelled brand domains.
Thank you Ofer, I appreciate the source info. Good luck with the service, I think it has exciting applications, and I’m excited to see it in action.
Consider Arrington was deeply involved with Pool.com (a domain drop catching services), I find it ironic everyone spouting such hatred for ‘domain squattors’
Adsense coming along was bad for the Internet , Was bad for business/development full stop. How many individuals buy up hundreds and even thousands of domains simply to place adsense ads on.
The Domain industry is so overbloated . Hopefully sometime sooner than later Icann will bring in some new rules.
What good is an internet with millions of “redirect pages” or “Adsense related ” pages ?
it simply stiffles development and growth full stop.
And what new idea is the above business.
Sometimes I wonder whether this blog has lost its way.
Colin-
“This is a great idea. There have to be other parking companies doing this. If not, they should be kicking themselves right now and getting their programmers to work…”
Adknowlege has a similar product, and many of the domain parking companies have experimented for years with this idea using CPA offers.
I think Sendori is on to something as well, but I’d argue with a few of your points…
1. Your comment “the putrid stench of domain squatters” is an insult to a group of very smart business people and practices. If you were so smart, you would have done exactly what many of those “squatters” have done. What would you do if today you saw that “PersonalBlogs.com” or even better, “Blogging.com” was available for $8.95 per year? Or what if you saw “MotorcycleInsurance.com” available for $500.00 (and then $8.95 per year thereafter)?
Even if you are not in the insurance business, if you knew that it would earn you thousands (or more) per year in advertising revenue, would you ignore that? You’d have to be an idiot. So please stop referring with such condecension to “domain portfolio holders” [thanks for that reference at least]. I’m sick of seeing hypocritical and jealous technical writers who have 8+ ads on the same page as their articles criticizing others who have the exact same rights as they do to advertise on their domains (via ppc or whatever).
It’s about time that those who registered domains early on be recognized for their very smart decisions.
2. There are many solution providers such as DomainSponsor, Sedo, and Fabulous that are helping domain holders connect with advertisers [mostly through Google and Yahoo] very effectively. Although Sendori does offer a very interesting alternative, the idea that domain portfolio holders are not able to monetize their domains effectively right now is wrong [unless they just have lousy domains and many do]. But the right kinds of domains usually monetize well.
3. Lastly, the idea that one vendor [single site destination] will convert better than a choice of vendors [PPC] is not always true and not always desirable. Many searchers are looking for a group of vendors. They want choices. Searchers often use direct navigation after NOT finding what they wanted via a search engine. Let’s face it. Because of SEO, today’s searchers don’t always get the best results; what they get are the results of those who are best at SEO.
Direct Navigation is often a way for a searcher to bypass those SEO produced results.
P.S. I have nothing against SEO, actually think it is a great online marketing tool if understood and used properly; just commenting on an issue that searchers (and search engines) face today.
There’s a startup called LeaseThis.com http://www.leasethis.com that is also looking to make money off of parked domains be leasing domains to advertisers. Here’s an article from Domain Name Journal http://www.dnjo...january2007.htm
@ 22 Joe, great comments, especially the first one.
Speaking of putrid stenches. . . . it’s a good thing we have pundits to tell us what would make the internet better and what advertisers and internet users want/need
What we’re really talking about here is a new kind of spam – Domain Spam
At one time “email marketing” was actually useful. Then slightly useful, then slightly annoying, now you can compare it to smoking in a public place in Cal. People hate it and companies spend large amounts of money and effort fighting it.
Domain Spam is still young but it will end up the same. Because it’s evil? That’s a judgment call. But certainly Domain Spam that uses methods such as typo-squatting (registering misspellings of known brands) is. The bigger issue isn’t about right or wrong – it’s about noise. Domain Spam is just a bunch of noise masquerading as meaningful content. We’ve all clicked them. They’re even advertising their Domain Spam URLs on Google. So it’s not just people that enter URLs directly. For me it’s pretty obvious when I hit the page. I get just another list of advertisers or some hacked together semblance of content that’s actually pretty bad.
Good news – it’s actually not that hard to fight – you just do some basic things like download the root zone files, and registry whois nightly and find the common attributes of the offenders. They’ll have similar DNS servers, similar registrars, similar whois info, similar netblocks, etc. Then someone should just create a browser plug-in (like they do for phishing sites) that either ignores them or lets you know when you’re going to a Domain Spam site.
Check out what Richard Rosenblatt is doing. He was a chairman of Myspace, bought eNom, one of the largest domain registrars, and eHow a content creation site and is creating a marketing company to doe what – add millions more spam domains to our daily lives – lovely!
http://news.net...yspace_ceo.html
I have just reserved the domain names:
sendore.com
sendoree.com
sendoori.com
I will be placing them up for auction on sendori.com. Prepare your bids!
aha…
sound of lightbulb going off in the head/room….
there’s the biz model!!!
as someone stated, create a plugin, that simply goes to google.com if you go to a spam/mispelled domain. ask the user of the plugin for $3-4/year for the service…
in order to update the database, you download/process the basic whois/root list of domain names… you can pretty much automate this.
you also allow the user of the plugin to submit any ‘garbage’ sites that the user might run into, that you’ve missed.
you can create an automated crawler to check the domains that you have in the garbage list, to make sure the domains are really garbage…
this could work, and it would be an interesting project….
ps… if you don’t want to go this route because of the level of work, you can simply threaten to do it… and work out a deal with the guy who did myspace.. he should pay up in a heartbeat…
if this approach was developed, and succeeded, it would kill his biz model!!
peace…
if you’re serious, hit me up!
bedougloas@earthlink.net
// At one time “email marketing” was actually useful. //
yeah, because email marketing is just a waste of time now….
Hmm
I guess I just don’t understand how this is exactly ground breaking, maybe i’m just not getting this? It doesn’t seem like a really novel idea; traffic generation sites and domain parking sites have been around for a while. i.e. http://www.targ...edvisitors.info which also uses parked domains.
Ross
- http://www.thehostguru.com
Not a bad idea, though the buy-in is high.
I sense a “bill o’reilly effect” purposely coating Marshall’s article. “Putrid stench of domain squatters”? Oh please. That comment alone shows either the absolute envy of Mr. Kirkpatrick because he doesn’t own more than a few non-productive domains, or it shows he’s intellectually stuck in the year 2000.
The majority of domainers are purchasing keyword specific and relevant domains because the public is beginning to understand the very process of “topic searching” through their browser (or “direct navigation” as some people unfortunately have labeled it). The more the public knows that if they want to find information on the produce industry, they can type in “produceindustry.com” and hopefully come to some website with the produce industry’s information on it. (warning: this author owns the domain) Or type in the .org extension, because usually that’s what organizations choose as their extension. The more the public becomes aware of typein searches (finding something by typing in the domain name), the more valuable keyword search term domains become.
Nobody is going to call Donald Trump a squatter because he bought good prime land at a cheap price, and now is selling it at millions in profit. The same applies to domainers, or “domain investors”, which is a legitimate business if you are staying away from typos and TM related domains. Most of us do.
Big business has been secretly buying up keyword domains for years, and for Marshall to not call THEM squatters is hypocritical. Type in Baby.com and see who owns it. How about “computers.com”? There are thousands of examples. Some companies actually create new company entities based on the power of the domain name itself.
One of the posters in this thread, David Ulevitch, stated something about Google and Yahoo knowing their advertisers are “irritated” about domainer landing pages sending them traffic. Ummm… is that why both Google and Yahoo send representatives to the domain industry conferences like the Domain Roundtable and Domainfest to speak? Do you think they come to rag on domainers? Get the facts before making comments that are rooted in some prehistoric domainer stereotype. Domain Portfolio owners, if you want to call them that, are a significant source of income for search engines selling PPC ads. That’s a fact, and it’s rapidbly becoming more mainstream.
I am a domain consultant who works with many key players in the domain industry, and we all know one thing, even if it is possible that it might hurt the parking services who create the landing pages that seem to curl Marshall’s butter — if you’re a company that sells online, and you don’t own the generic keyword descriptions of your products or services, then your competitor will. Once your competitor owns those domains, they’ve just shut you out of a “one-beneficiary” demographic — which consists of people who type in domain names of the keywords they’re searching for online. Only one company wins that traffic, and that’s the company that owns the keyword domain. It’s that simple logic that is causing huge players to come into this game and buy up tens of thousands of domains a month.
This is what Sendori and other similar companies are banking on. Once a company buys the traffic from a relevant keyword domain, there is no longer a “landing page” full of competitors advertising on it. The company renting that traffic is now grabbing ALL the most actively-directed rifle-shot targeted traffic there is… the natural typein traffic. Internet marketing department heads who don’t understand this concept will be replaced soon by those that do.
I’m surprised that Techcrunch allowed this article to even be published on their site, because the writer is so ignorant of a billion dollar industry that every major company in the world is interested in, and pushes the internet ad industry with a lot of fuel.
#32 (success)
interesting comments. so you believe/think that there is a huge/growing market of people who blindly type in a url term in the url/address bar, and hope that they might get a page/site with useful information.
hell, even my mother doesn’t do that!!! but if you’re right, it might explain why some people continue to head to the AOL/Earthlink phishing sites…
over time, given that some people are going to be upset because the pages that they’re directed to don’t meet their needs, i would hope that more people would really use the search mechanism to guage the ‘closeness’ of the site to what the user is looking for. (which points out a glaring failure of the state of the art search process)
i’ll also grant you that there will be some cases where the user looking for a given term, and wildly typing that term in the url, will get the user exactly what they’re looking for. i’m just not sold on the claim that this is ‘good/better’ for the end user….
but i will tell you, if this gets to be large, then i know of a few people who will create a toolbar kind of app, to allow people to pretty much ignore being redireected to these kinds of sites…
i personally get a little ticked when i do a search, get a information back for a page, only to select the page, and discover that it’s no longer valid, and that it simply has ads on it….
different strokes/different folks!
peace
Didn’t this guy give a useless speech at domainfest recently?
Everyone who invested in domains is a squatter…get over it. Proud to be a squatter and making $10,000 per day.
I don’t agree that parked pages are useless and hurt the internet. People type in a domain and they get a doorway to all they want… The people advertising on the parked pages usually provide a quality product….
Type in just about any good parked generic domain and you have a doorway to the best sites on the web about that topic.
I am really unclear why you would be so down on peopke who own domains…Are you down on the guy who owns a plot of land in LA but has been waiting for the right offer to come along before selling it. Had the corporations been so smart they would have bought the domains instead of crying about how they miseed the boat…
Feedback is a great indicator of a good seller!
Totally agree with post #34. Squatters knowingly register the trademarks of others. There is a decade of case-law that supports the right of anyone (you, I) to buy a ‘generic’ domain name and use it within the law. White-hat domain owners didn’t roll-over when bad stories came out about the space 5 years ago, they aren’t rolling over now. Lots of sour grapes in the domain/tech/dns side of the Internet because so many ‘clever’ techies spectacularly missed the boat. There are bad actors in every biz but you don’t shut down Wall Street because some folks are insider trading. The last bastion of folks who don’t want commerce on the net seem to be on the anti-domain owner bandwagon. Screw’em.