In the .CM initial landrush domain bidding, I bid on five domain names. My criteria for bidding was

1.)    The .com version of the domain name had at least one million unique visitors per month from the US, based on Comscore data.

2.)    I had in mind a clear way to monetize the traffic (e.g. relevant affiliate offers based on the user profile of the .com domain name).

3.)    I estimated that the site would have a significant volume of type-in traffic. This was based on intuition.

I ended up winning two of the five names, and I was very excited to test traffic to the two domain names. After a few months of testing, I can report that the two .cm domains received almost no traffic. I did not expect a flood of traffic, but the volume was significantly below my expectations. Going forward, I would only purchase a .cm domain name in order to protect the brand of one of my existing sites.  Let me know if you had different results from the purchase of .CM domain names.

BillClip.com
MrDeals.com
XboxRemote.com
MonetizeBlogs.com
TheKnicks.com
GreenBlend.com
CollegePower.com
Metroist.com
DomainZing.com
SiteViper.com
Gamezoid.com
Jobspire.com
GrabMags.com
DealsHotList.com
HotListDeals.com
ExampleTermpaper.com
PointAnalytics.com
MindWaster.com

Generic & Brandable Names
bamzo.com
ruzzy.com
dipno.com

Pre-orders end on July 31st, 2009. It is free to pre-order a domain name. From what I can tell, if multiple people pre-order a domain, it will be placed up for auction. I pre-ordered a bunch of names, and I will update you on how things turn out.

Overall, I like the targeting concept, and I was very impressed with the system by the end of the call. The only thing that I did not like about the system was that the rep said we could not use it to only show ads if the user hit one of the hyper targeted (higher CPM) ads. The rep said that if we showed the networks ad code to a user that did not match any hyper targeted segments, the user would be shown “brand” ads. I really would like to be able to leverage the system to show premium priced hyper targeted ads when possible, and then use my other ad partners to fill my remaining inventory. Hopefully, the system will grow to include this feature. It will be interesting to see if Facebook launches a similar ad network product. I have a feeling that Facebook has even more meaningful and accurate data on their userbase than Myspace. The network is up and running now, and I would be very interested to hear about any initial success stories.

Lotame – This company was by far the most interesting one that I talked to. Lotame provides a system that monitors activity on social network participants and then uses that data to serve ads to the users throughout their network of partners. For example, if I write a post a blog post about snowboards on one of their network partners, they record in my profile that I am interested in snowboarding.  They go out to snowboard companies and pitch them a community of users that are actively interested in snowboards. When I visit the site where I made the post or another site in their network, they will show me ads bout snowboards. Of course, these ads sell at very premium rates. They didn’t disclose their partner sites, but it is well known that they work with Multiply.com and some other big social networks. My only questions/concern with them is how big these interest groups can be. How many people do they have in their database that have actively expressed an interest in snowboards? It seems like they will need a ton of partners/data to really scale.  I will definitely be keeping my eye on them.

Prospectiv – I talk with a lot of people that want to get on the registration paths of sites that I work with. Although I haven’t been able to work with Prospectiv yet, I have always been impressed with their offerings. Prospectiv specializes in high quality co-reg offers. They are owned by the same company as Eversave, so they have access to offers from big brands that will not detract from the value of your site. I hope to work with them soon.

Shady Affiliate Companies – I am always amazed at how many companies there are that focus on what I consider to be shady affiliate areas such as work from home business opportunities, cash advance, and other grey areas. Who are the consumers generating the leads that keep these guys in business? 

Tags: adtech, lotame, prospectiv

As soon as they implemented the feature, they were sending tens of thousands of email messages per day.  Some of the big email providers did not take kindly to their email practices (which were completely legitimate) and they were blocked from both Yahoo! and Hotmail within a week.

To help them in this situation, I was in charge of researching email deliverability consultants to help with the problem.  Although there are some standard technologies that can be implemented to help improve deliverability (Domain Keys, SPF, etc.) the whole process seems like black magic. Naturally, there are lots of consultants out there pitching their deliverability voodoo. I was amazed when I spoke with one of the leading companies in the space and they were looking for a retainer of $10,000 to $15,000 per month.  I am sure that they are good at what they do, but this seemed exorbitant to me.  After researching many options, I recommended that the company work with a consulting company on a three month engagement for a very reasonable $750 per month. The company has big name clients and a great deliverability track record. I will report back in a few months to let you know if they were able to improve the company’s deliverability. 

SponsorSelect -They allow site visitors to choose a sponsor for their session. Once a sponsor has been chosen, the sponsor’s ads can be shown throughout the rest of the user’s session (or for the first X impressions) and the sponsor’s ad is launched in a pop-under. The net payment to the publisher is somewhere from $.18-.25 per user selection. This is a very interesting way to monetize a site. I could see it performing very well in the gaming vertical.

CX Digital Media (formerly Incentaclick) – Both their head of ad sales and the affiliate manager that I spoke to seemed to be very publisher focused. They had some good ideas and seemed a bit more engaged than some of the other CPA companies that I met at the conference.

NeverBlueAds – They also were very publisher focused and seemed committed to matching publishers with quality offers.

AffinityDirect – They generate leads for educational offers. I was very impressed with how they were willing to work with us to test new promotion methods and be a flexible partner.

On the banner side, I was intriguied by both Adsdaq and CPXInteractive. Both companies were hungry for our inventory, and were willing to offer some relativley good prices on the spot. Hopefully, our tests will live up to what they were offering at the conference.

Overall. it was a great conference. There was an incredible amount of interesting exhibitors and attendees. If you are interested in hearing more about my experiences working with the companies above and other companies in the space, subscribe to my RSS feed.

You can check out the ads in question here.  The landing page at Sedo is located here.

So why is SiteViper worth using?

• SiteViper aggregates for sale listings from around the web so that you don’t have to spend time wading through forums. Listings are refreshed every 15 minutes, so you will not miss anything.
• You can subscribe via RSS.
• You can search and set up RSS or email alerts for new listings matching your criteria. This feature is invaluable when you are looking for a site or domain that matches a specific niche.
• Listings are grouped into categories so you can view just sites or just domains for sale.

I plan on making a series of improvements to the site over the next few weeks. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to email me at paul@monetizetraffic.com.

Open Source Web Design Templates – From elementary school on, I have been pretty much a failure at anything that involves an artistic sense. Open source templates are free, and I have been pleasantly surprised by the quality of some of the designs. After muddling through a number of template sites, my favorites are FreeCSSTemplates.org, OpenDesigns.org, OpenWebDesign.org, and OSWD.org. It may take some time to find a good design, but it is well worth it.

Firebug – I usually waste a ton of time screwing around with div’s and other CSS minutiae. For this project, I used the Firebug plugin for Firefox, and it was a great help. Firebug will let you highlight specific elements of your CSS code so that you can see what is really going on with your code. The plugin also lets you dissect javascript and look under the hood at load time of specific elements. If you are very hardcore about load times, you should check out the Yslow enhancement for Firebug.

These tools have been great for me, and hopefully they can help you out too.