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Big money is at stake for the domain name exchanges, all of whom are still small compared to the potential for this business. Several domain exchanges have emerged as early leaders. Sedo is ranked number one by domain name appraisal consultancy, Zetetic of Davis, Calif, who recently released revenue data they compiled on the top five exchanges. Zetetic says approximately $111 million in after market domain name trades took place in 2006, with just over 50 percent of those taking place in private deals outside the exchanges. Zetetic’s numbers, however, most likely underestimate the overall dollar volume of domain name buying and selling. In 2004 alone, for example, publicly traded domain aggregator Marchex of Seattle paid $155.2 million in cash and $9 million in stock for a single portfolio of 100,000 domains, many of which were misspellings of common brand names. According to David Kesmodel, a Wall Street Journal reporter writing a book about the domain business, Marchex currently owns about 220,000 domain names. Driving the rich price of domain names are the following: The combination of direct navigation (users type keywords or search phrases rather than URLs directly into their browser’s navigation bar), domain parking and keyword-triggered sponsor advertising such as Google Adsense, which is how web site publishers monetize the typically wayward traffic. Click on any one of the millions of parked domains – we’ve all stumbled upon these nearly useless pages – and you’re presented with a bunch of sponsored ads. No original content. It’s big business for the domain parking players like Sedo and GoDaddy, as well as for Google and Yahoo who supply the ads. And for thousands of domain owners, parking means they can monetize their domain assets without ever having to type a line of HTML code. Owners of parked pages love direct navigation users, because they drive high click-through rates on sponsored links. Much of this business would dry up, however, if direct navigation users would simply learn how to use search engines. We can only hope. Or, Web browser makers could kill the business overnight if they stopped trying to guess the user’s destination, and instead used the keywords to open a search engine query so the user could choose a real destination. In the meantime, it appears I may never own the domain I’ve coveted for the last five years. At least I own boobtubebook.com. And yes, this and several other domains I own are parked at Sedo. 责任编辑：米尊 |