I can't believe that it's another week already; the year seems to be going so fast! You may have heard of the term "spring cleaning" and I thought that it was time that I did a little myself for whizzbangsblog.

Domain Parking Survey
I would like to encourage everyone to please complete the domain parking survey. It was this survey last year that started the ball rolling and put the parking companies under the microscope when it came to the issue of transparency.

Archive
The Archive menu item contains an enormous number of articles that I've written on domaining. Topics such as Domaining 101 and Domain Optimisation are covered extensively. Only registered users (which is free) are able to read articles.

Advertising
If you would like to reach a lot of domain owners then please check out the rates for advertising by clicking here. It could be that you want to sell a number of domains or promote your own company and services.

Domain Wiki
Don't forget that all registered users can update their own entry and other entries on the domain wiki. I'm constantly referencing the wiki in articles so you may wish to edit or create your own entry.

Domain Forum
This is the place for you to ask the community of whizzbang domain owners questions and get help on lots of topics. You may also want to contribute answers and help others out.

RSS Feeds
I've noticed that a number of people have been accessing whizzbangsblog via the RSS feeds. Can I suggest that you set your RSS reader to poll my server twice per day. At the moment some readers are polling about every second which is not really necessary.

Mailing List
About every month I send an update via email on what's been happening in the world of domains for the past month. I've found that many of the emails are not getting through spam filters etc. so you may want to update your own filter and approve the domain "whizzbangsblog".

That's all the housekeeping for now. I hope that you have a great weekend. I'll see many of you in Orlando!

This is part 2 in the new series on what are the changes occuring in the domain industry and how Google in particular is controlling the landscape that we all work in. It continues directly on from part 1.

For example, the online games vertical may have a maximum profitable bid price for advertisers of $1 per click. If an advertiser purchases clicks for $1.10 they will eventually go out of business but at $0.90 it's a bargain. There may be slight variations on a day by day basis but they will tend to oscillate around the $1/click price.

As the auction market continues to mature greater numbers of advertisers become more sophisticated and adopt systems for getting the best price for their advertising dollar. This price will be the theoretical maximum bid price for each keyword associated with each market vertical.

This system of selling advertising means that the only way for Google to continue to increase revenues is to expand the market so that there are more possible clicks for advertisers. In other words they need to purchase traffic in greater and greater volumes. This is exactly what they are doing and it's squeezing everyone else out of the marketplace.

What's interesting is that there is an argument that Google should reduce its margins for purchasing traffic to 0% simply to lock competitors completely out of the marketplace. This would allow Google to also sample traffic to identify which is the highest converting for advertisers and then to mix it in with low converting traffic (eg. MySpace). This would further increase the volume of clicks while still keeping advertisers happy.

For example, let's imagine that a Google network publisher had 100% conversion rate for clicks that they supplied for games related traffic. If Google takes their average commission for network traffic of 11.9% (let's round it off to 10%) then they will pay the publisher $0.90 per click and retain $0.10 per click for themselves.  If an advertiser had a budget of $10 then Google needs to supply 10 clicks to the advertiser to consume their expenditure. Google could supply the ten clicks from the high quality publisher (pay them $9) and retain $1 in commission. The advertiser would be ecstatic with the results since every click converted! The problem is that this doesn't maximize Google's revenue line.

Let's now add another variable to the mix. To make the maths easy we'll imagine that Google also has 0% converting traffic. It would make more sense for Google to send one high converting click to each of  ten different advertisers and then follow up with nine "bad clicks". This would mean that ten advertisers would have a 10% click through rate and be paying $10 each to receive one conversion. Google would receive $100 for their efforts.

Google could pay the publishers on an equal footing and like before outlay 90% of the advertising revenue back to both the bad and good publishers. This would mean that Google would pay out $90 and retain $10. Like magic Google and turned the good converting traffic into ten times the revenue it had before. Not a bad revenue model but like a bad TV commercial, "but wait there's more!"

The next installment in the series will explore the impact of Google "Smart pricing" and why there was a strong economic imperative for Google to create it.

For the past few days I've been trawling my way through global Internet reports, advertising reports and through the last five years of Google annual reports. In fact, I think that I'm nearly reported out.

After reviewing the recent Google quarterly report it can clearly be derived that Google is continuing to adopt a very aggressive strategy of cutting off Internet traffic from competitors. Since the beginning of 2006 Google has been progressively reducing its network traffic margins from a high of 22.1% (Q1 ‘06) to low of 11.9% (Q1 '08).

During this same period Google has reduced the advertising margin on its own sites from 40.8% to 39%. Although 1.8% doesn't sound like much when you're dealing with a revenue line of $5.09 billion for last quarter then that 1.8% becomes $91.5 million which is more than the annual revenue line of most domain parking companies.

By constantly squeezing the competitors out of the traffic market Google is continuing to shore up traffic for the burgeoning online advertising boom. Presently the entire Internet advertising market in the U.S. represents just 7.7% of the entire advertising spend. Television (cable, network and local) is still taking 65.9% of the U.S. domestic advertising dollar. Traffic is eyeballs and it's clear that Google wants a slice of that television pie by securing greater and greater numbers of eyeballs for their advertisers.

So why has Google changed its strategy over the last couple of years and where is it getting its new traffic from? The reason for this is that the current Google model of auctioning advertising space is reaching a natural maximum price per click for market vertical after market vertical.

I can’t believe that it’s May already. This year seems to be flying by! Have you ever noticed that when you’re busy or just really enjoying life that time seems to move more quickly?
About 12 months ago I read an interesting article in Wired Magazine about how a young New Zealand physicist is redefining time not as seconds and minutes but as events and that as humans we have the capacity to compress or expand time depending upon our focus. The article really messed with my mind but it really was a thought provoking concept. I think that the researcher could have used the domain industry as a case study and highlighted a domainers ability to move from time event to time event as they chased down a deal!

Believe it or not this brings me to a portfolio of domains that I’m involved in. Like any good domain owners my partners and I have recently compressed time (ie. really focused therefore warping our reality) and conducted an audit of our domains. The result has been that we have about 500 domains that we have priced and now listed for sale.

Some of the highlights in the .com space include names such as:
Debtlife.com  $8000
Richesandglory.com  $2500
Acebargins.com  $7000

A few of the domains in the ccTLD space include:
Electricword.co.uk  $4500
Chartsingle.co.uk  $3000
Gamesnation.co.uk  $2500
Iknowthat.de  $5000
Taxcut.de  $3500

All offers will be considered and you can view the domain lists by clicking on the following links:
.com    .Info .net  .org  .us     .de      .co.uk   

In the meantime why don’t you compress some time yourself, look at the lists and make a few offers on some pretty inexpensive domains! We are accepting offers on a first-in-best-dressed basis, this is NOT and auction.