Domain Name News, Domain Industry News, ICANN News, Registry News

While attending DomainFest in January I scanned the list of speakers and was pleasantly surprised to see that Wired Magazine co-founder, John Battelle was one of the scheduled guest speakers. I've been an avid fan and subscriber of Wired Magazine for many years and have enjoyed its punchy prose and eclectic style. As well as a plethora of advertising (which is often quite interesting) Wired covers all things related to the future, from gadgets to social trends or anything else that has captured a writer's imagination. So it was with bated breath that I sat and listened to John's rendition of our industry. I found him to be quite entertaining and interesting as he covered topics as diverse as the 2001 Internet bubble, blogging (close to my heart) and finally the power of search. It was this last topic that caught my interest. John espoused that our industry needed to move from a click to a dialogue mentality. I've actually been a strong advocate of establishing a dialogue with customers in another business that I'm involved in but his comments really stumped me when it came to domains. The essential premise of having a dialogue with a customer is that you hope to build a userbase with return visitors, some of which will engage in a transaction thereby making you rich. At the conclusion of his session I spoke briefly with John about what I saw was a fundamental difference between domaining and developing a website. Domainers often own thousands of domains rather than having a single site. They are paid for clicks not for dialogues. Until this changes then domainers will continue to focus on enticing users to click. In order for us to be paid for dialogues the parking companies need to be paid for them which in turn means that Google/Yahoo also need to be rewarded for dialogues. This ultimately means that advertisers need to reward Google/Yahoo for establishing a dialogue with customers. From my way of thinking this is unlikely to happen. There are too many entrenched players in the market with too much money at stake to make such a dramatic shift to our industry. In the next article in this series I will discuss some of the things that I learned from John's book, "Search" and how they could possibly impact domaining. Source: Posted by Michael Gilmour — Original post on on Whizzbangsblog — March 1, 2008