NameMedia continues their development efforts by purchasing craftster.org, a “craft community”. This purchase follows their purchase of sites such as photo.net and DavesGarden.com.

[via craftster.org forum annoucement]

BP Holding Group announced today the launch of another development project on one of their premium domain names, PRICES.COM. The company has partnered with Shopping.com, an Ebay company to create a comparison shopping engine on the domain name.

Company CEO Michael Bahlitzanakis informed Domain Name News about the release and their efforts to build more sites. “As part of our continuous effort to build high-end sites, BPHG Media and it’s design arm, BPHG WebOart have built the ultimate price comparison shopping engine. A partnership forged between Parent company BPHG Media and Shopping.com, a subsidiary of eBay. This was a project which was long overdue for us in the market place. Prices.com is a one-stop shop for online shopping.”

The site revenue is still based on a pay-per-click model but it provides an enhanced experience to a typical parking page pay-per-click model. “We help shoppers make quick, easy and informed shopping decisions by presenting them with a comprehensive array of products from their favorite brands, reinforced by extensive product reviews and ratings from across the Web.” Bahlitzanakis plans to roll out an affiliate program targeted at domainers and to eventually incorporate a way for merchants to directly advertise on the site.  The company had previously launched Weblog.com in August of 2007 and has hinted at plans for another major site release on one of their other premium domain names in the coming months.

Communicate.com Inc., a growing e-commerce and media company, has teamed up with Wanderspot to launch Brazil.com, the first of many online travel destinations planned to be released this year.

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For those of our readers who are interested in domain development, we can recommend following Joe Davison and Elliot Silver, as they build their domains into websites. Elliot is expanding his GeoDomain Lowell.com into a destination about the city that combines small-town charm with “the amenities and services of larger urban areas” and chronicles the progress in his blog. Joe, who has not yet revealed what exactly his site’s business model is, tells us about developing top50.com.

Salient Properties and Domain Strategies have joined together to create a new company, WiFi.Com, LLC. By teaming up to develop WiFi.com, the companies believe that they will be able to grow the domain into a leading technology center for the WiFi industry.

In 2006, WiFi.com was purchased by Stuart Wood, President of Salient Properties, for $225,000. Since then the domain has acted as a successful WiFi technology portal. But according to Wood, Rob Monster and his team at Domain Strategies convinced him that there was more potential for the website with a partnership.

Domain Strategies has developed a three-step process for domain assessment and development. After successfully applying this process to numerous top tier domains, they believe that WiFi.com will see similar results.

“By partnering with the premium domain owner and aligning interests through a joint ownership of a new company, we are able to focus available capital on the building of the business rather than simply buying a domain,” Rob Monster, Founder and Chairman of Domain Strategies explained. “By partnering, we extend the range of our capital, include the domain owner in the vision and allow everyone to participate in a significant increase in value of the enterprise.”

It will be interesting to see what happens with WiFi.com as this partnership begins building the domain into a broader business model.

According to Justin Carder’s blog (Director of Blogging), Marchex (Nasdaq: MCHX) is going to be conducting a trial with neighborhood blogs for Seattle, which are going to be run under the MyZip brand. The company is currently looking for one local blogger for each of the Seattle zip codes. At a later time, the trial is to be expanded across the US.

Justin writes: In my new job, I’m working for Seattle-based Marchex to create a system that gives people the tools they need to write great neighborhood blogs and the financial incentive for the writers and their communities to keep it going. For Marchex’s local search and advertising efforts, creating an environment rich with neighborhood content is good for business. For neighborhood bloggers, MyZip is the best way to create something that will last and not get lost in the swirl of life. […]

Through the course of the trial, we’ll give you advice and tips to create useful posts and we’ll reward you for your effort — each participant will receive $50 per month through the duration of the trial. We also hope our trial bloggers will stick with us and stay with the network as our long-term incentive plan goes into place and we add in a non-profit giving element.

The sign up form for interested bloggers is a small survey.

Since their purchase of zip code domain names covering the majority of population of the United States, Marchex has experimented with several models to drive traffic and monetize these domains. Currently MyZip.com and the zip code domains itself point to landers based on Marchex’s OpenList business review and information website.

Disclaimer: The author ownes a small amount of shares in Marchex.

Geo-Domain owners are not domainers.

Most of the major cities (think top 50 US) were all taken before 1997. Often times they were taken by people in that specific area. For example, I met the guy who owns Austin.com. He has it because he had an ISP from there, and registered it. In March 1994. Few of them collect domains outside of their comfort zone (ie - their city). This is important to note. I see a lot of overlap at TRAFFIC/DRT/DF. But there were few domainers that I saw here. At the same time, few geodomain owners would bother with the before-mentioned conferences. I asked dozens of people, and the same standard response: “Not a domainer, waste of time”

The Auction was Boring.

I think that was a core problem. As I mentioned, geodomain owners aren’t domainers. So the auction to them wasn’t something at the top of their list. Furthermore - as many already owned a top city/state/country.com, why would they bother with domains with state suffixes or other inferior TLDs? I do believe geo-centric domains would have done better (Eg DallasPlumbers.com or AustinDoctors.com). If it wasn’t for Perth.com pushing up the energy for a while, it would have been bad.

Problems I saw:

• Auction right after lunch. All those carbs = you just want to fall asleep. By the second hour I was ready to keel over.
• ‘Pushing up’ of price. I didn’t like how the Auctioneer would start at $5000 and ‘push’ to $10000 (which would be the reserve). Stuff like this brings out the shill bidding accusations. As a phone bidder I wouldn’t necessarily realize that no one was bidding. Perfect example: here. None of the bids that the blogger thinks were ‘rejected’ ever existed. They were all from thin-air.
• Poor planning. It started 30 minutes late. How many times have Moniker ran an auction? Seriously - get with it already.
• Clueless Auctioneer. Can I say that here? He struggled with pronouncing ‘kazakhstan’ (why would the ‘z’ be silent?). And that was just one of the mis-pronounciations. This just cries poor planning. Why didn’t they go over the list of domains before the auction?

Parking? What parking?

The majority of exhibitors were either domain-oriented companies (eg parking) or reservation (hotels/travel). All the parking companies I talked to agreed that the match wasn’t there.

Disconnect with the ‘local’ field.

I was disappointed that beyond us (iBegin) and Local.com none of the big players in the local space actively took part in this (Neal Polachek from Kelsey Group and Gib Olander from Localeze did show up). No local advertising companies. No local tracking service. No YP publishers. No analysts. These CITY.com owners hold a lot of traffic. Local companies need to wake up to that.

Things are just getting started

The first domain conference I went to was Oct 2004. I’ve heard ‘we want to develop’ for the last 3+ years, and I have yet to see anything really happen. But when it comes to domain development, none get me as excited as geodomains. The amount of money in the local space is huge. People are starting to waken up to that. The fight has changed from just ‘local website’ to ‘local media.’ And contrasting the discussions about development from this to DRT - I believe geodomains will be developing out sooner and faster than other generic domains.

Overall, I enjoyed this more than most of the domain conferences. Of course this is with the skew that we do (business listings) meshes much better with geodomain owners. But there was definitely a much better feel for building out of a domain - instead of the typical ‘PPC company shootout’ or ‘Google vs Yahoo - the gloves come off this time’ panels (which always end up with each company saying ‘Hey we are the best!’) there were good panels on development, technology, and SEO. There was the sensationalist ‘Dot-Coms vs. Other TLDs: A Battle Royal?’ which ended up with the ICANN director skipping and was more a casual agreement than any sort of battle. But hey - you can’t have a domain conference without some hyperbole.

UPDATE: I just wanted to clarify as it seems like some wires got crossed.

1. I loved the actual conference. My favorite domain-oriented conference so far. Lots of real energy and work towards development (and not the same panelists talking about the same story). Friendly people, good energy, and informative sessions. I almost always skip all the sessions at a conference - this time I listened to most.

2. I did not love the auction. TRAFFIC & DRT were much more energetic. Much more organized. This one was the opposite.

NameMedia  (parent company of buydomains.com) announced that they have purchased photo.net, which is to work in tandem with their photography.com website. This continuous their development efforts and certainly shows that they are willing to buy existing sites and combine them with their premium domain names.

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During the Targeted TRAFFIC conference in Florida which started yesterday, a new kind of Domain Development company called Domain Strategies is being launched. The company will bring together domainers, investors and entrepreneurs in order to create businesses. Rob was so kind to take the time to talk to me about his new venture earlier this week.

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It is with delight that I welcome a new author to Domain Name News: Ahmed F. Ahmed is an experienced developer, and his latest project, iBegin Source, offers reasonably priced local business data, which can help with domain development. [Frank Michlick]

It is both exciting and disheartening to read about parking development.

Exciting because it is good to see that domains are finally moving to the next stage. We’ve already proven enough times that domain parking works. Direction navigation exists. They are pre-qualified traffic. They click on ads. None of this can be disputed. It has been proven over and over.

Yet PPC was only a stop gap. The domain is a middleman - funneling traffic without laying claim to the traffic. How many people re-visit the domain? How many more would re-visit the domain if it was more than just a bunch of paid links? We’ve been hearing parking companies talking about ‘development’ since 2004 with nothing to show.

So it is good to see development coming along. Sure there is hype about web 2.0 and user-generated content, but that requires a large set of traffic. Use Digg as an example - less than 1% actually contribute stories to the website (which doesn’t factor how many of those are self-serving).

But it is disheartening to see startups doing the legwork. Why aren’t established companies like DomainSponsor or Fabulous looking into such automated processes? They claim that content websites bring revenue down. An obvious no-brainer in the short term. But what about long term growth? With content, there is a higher chance users come back. The site can gain links. At the least - offer us the option. People looking at the long term will be more than happy to give content a fair shake.

Want an example? Minnesota.com was supplemented with local data. The end result? Site traffic up 1000% in 17 weeks (and continuing to increase). Did revenue fall at first? Yes. Is it higher now? Absolutely. It is also gaining natural links, including a recent one from a TV station. The long term value proposition of the domain has increased - its brand name has been strengthened. Its revenue is up. It has links. Short term pain for long term gain.

There is a lot of data out there - both free and paid. And I don’t mean obvious sources like Wikipedia (which has been over-used). Project Gutenberg offers classic books for free. Perfect fit for literature/author domains. Geonames offers large amounts of local data for free. And those are only the free sources - there are a lot of paid sources that make a lot of sense for domains. In the post I mentioned in the beginning - the first comment is about developing local domains. There are tons of geodomains. Franky Schilling has mentioned local domains before. Frank M talked about Marchex utilizing local data on local domains, and even specifically mentioned where others could purchase local data. Heck SuperPages.com trumpeted their purchase of the LocalSearch.com domain. Why are parking companies just sitting around? Buying local business data may not make sense for one domain. But with tens of thousands (or even more) parked domains, it does make sense for parking companies.

That is just scraping the surface. What about weather? Recipes? Dictionaries? City data? All this data is free or can be had for cheap. It seems like the rich parking companies are happy to sit around while making money off of our domains.

Marchex is ahead of the curve. The startups are ahead of the curve. Even the Hot or Not guys knew it was time to start innovating instead of obsessing over the bottom line. Can the large parking companies wake up and start some of their content development? I don’t like leaving money on the table, and I assume you don’t either.