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With the largest attendance in history, the TRAFFIC Conference in Hollywood Florida was a great success both in Networking as well as Content. It was amazing to see how many new entrants and non-traditional participants were at this event, which is a testament to the ever increasing value this vertical is representing to the online advertising market.

Attendees included both large and small domain portfolio holders, multiple Registrars and Registries, representatives from Google, Yahoo and other top Search Engines, as well as tons of entrants from Internet Advertising and other verticals looking to see how their businesses can benefit from the high quality type-in traffic premium domains are providing advertisers today. For a more detailed breakdown of events take a look at Domain Editorial that offers more of a play by play take of the event.

Another record breaker was the LIVE Domain auction held the last day of the conference, where over $4.7 million dollars worth of domain names exchanged hands, most notable of which was the sale of cameras.com for $1.5 million to DirectNic Registrar. For a complete roundup of the auction results and prices take a look over here.

Although a little unexpected to me, Tucows was recognized as best registrar with the WADND Seal of Approval. I say unexpected only since we tend to be more of a higher priced domain provider with lower volume domain portfolio holders which are the majority of attendees at events such as these, but this recognition proves that our secure, stable, and feature rich domain services in both the reseller and especially registrar markets are an extremely safe and valuable offering in this evolving, growing, and maturing industry.

From Left (Tucows): Craig Hamilton, Peter Ejtel, Frank Michlick

According to the Register, It appears ICANN is set to vote on a PIR initiated proposal on allowing them to monetize the Domain Tasting process at $0.05 per taste.

For some time now, some registrars and their customers have been using the domain refund feature, which allows a registrar a full refund if a new domain registration is deleted within 5 days, to register domains in bulk and test for monetizable traffic before deciding whether the yearly registry fee was worth the continued registration.

PIR (The .org registry)  is claiming significant overhead facilitating these transactions on an ongoing basis, and although not willing to disclose specific numbers state that the vast majority of daily transactions are part of the tasting process. I have personally managed some projects for registrar customers of ours along these lines, and can personally attest that tasting in general is one of the major reasons why the number of domains registered in the top 3 TLDs has grown significantly over recent years.

I doubt the infrastructure overhead claim has much merit, but based on the fact that most if not all profitable domains have been registered, it does make financial sense on the registry's part to try and monetize what they can since all of this traffic is leading to a lower and lower percentage of monetizable registrations going forward.

The one thing I do not like about this is the clandestine nature of the review process for this proposal. I couldn't find many comments about it even though it was listed on the proposal page. We'll see what happens with the vote, but based on little or no discussion or commentary, I can not only see ICANN approve this proposal but also a quick turnaround from the COM/NET registry to follow suite.

With the Direct Navigation market significantly increasing year over year, today's domains that don't pass mustard may become profitable in the future, and IMHO the registries may just be shooting future business in the foot with this strategy.