Click To Hit

After spending several years catering to it, I still closely watch what’s happening in the domain aftermarket. In the last couple of days there’s been a flurry of activity from a Business 2.0 article on Kevin Ham by Paul Sloan. I think the article’s great since it gives some well deserved credit to Kevin and Colin for the fantastic domain empire they’ve built over the years. Although I never had the opportunity to interact with them directly, I’ve been afforded many an insight into how savvy these guys are from a few of the competitors they and I both dealt with over the years.

An interesting thing occurred since that article was posted, the overwhelming focus seems to be a public backlash on the deal they did with the Cameroon government to wildcard the .CM CCTLD. What this means is that any traffic that goes to an unregistered .CM domain (such as sharedreviews.cm) resolves to a page with advertising hosted by these guys out of Vancouver. Although I won’t comment on the brand infringement that could occur from .com domain typos that I find unsavory, overall it was a shrewd business deal and one that I’m sure many an individual are kicking themselves for not thinking of first.

To me, the biggest benefit in the article is the exposure of the light side of the Direct Navigation search market. With our new startup, companies like Marchex, Hitfarm, Demand Media, and many others who are looking to develop their domains into microportals are great targets for us to license content from our startup in order to generate additional lucrative revenue streams for our community. Take a look at a post I made on our startup blog yesterday that touches on the power of product reviews, and what they can do for anything from ecommerce providers, to corporate sites, or even microportals such as those that Kevin, Marchex, and Demand Media own.

In either event, maybe Mark is right… this may have more to do with reader political affiliation than any real issues with these guys directly