According to a report on Fox 17 in Nashville, the Kentucky Court of Appeals. has blocked the state’s attempt to seize gambling domains. The decision can be read online.

Essentially, the appeals court ruled that domain names are not “gambling devices,” and as a result, the initial ruling could not hold since the law pertains to “gambling devices.” The ruling did not address other issues involving the domain seizure, so the law could potentially be revised to include domain names, and perhaps they could be at risk again in the future in Kentucky.  I suppose it really depends on how much time and effort the Kentucky Legislative and Judicial branches wish to devote to this.

Mike Berkens, who has provided extensive commentary on the Kentucky domain seizure, has provides additional feedback on the ruling today.

Say you have a product that is in a quickly saturating market.  How do you get your product to the forefront of this market?  If you are Unilever, you rename the market and own the new market.

I have high(ish) cholesterol mostly due to genetics, although it has been going down as a result of my eating and exercise habits.  I frequently pay attention to cholesterol reduction products, and I found something called Promise Activ Super Shots, which has plant sterols, that supposedly help reduce cholesterol.  They taste pretty good, so I take one whenever I can remember to buy them at the store.

Today I finished the last of the four pack, and as I was throwing out the box, I saw “REMOVE CHOLESTEROL” in big blue typeface. When it comes to cholesterol, I usually see keyword phrases like, “reduce your cholesterol,” “cholesterol reduction,” and “lower your cholesterol,” and this is the first time I saw “remove cholesterol.” I did a Whois search, and sure enough, RemoveCholesterol.com is owned by Unilever, the parent company of Promise, and it was registered in 2007.

It appears that Unilever has created, branded and defined this keyword phrase for their products. With all the competition for the popular keyword phrases, it’s a smart move to create a new one. Now if they would only forward traffic from this domain name to one of their brand websites!!

When I was on WebmasterRadio.fm, I was asked to make domain industry predictions for 2009.  I hate making predictions, but one of my off the cuff answers was that I thought there would be less development by domain investors by the end of 2009 than there is now.  Although this contradicts what has been going on throughout the past several months, I’d like to explain my thinking.

With PPC revenue down and UDRP complaints against generics/acronyms seemingly at an all time high, domain investors at all levels have been moving towards developing their domain names.  Some people are using mini site services like aeiou.com or SiteGraduate.com, other people are using companies like WhyPark to build a continually updated site, others are hiring great developers to build websites, and others have been working on their own to build out their sites.  Development has been the main theme or at least a big talking point at all the domain conferences since late 2007 and early 2008.

The one big problem/obstacle is that development is hard work.  Sure, a 5 page mini site will get indexed vs a parked page which typically won’t, driving organic search traffic to the site.  However, to really make good money and a solid ROI, I think more than 5 pages are needed to capitalize on the long tail in addition to the lower hanging fruit.  Since most competitive keywords and key phrases have considerable competition from fully developed and deeply rich sites, a great domain name usually needs more than just a mini site to see strong results. My mini-sites that do well started off as mini sites, but I also took time to add content.

This being said, the people who have been spending time and money developing are realizing just how difficult it is to make a good return on investment, and some will throw the towel in and either stop developing and building their sites or slow the pace at which they were going. I think we will see this happen towards the end of 2009. People will still be developing their best domain names, but I don’t think it will happen at the same rate that it has happened the last few months.

Again, I repeat, development is hard work. A great domain name doesn’t need to be developed to make money, but development will usually bring in more money and traffic.  The domain owner needs to determine whether it’s worth the money and time to do this.  Ultimately, I believe people who have been spending money developing “brandable” domain names will realize that they aren’t bringing anything special to the table, so they aren’t generating a positive return on their investment, while owners of great generics slowly realize that development is more effort than they initially thought.

There are great options out there to develop good domain names.  However, it takes time and effort to grow websites into revenue generating websites, and I don’t think all domain investors will have the desire to do this.

What do you think?