ComWired: Helping Domainers & Developers
Sean Stafford is at it again. Every few months, it seems that Sean is building something helpful to domainers, and I think his new service, ComWired.com can help domainers and domain developers.
The DNS service is billed as a way to split up a domain name’s traffic depending on where the traffic originates. For example, if you have a parked domain name that receives traffic from the US, Mexico, Japan, China and Russia, you can choose where to send traffic from each country, depending on where you find that it can be monetized better. This is a neat concept for domain investors, but it can similarly work for domain developers, too.
Portland.com is the online guide to Portland, Oregon. Being from New Hampshire, when I hear Portland.com, I immediately think of Portland, Maine. Knowing the brains behind Portland.com, I am sure they analyzed their traffic to know that its looking for information about Portland, Oregon rather than Maine, however, I am sure there is some traffic looking for information about Portland, Maine.
With help from ComWired.com, the owners can detect where the traffic is coming from, and if it’s coming from New England cities, hypothetically, they can send it to Portland.com/Maine, which would theoretically have a site all about the city in Maine. All other traffic can be sent to the main (ha ha) site where they would find information about Portland, Oregon. This could also be effective for country based geodomains.
I should add ComWired.com can only split up traffic by country at the moment, but they expect to be able to split it by city in a few short weeks. For now, the service is free to use, although that will probably change in the future.
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Comments (8)
greg bates
March 11th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
This sounds like a great tool – look forward to learning more about it. Please keep us posted.
Lou Mindar
March 11th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
This is a great concept and could prove to be really valuable for geo domainers. For example, if you own Springfield.com (I don’t), you can currently only focus on one of the many Springfields. With Sean’s new product, you can build a site for each of the Springfields, collect ad revenue from businesses in each of the Springfields, and send vistors to the most appropriate page on your site, all with just one excellent domain name.
Now Skip doesn’t have to choose between Portland, OR, Portland, ME, Portland, TN, etc. He can own and target them all.
Sandy
March 11th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
@Lou The only problem I would see for geo domains, would be that many of them are targeting tourists, not from the area.
But even then I guess you could have another page/site setup where people not from any of those areas are directed and can choose the Portland they were looking for.
NoJ
March 11th, 2009 at 7:08 pm
Lets see how long the service will be available for free before he starts billing for it.
Lou Mindar
March 11th, 2009 at 10:35 pm
Sandy — You’re right. The trick will be to give visitors a choice. A person in Maine may want to find info on Portland, OR, so there will have to be a way for them to choose the “Portland” they want. If that can be figured out (and I think that it can), these great domains become even more valuable.
Geoffrey Gonzalez
March 12th, 2009 at 1:17 am
Hi Elliot,
Nice topic to write about.
The comment left above Sandy is correct.
Your rational is also correct.
The reality is the following, GEO names get local traffic and NON-local traffic.
I face this with my http://www.Mexico.us site. There are five areas within the United States that are named “Mexico”
Since you the GEO-IP tracker doesn’t know which Mexico is being saerched… Whats best is to possibly create a section within the header that reads the “City, State”
Then the next decision should be whether you will located the other “City, State” information on sub-domains or just folders. Geoffrey
This topic has been
Jeroen
March 12th, 2009 at 4:13 am
Thanks for pointing out this service Elliot. I’m going to check it out.
Domain Superstar
March 12th, 2009 at 9:23 am
@Sandy I wonder if some kind of split landing page would be useful or just annoying (i.e. the first page has two options — “did you mean portland, or or portland, me?”) which then redirects you to the appropriate site.
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