Multi-Use Domain Names to Add Value

Half and Half Owen Frager had a good article in which he pointed out what Rick Schwartz is doing on eRealEstate.com. I don’t know the details of the deal, but Rick is still using eRealEstate.com for his own company, and another company is using eRealEstate.com as a social network for real estate professionals. By using subdomains and folders, a domain owner can use a domain name in multiple ways.

Off the top of my head, I can see this as a great model for geodomains where there is more than one city with the same name. For example, Portland is a large city in Oregon and in Maine. Both cities have professional sports teams, great restaurants, and a fun nightlife. Portland.com, however, is only focused on Portland, Oregon. If the team decided to branch it off using a folder like Portland.com/maine/restaurants, they could get the search engine traffic from people looking for information about Portland, Maine.

To avoid confusion, they could decide not to promote this “other Portland” on the home page and only rely on the search engine traffic. IMO, they would do well because they could use hotel affiliate links rather than direct ad sales, as direct advertisers would want to be on Portland.com rather than Portland.com/maine. It’s also less confusing to have to explain why they aren’t on the actual home page.

As Rick exhibited, this doesn’t simply have to work with geodomain names. There are plenty of other types of sites that can use this. If a company doesn’t wish to develop multiple websites on one domain name, it can offer to lease other sections of the site, as some companies do with short domain names – like NV.com for example. I wouldn’t want to sell the space because it will encumber the domain name in the event of a future sale, but leasing it might be an option here.

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Written by Elliot on July 28, 2009 in Advice, Rick Schwartz
Tags: domain leasing, owen frager, subdomains

Comments (3)

owen frager

July 28th, 2009 at 12:28 pm

Should be noted that this not not a new discovery. Rick had a previous lessor on the site for many years- you can see that in Archive.org. Even 10 years before this he split his famous domain Men.com. The split splash page said gay men enter here and straight men enter here. Each went to an appropriate affiliate page.

That was the power of the enter button. I’ll never forget that.

Felipe Barousse

July 28th, 2009 at 12:58 pm

Agreed, this is an old trick.

We use it in many of our web applications. One of those applications, for instance, is a 100% web enabled ERP applications, totally focused on the logistics and supply chain industry. So, by nature of that industry it is a widely distributed set of users of the same app.

The main site’s home page holds all the info pertaining to the company, product specs, the application’s features etc. In turn each and every customer that signs up and uses our application gets a second level sub-domain, like: customer1.ExampleMainDomain.com , customer2,ExampleMainDomain.com, etc.
which is used by each one to get into the application.

This has worked extremely well over the years and allows us to control every aspect of the site and application while, at the same time, each instance of the application which has its own sub-domain, can be fully customized on a customer by customer basis. For example, if the customer needs it, we can even limit from “where” they are allowed to use the application. By filtering IP addresses, for example.

A given sub-domain can even be physically running in a server of cluster farm owned and managed by us, but located at other side of the globe.

Another example of this same topic is : We do also have domains that are essentially parked (and hopefully would be soon developed into something..) but what is producing $ on those names, are for instance services as simple as e-mail and on some other instances database feeds of some sort.

Another 2 cents. Kind regards from Mexico City.

Felipe Barousse
http://www.piensa.com

Domain Name Investment: Monetizing Sub domain names | TechFilipino

November 4th, 2009 at 1:58 am