I just received a press release from NameMedia and Oversee.net announcing an expanded sales partnership. Oversee will begin selling domain names on AfternicDLS, utilizing the knowledge of this NameMedia company’s sales staff. This smart move will help Oversee.net sell domain names rather than having to hire and train a sales staff to do that job.

Through its Porfolio Brains entity and other entities, Oversee.net owns a huge portfolio of domain names, so this is a very good opportunity for both companies. I have seen quite a few Portfolio Brains domain names in Whois look ups, so I plan to do some more research and get in touch with Sonia Doubet, my Buy Domains representative, to see if we can work out a deal.

Sometimes it makes sense to keep things in house, but oftentimes it’s better to work with professionals who can do the job for you on a commission-only basis.

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NameMedia and Oversee.net said today that Oversee would join NameMedia’s Domain Listing Service at AfternicDLS.com to open a new sales channel for its large domain name portfolio.

“This alliance expands our companies’ long-term relationship,” said Oversee President and CEO Jeff Kupietzky. “NameMedia has built the industry’s largest global reseller network for domain names, particularly for retail buyers and small and medium businesses. DLS will help Oversee tap into this retail channel and expose its inventory to millions of customers looking for a premium domain name.”

AfternicDLS is the leader in reaching retail buyers of premium domain names through its websites at Afternic.com, BuyDomains.com and a network of over 40 distribution partners, including many of the world’s largest registrars.

“Oversee’s portfolio is one of the largest in the world and will significantly enhance the size of the inventory offered to NameMedia’s reseller network,” said Kelly Conlin, Chairman and CEO of NameMedia. “More than 35 million times each month, consumers looking for domain names access our available inventory, so adding Oversee’s domains improves the chance of a good match—and the velocity of sales in our network”

Conlin also underlined the value of its participation on Oversee’s SnapNames platform. “NameMedia’s domain name portfolio of nearly one million names has been built over the last ten years by our acquisition team identifying the best sources of domain name inventory,” he said. “SnapNames continues to be one of the most productive sources of domain names for our buyers, and we look forward to continuing to find outstanding domain names every day through the SnapNames auction platform.”

Back in November, I wrote about PITCHFest and LAUNCHFest, two new sessions that were scheduled for the Domain Fest conference happening next week in LA. I just received word that there will be two PITCHFest sessions in lieu of LAUNCHFest, and I think this is a smart idea.

PITCHFest was billed as an opportunity to present a five minute summary of a business idea that will “enhance the value of parked or developed domain names by driving increased traffic and/or revenue.” LAUNCHFest was billed as an opportunity for applicants to choose from a small group of Portfolio Brains (an Oversee.net company) domain names and the applicants would present a business plan to judges describing how they will build a business on that domain name.

I was critical of LAUNCHFest, as I felt it would benefit Oversee.net much more so than the applicants. I felt that the domain names that were being offered up for applicants to develop were overvalued by the company, and there really wasn’t anything rewarding about the deal for the applicant who wins.

The format for PITCHFEST will be as follows (adapted from an email I just received):

Four finalists will present in the first PITCHfest session on Tuesday, and another four on Thursday.  The finalists will be given five minutes each to present their product/service concepts.

Immediately after each five minute presentation, judges will be prompted for their opinion on the merits of the product/service presented.  A total of ten minutes will be allocated to the comments from all judges combined after each presentation—times are intentionally kept tight to maintain a candid, hard-hitting session.

Judges will rate each concept, assigning a score of up to 25 points in each of the following dimensions:

• Creativity
• Viability
• Originality
• Revenue potential

They will announce a winner at the end of each round.  After the second round, the audience can vote for the “People’s Choice” winner from both rounds.  Winners get a nice trophy, but more importantly highly visible jump start toward success for their new product/service.  And the audience will learn about new ways to improve their revenue.

Judges for the first contest include Frank Schilling (Name Administration, Inc.), Adam Rioux (Octane360), Eric Liaw (Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV), and Ron Sheridan.

The judges who were originally scheduled to participate in judging the LAUNCHfest will now judge the second PITCHfest. They include David Liu (Jefferies and Company, Inc.) Douglas McPherson (IdeaLab), Richard Morganstern (Tech Coast Angels), and Ron Sheridan.

I came across Information.com today, which uses the default Domain Sponsor landing page. There are some domain names that resolve to http://searchportal.information.com/?domainname=XYZDomain, and many of them seem to use the default landing page. I am not exactly sure why domain names are forwarded there, but I know Oversee.net is the registrant of Information.com.

Judging by the Compete stats for Information.com, they are getting a ton of traffic, although the trend seems to be dropping for the past few months. In November, Compete reported that Information.com saw 20,667,014 unique visitors, which is down from 27,335,582 unique visitors in January of 2009.

Alexa ranks Information.com #667 out of millions of websites, and Compete ranks it #47. As a comparison, Google is the #1 ranked website for both. There are also 50,000+ Information.com pages indexed in Google, so you can get a glimpse of what domain names appear to be associated to Information.com.

This morning, Domain Sponsor announced the details for PitchFest and LaunchFest, two new features of the DomainFest Global conference which will be held in January.

PITCHFest: Five hand-picked applicants will present a five minute summary of their business idea that will “enhance the value of parked or developed domain names by driving increased traffic and/or revenue.” Presenters will speak to a panel of judges, as well as the DomainFest audience. The winner will receive a trophy.

LAUNCHFest: Prior to the conference, applicants can choose one of ten domain names (owned by sister company Portfolio Brains, LLC), and five selected applicants will present a business plan to judges describing how they will build a business on that domain name. The judges will select a winner based on the following: creativity, viability, originality, and revenue potential.

The winner will have the opportunity to develop their business on the domain name “subject to a pre-determined lease arrangement.” Oversee.net will waive the first year of lease payments and the winner will have the right to lease the domain name for five years, after which the winner can buy it.

I like how PitchFest is structured. It’s a five minute pitch for five newly launched (I assume) companies, and hopefully there will be some innovative presenters. However, I think LaunchFest is a fantastic idea – for Oversee. Firstly, while Planners.com is a very good domain name that sold for $12,000 in 2004, I think the others are mostly average domain names and don’t see a home run in the list.  Below are the list of names they are allowing applicants to choose from, along with the purchase price:

• Planners.com    $125,000
• AdvertiseHere.com   $125,000
• StartABusiness.com  $75,000
• GoOut.com    $75,000
• RealEstateNetwork.com     $50,000
• BoostSales.com     $50,000
• SiteFinder.com     $25,000
• WebIncentives.com     $25,000
• AnythingForSale.com    $10,000
• DailyPicks.com    $10,000

Not only is Oversee.net going to get an annual lease deal (after the first year free), which will presumably generate more revenue than the parked name makes now, but they are going to have someone build these brands for them. If the brand fails and the site goes out of business, it will end up driving more revenue back to the parked page from the previous development (and Oversee wins). If the site is a success and the owner wants to buy it, Oversee will earn money on the lease and/or get their desired sales price in 5 years or less (and Oversee wins again).

If we were talking about out of the park home run names that wouldn’t be for sale under normal circumstances (like RealEstate.com or GiftBaskets.com), then it’s a great opportunity. However, I don’t think these names are that special. In the end, the winner is Oversee.net rather than the applicants, in my opinion. Perhaps a cash reward for development, scrapping the annual lease agreement, or adding better domain names from which to choose would make this a winning idea.

What do you think?

I want to give a belated “thank you” to the PR team at Oversee.net and Monte Cahn at Moniker, who put together a very cool case study for one of my domain names. When Corinne Forti emailed me a few months ago to discuss writing a case study on TropicalBirds.com, I was happy to oblige. I’ve discussed the site many times on my blog and at tradeshows because it went from getting a few visits a month undeveloped to several thousand visits a month developed, with most of the traffic coming from search engines.

Several weeks ago, someone casually mentioned seeing the case study at a presentation, and I completely forgot about it until a couple of weeks ago at Traffic New York. Fellow domain investor Dave Evanson whispered from a few rows away, “Elliot, what the f*ck is this?” while holding up a thick folded pamphlet, complete with photos in full color. I went over to check it out, and I remembered the interview.

Although the site makes very little revenue right now (monetized with Adsense and some affiliate links), I do think it tells a good story. Despite the fact that there is little competition for tropical bird-related keywords, the TropicalBirds.com case study shows that when you take the keyword domain name, add custom content, and have good basic SEO techniques (including link building I did), you can turn a lightly trafficked domain name into one that receives good traffic.

The way I figure it, some day, a breeder or pet store chain will want to take what I started and actually sell birds/products directly to consumers online. With the site getting 5k visits a month (well, 5,435 visits in the last 30) and 87.2% of that from search engines, it’s a traffic producing engine, assuming continued good rankings. If you figure a company would pay $.05/visitor at a minimum to $.25/visitor at a maximum for the traffic, that’s between $3,261 – $16,305 /year in Adwords alone to get that traffic (assuming all traffic is bought and traffic is the same for 12 months).

Of course, not all of this traffic is looking to buy a bird or spend money on a product, so this is just an example, but the point is that it’s a neat little domain story, and I appreciate the fact that Oversee.net and Moniker thought enough to create a cool case study and share the story of TropicalBirds.com in various presentations.

BTW, if anyone is interested in creating their own bird empire, I would sell the name and website.  As the case study says, “Elliot Silver is neither an avid bird watcher nor bird lover.” I would, however, LOVE to sell this website and domain name to someone who is!