Gary Price noticed a bunch of new Microsoft domain registrations. Among them is the enigmatic “LocalSearchPuids.” What the heck is that? Price speculates: PUID = (Portable Unique IDentifier).
But what do you think? A local search “PUID” is:
If you can believe it, Marchex has simultaneously launched more than 100,000 local and vertical search sites representing over a billion pages. The move is probably unprecedented outside of a search index.
In May of 2006 Marchex acquired local search site OpenList and has used its technology assets and methodology to enable this launch. Before this acquisition, its domain portfolio business was essentially a collection of links to advertisers.
The rest of this post is at SEL. Here are my related posts about OpenList.
My colleague Brian Smith who blogs for Search Engine Land and has his own excellent blog, Comparison Engines, asked me to publicize that the domain VerticalSearch.net is for sale.
How much is it worth? I would say at least one million dollars. 
VerticalSearch.com (not owned by Brian) is a B2B search engine.
Seriously, if you (or someone you know) is interested in the domain, contact Brian at “brian at verticalsearch.net.”
The WSJ’s Kevin Delaney writes (sub req’d) about the domain “Hell.com” coming up for sale — a Halloween appropriate story:
Hell.com is scheduled to be offered in a live auction organizers predict will draw bids of more than $1 million. The hot market for domain names, the addresses people often type in for Web sites, is being fueled by the surge in Internet advertising and the ease with which domain owners can make money from ads brokered by the likes of Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc.
Sex.com sold for about $12 million earlier this year and Diamond.com changed hands for $7.5 million. The big-money domain-name sales echo an earlier boom, when Business.com fetched $7.5 million in 1999. Today’s live auction of 300 names, by Seevast Corp.’s Moniker unit, includes more than a handful it predicts will generate bids of more than $1 million, including Iran.com, Auction.com and Elections.com.
Whether or not those domains justify those kinds of prices depends entirely on execution. Some of the most “intuitive” domains are “also-rans” in their respective spheres. For example, awkwardly named shopping sites “NexTag” and “PriceGrabber” considerably outperform the much stronger “Shop.com.”
There a numerous such examples where the category leader doesn’t have the best URL.
But if you’re building a brand around a URL, then the seven-digit prices may be justified in limited cases. (See my post on the absence of URLs and branding.) In my little local world, AT&T (then SBC) and BellSouth paid a reported $100 million for YellowPages.com and then tossed out almost everything but the URL.
In one view of the world, “it’s the most expensive URL of all time.” In another view, AT&T bought the brand “yellow pages” on the Internet – something that no US publisher can own offline. Through that lens $100 million doesn’t seem like an outrageous sum.
But yellowpages.com, the most “intuitive” brand in the IYP arena is not the traffic leader (per comScore):
What does Google mean? What about Yahoo!? What about eBay? And “Amazon” is a word but has nothing intrinsic to do with shopping. These top Internet brands executed and the brand followed.
Of course if you’ve got a brand/URL like “Revish,” “Cyn.in,” “Amigilia” or “Pytagor,” you put yourself at an automatic disadvantage because of the convoluted nature of your brand/URL.
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From the WSJ — Hell.com failed to sell: “Hell.com failed to sell during a live auction of Internet domain names on Friday, as no bidders met the $2.3 million reserve price set by its seller. Monte Cahn, chief executive of Seevast Corp.’s Moniker unit that held the auction, said bidding on Hell.com exceeded $500,000, but that was far short of the minimum $2.3 million required for the online address to sell.”
If you’re a traditional (offline) company you can create a domain name that doesn’t identically match your company name. For example, if you are “Widgets R Us” you could be WidgetsRUSonline.com or GetWidgets.com, and so on. Your offline brand and online presence don’t need to match 100%, although it’s desirable if they do.
Where everything breaks down is if you’re a pure Internet company. Then your domain is your brand. And there are virtually no domains left. Almost every word or word combination that isn’t pure gibberish has been registered. That’s why you see all these goofy and distorted new company names (unless they’ve bought the domain from someone else). It’s a backward way of doing branding.
Ordinarily one would sit in a room, come up with a brand and then establish a web presence reflective of that brand. But people nowadays have to back into a brand based on what domains are available (or pay the squatters’ extortion fees). Check out Go2Web20.net (itself an example). This a fascinating site that catalogs the Web 2.0 phenomenon in all its awkward-brand glory.
Only a fraction of these businesses will survive; so this will probably be the “Web2.0 graveyard” 18 months from now.
