Internet Business

Well, there is a lot of talk about how important, the age of a domain is, and what role it plays in search result rankings. From the various things that I have heard by search engine specialists, and from my own personal experience, I would have to say that it probably does play some small part in rankings. And I believe rightly so, as more established sites in my opinion should receive some benefit, other things looked at may include the actual age of any inbound links.

The worlds most popular internet video site, youtube.com plans to share revenue with the creators of the unique video content that powers the site. Youtube users watch a reported 70 million videos per day. This factor, together with increases in technology that powers the internet, could have the capacity to revolutionise our entertainment, and make the US$1.65 billion that google paid for the site, look like good value. A lot of people thought US$580 million was a lot to pay for myspace.com, now people look upon it as a bargain.  Actually, I think the recent announcement by google, is a bid to stop companies like revver.com from stealing youtube’s market supremacy. Unless they keep tide with what competitors are offering, they could possibly see their investment worth a fraction of what they paid. Although there are no firm details on how they will share revenue, it will probably be in the form of adwords/adsense ads.  More details can be found here.

According to the dnjournal weekly sales report,  the domain joystick.com sold for US$65,000 which is a low price to for the number one sale for the past week.  The domain was sold at snapnames.com and the buyer was nameadmininc.com from the cayman islands. The overture tool is currently not working, so not sure what the stats are there, but those figures aside, I think this domain is very good value. One of the main reasons being that aol, own the website joystiq.com a highly popular computer gaming blog which was part of the weblogsinc network. So the domain would get a fair amount of type-in traffic based on this alone,  and you never know, the gaming market is huge, aol may consider making a higher offer on it in the future.

Wordpress 2.1 Ella, in line with the jazz theme, named after Ella Fitzgerald was released on January 22. Details on all of the features can be found here. I have yet to familiarise myself with the new features, but the control panel, does have a somewhat different look to it, though the differences do not appear to be major.

According to the dnjournal weekly sales report, the past week, there were three six figure domain sales, exito.com for US$121,560 and ultimateguitar.com for US$101,676 both via moniker. Sedo also managed to broker the sale of vn.com, a rare two letter .com domain for US$100,000.

This article by Andy Hagans lists his opinion on some of the top link baiting services. “Getting high quality editorial links is currently the single most important factor in getting a site to rank” Google is constantly evolving, and the type of inbound links that may have once worked, may not necessarily work in the future, there appears to be an increased weighting on the number of natural inbound links given to popular editorial blog comments. There are a few masters of linkbaiting in the blogosphere, Jeremy Schoemaker of Shoemoney.com is one of them who does it quite well.

According to this blog post, Guy Kawasaki is consistently ranked between the 35th and 45th most popular blog according to Technorati. The blog apparently gets around 30,000 page views per day, yet only makes US$280 per month from adsense. I dont mean to put that down, considering this blog has yet to make a single cent, but those figures are quite surprisingly low. Whilst it is worth noting, that the reason for that blog is to promote his books amongst other things, and I believe there are other revenue sources, perhaps he should take note of John Chows Blog who according to this post, made US$693.36 and is not yet rated in the technorati Top 100, but I have every confidence that he will one day make the top 100. His posts are entertaining and informative, and he shares a lot of extremely useful information with his readers.

According to the nytimes, google has acquired a small stake in a chinese website called xunlei.com that allows users to download music and videos via the internet.

Wordpress 2.0.6 has been released today and “it includes an important security fix and it’s recommended that everyone upgrade” Further details can be found here.

Finally got around to signing up at the digitalpoint forums and found this interesting thread on someone who had increased their adsense revenue from US$10 to US$800 per week. I tend to agree with the approach of building a few really good sites that make a decent amount of money versus a large number of smaller sites that are less successful. The author also mentions some advice from Shoemoney on how it is good to build upon your original site with new sites in niches that are closely related, I can see a lot of benefits from doing that.