Domain Terms and Investing on Domains

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Investing on domains can be a very lucrative and exciting adventure – but for those of you just starting out in the world of domain registrars and registries, TLDs and ccTLDs, primary and secondary markets, it can be mind confusing. A compilation of the most frequently used terms that you may find helpful as new members of the domain investment community or if you are just curious and want to learn more and add it to your “knowlegde database”, here they are.

Domain: A web address. Also known as a URL (Uniform Resource Locator)

Domain parking/domain monetisation: domain owners can use domain parking to lease out online real estate to advertisers by using a service “instant website” landing page.  These pages contain highly targeted advertising and the domain owner earns a commission from the advertiser for every visitor conversion. This is a form of PPC (pay-per-click) advertising.

Domain Investor: a domain owner who invests in generic, dictionary-term URLs and builds up a domain portfolio to resell or “park”, with the purpose of achieving a return on investment (ROI).  Think of it as a property investor building a portfolio of real estate and securing a return with a combination of resale and leasing.  Domain investors are NOT cybersquatters.  Domain investors channel funds into acquiring generic names that depend on type-in traffic.  Also known as a “domainer”.

Cybersquatter: A cybersquatter is someone who registers a name with bad faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else.  They “squat” on the name, often with the aim of selling to the rights holder at an inflated price. This word is sometimes mistakenly and incorrectly applied to domain investors.

Domaining: the business of acquiring and monetising Internet domain names for their use as an advertising medium.  Also known as domain investing.

PPC: ‘Pay Per Click’ – a way to monetise traffic.  Refers to the “per click” commission that domain parking clients earn for using a parking page on their domain name.

Domain secondary market (also: domain aftermarket): A market where people trade in registered domain names. Participants in the secondary market include the marketplaces, the domain investors (domain owners) and potential buyers, made up of domain investment professionals, branding agencies, companies looking for a domain for a new ad campaign and new businesses seeking the ideal name for their online presence.

Domain primary market: domain names that have not previously been owned by anyone else, and are available to register at a registrar (eg. goDaddy).

Registrar: (eg. www.godaddy.com) the company that has a direct relationship with the domain name registries and is authorised to sell domain names to Registrants. This distribution platform for available-to-register domains is known as the primary domain market.

WHOIS: a simple request/response information retrieval protocol. Its most common use is to retrieve contact information for domain owners.  An example is www.whois-search.com

Domain tasting: the practice of a domain name registrant using the five-day ‘grace period’ to test the marketability of the domain. Usually, if you are not satisfied, you can cancel the registration and get credit for future use (note that some registrars will charge you for a deletion fee).

TLD: top level domain – the last part of a domain name, such as .com, .net and .org

ccTLD: country code top level domain – e.g. .uk

Type in Traffic: visitors landing at a web site by entering a word or phrase directly in the browser and adding .com or any other TLD or ccTLD extension.  

Direct navigation: method of arriving at a website without using a search engine, rather by typing the address directly into the address bar.

SEO: Search engine optimisation – the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via ‘natural’ (‘organic’ or ‘algorithmic’) search results for targeted keywords

That’s it. There are the most common terms used on this subject. Source: Sedo

DiTesco

DiTesco is a Business and Inbound Marketing Consultant, and founder of iBlogzone.com. iBlogzone's main objective is to help startups and small business owners achieve success in their online ventures. | More About Me and my Digital Marketing Services in SP Brazil.