June 1, 2009
Britain’s got Talent, but not Domain Names
Over the bank holiday 13m of us were stuck to our TV screens for the Bank holiday’s biggest treat – the two semi finals of Britain’s Got Talent. And then last weekend ITV took an even bigger chunk of the viewing audience, and our collective consciousness, for the grand final. But whilst that was going on, some enterprising cyber squatting individuals were snapping up the domain names of all but a handful of the performers involved.
As we’ve spoken about before, cyber squatting is when someone registers a domain name which is the same or similar to that of another individual, brand or company, in the hope of profiting from traffic that a website on that domain might generate.
We’ve recently seen this happen in the case of Swine Flu and domain names.
Both the .com and .co.uk variations of the contestant’s names have been registered as domain names. Those contestants with foresight – all 5 of them – registered web addresses in their name before entering the talent contest.
The owners of these new domains will generate traffic to any website they put on those domain names in the following two ways.
The first is called direct traffic or type in traffic. This is where people type in the name of the person or company they are looking for directly into the address bar, and just add .co.uk or .com onto the end.
The second is when people search for that celebrity on Google. Its much easier to boost up your position in the Search Engine Results page (SERPs) if the keyword that people are using to search with is within your domain name.
And people will end up clicking on those websites that are exact match of the contestant’s domain name when they see it appear in the SERPs.
What is the point in getting traffic onto these sites? The short answer: money. If the cyber squatters fill these pages with relevant adverts, then those adverts are going to get a lot of eye balls, and lots of people clicking on them as a consequence.
In a further development, many acts have also had Twitter accounts opened in their names. This is a hint at the power of Twitter. Maybe Twitter account names will in the future be as valuable as domain names, since users will search for those people in Twitter and then ‘follow’ them, even though they may have nothing to do with the actual celebrity.
What’s the moral of this one? Well if you haven’t done so already, maybe its time to register your own name as a domain name. And whilst you’re at it then why not do the same with Twitter. You never know - Simon Cowell might be waiting just around the corner…
Ken - do you think that small business websites such as ours, built here, could sell advertising?
I imagine that it’s done on a pay per click basi? And now that we have the HTML widget, we could maybe run a bit of code on an hyperlink image to count the clicks or something? Maybe webeden could create something like that as part of the next upgrade (only joshing, stop banging your head off the desk)
Does one sell it at something like 10p per click? Or a £1 per click?
Or do you need to be a really big player before you can sell advertising?!
AX
Comment by Alison Cross — June 1, 2009 @ 5:33 pm
You can definately sell advertising on your website - even a very low traffic website can turn visitors into £.
As to how much you can make, that all depends on how many visitors you have, and the sort of market that you’re in.
The best way to test the idea of selling advertising is to put Google Adsense on your site, and see how much money that makes you - do you know how to sign up to that?
Online advertising is sold either on a per click basis, on a ‘per thousand impressions’ basis, or on a ’sponsorship’ basis.
If you go down the per click route, then the amount you can charge depends on your ability to calculate the clicks (no feature yet available for this with WebEden), and the market you’re in.
Let’s say you run a website all about your local area: you might get a taxi company to advertise, but they’re only going to want to pay 20p per click or so. That’s because only a few of the people who click on their advert will book a taxi, and then their profit per booking is probably quite low. So they can’t afford to invest much per click.
However, if your website compares mortgage providers, you might be able to charge as much as £10 per click, since a mortgage broker can make up to £4000 for selling someone a mortgage, money which can of course be invested in marketing.
The easiest route is probably sponsorship. By this I mean approaching advertisers and saying: ‘This is what my website is all about. This is the sort of person who visits my website. I have approximately X number of visitors. I will charge you £Y per month to have a box on my page.
You’re being honest about your visitors and your website content, but you make them no guarantees about the number of clicks or impressions they might get.
I’ve just touched on a few areas here, as its a very big topic. However, to kick off your advertising ideas, try putting Google Adsense on your website.
Please let me know if you need any help with that.
Good luck!
Ken
Comment by admin — June 1, 2009 @ 9:21 pm