I’ve been watching lots of 1970’s TV lately. My kids really dig those easy-to-follow storylines and I love the trip down memory lane. What’s most interesting from a grown-up’s perspective is how the value of money has changed over the passage of time. A million used to be a big number in the days when Jonathan Hart flew his Gulfstream II to play poker with oil sheiks and generals. $25,000 a year was a salary that put you in the top 10%. Mr. Hart had earned his lifestyle by becoming an industrialist and self-made “millionaire”.

Yesterday’s million has given way to today’s trillion and a trillion is 1 million times the size of Mr. Hart’s million. I may be an economics dropout, but my street-smarts remind me to trust the words of Abe Lincoln: "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time." Abe’s turn of phrase, reminds me not be lulled into suspension of common sense, as we hear about the next trillion dollar bailout and how it will magically return us to the land of growth and normalcy from whence we came just 7 years ago.

I was living in Lyford-Cay in the Bahamas 7 years ago, in the wake of Hurricane Ivan. It’s a stepford, gate guarded compound of homes and club-buildings on the western tip of New-Providence, filled with old money, country club, trust-fund types. Nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there. One beautiful night my friend, the CEO of a major bank, who had helped arranged my temporary stay, called me to go running. He waved his arm across the twinkling star filled horizon toward a group of luxury villas: “All these people are broke Frank .. They are not productive and their wealth is slipping away without them knowing it”. What’s more apparent today than at the time of that prescient comment 7 years ago, is that in inflation adjusted terms, most of us are working harder for less. Forget the number on your PPC  stats page or the price you just garnered for that 5 figure name-sale, those dollars, euro, yen and francs you’re bringing home are buying less of what they would have bought 7 years ago. My friend had started his banking career in Countries outside the modern financial system. Brazil, Argentina and Africa taught him how fragile the global financial system could be and what it was like when the coveted “"system" fails. He felt chastened by the sudden increase in the price of commodities and particularly, gold (the world’s universal currency) which had risen from the $300’s an ounce to the high $400’s in a very short time.

My friend turned his conversation from our neighbors who’s collective millions were quietly losing value, to my domain names - “How much are all your domain names worth if you have to break up the portfolio and sell each, one at a time?”. Hmmm... If I sold 10% of my portfolio and slashed prices 70%, burning the furniture to get the job done, I could probably raise about $250,000,000. He laughed at the number as it seemed implausibly large in 2004. “How long will it take you at this pace to sell them all?” Some quick fingertip math revealed that I’d get around to clearing my last great .com sale around the time I blew out the candles on my 190th birthday. Time my friends, is still the most valuable commodity. The last 7 years of money printing may have staved off an economic collapse and served to make the implausible “dollar” value of our collective portfolios seem fair, but no amount of printing can bring back the most precious commodity, the 7 years we all lost.

What we really need in the domain name business is a “productivity miracle”. A quote attributed to Alan Greenspan, I first grasped the concept of the productivity miracle during an afternoon in Cayman when a group of visitors, lay on the beach in front of the Ritz. This vacation scene unfolded out the window of my office where I had an incredibly good day domaining. Without my scripts, servers, and skills I would have needed 50 of those vacationers (and then some) to accomplish what I did that day. I added permanent value to my business, while those strangers lapped up Vitamin D and umbrella drinks. You have all experienced similar days. I “was” the productivity miracle that day. Without the productivity  miracle of computers, software and programming it may have taken me a month to accomplish what I did - and I’d have missed tomorrow’s opportunities because I would never have had tomorrow free.

I continue to witness the productivity miracle in the office here in Cayman when John runs our monthly renewal list in 20 minutes, or when he gets the unlocks and authcodes for names and I run the bulk transfer script to move names over to our registrar. I see it when Ryan tweaks the traffic program and Roy and Ying roll out sales-site enhancements. I see it at InternetTraffic.com when each of you post your daily add-lists which come in like a never-ending river of opportunity for each of you. It’s heartbreakingly beautiful to watch the collective productivity of all our people and partners. All that mental horsepower (which is already focused), getting re-focused via our system. It would take all the people walking on the beach today to properly handle the hundreds of sales inquiries that the automated domainnamesales.com platform handled last night.

What this industry needs is a similar productivity miracle in name-sales marketing. So many buyers out there have no idea how to go about buying a better name. They don’t understand the value proposition, or they want a better brand but don’t understand the clerical process of getting to the point where they can put their new, shiny, better name on their business card. I am working for changes in the way we market our names. I can imagine a day in the not too distant future when domains entered into the front door algorythmic search-box at Google, Yahoo, Bing return a one-box result offering to help buy the name in exchange for a percentage of namesales revenue to the search engine that closes the deal.

Google would clearly have a massive tactical advantage with an established one-box product and their search footprint. Name-sales are a multibillion dollar annual business, and there are hundreds of millions of dollars in annual sales commissions for helping users facilitate the purchase of names - and billions more waiting for the party that helps those users create hosting relationships, signing certificates, email, etc. In a perverse way it may be New TLDs which spearhead the marketing push in premium domain names. As more people take up the opportunity to buy new names at registration price, the more those people will be able to identify the good names from the bad ones – and the more they will covet those better ones.

Well, a million may not be what it used to, but the million-plus names on our platform and millions of daily unique visitors they deliver are certainly appreciated here folks. So much so, that this month we intend to pass along our next rev-share tier payout to our partners. It’s the reason your wires will be just a smidge larger than the report number in your stats this month.

As our monetization platform has grown we’ve seen a large number of naked arbitrage operators try to join us. These are predominantly small accounts, with terrible names, which miraculously get 10,000 uniques a day. We’ve kept those folks at-bay. Arbitrage isn’t a dirty word. We’re all in the arbitrage business in one way or another. When you buy a domain for 10$ per year and sell 13$ per year of traffic, that is an arbitrage play. The type of Arbitrage which troubles us is the kind that changes the characteristics of traffic.

When you buy a piece of traffic from one ad network and sell it to another network for more money you are unknowingly changing the nature of the traffic you bought. Our upstreams have told us that InternetTraffic.com has far fewer traffic quality adjustments than other platforms. We are certain that has much to do with our collective vision regarding arbitrage. Visit an arb-page and click on PPC link after PPC link to get to an advertiser and you’ll see it is a frenetic, "lean back" process which bounces you around quickly, without much effort. When a user types a domain name into their address bar, they assume a much more focused, “lean forward” stance in their chair. The effort that goes into typing a URL and immediately getting your result without changing sites, creates the impression of authority and a more sincere user. It’s a subtlety that translates into greater sale conversions (traffic quality). Time and performance have born these facts out.

When you have type-in domains you are venting light sweet crude from the ground. When you run arbitrage, you are pumping saltwater into the ground to bring the heavy oil up - or worse, fracking, to get your oil. I would encourage any of you toying with arbitrage on this platform to please move that business to another partner. We have no place for it here. Arbitrage is always there for us. We can always get arbitrage back if we drive it away. Type-in traffic operators are more elusive. They have the pure traffic and we want to continue to provide a platform where it is appreciated.

Speaking of platforms - our DomainNameSales.com platform is chugging along and doing a terrific job brokering and handling sales inquiries for our clients, without charge. I continue to generate more revenue from that machine than I do from all my traffic sales. I strongly encourage each of you to embrace it, as I have. The version I use is no different than yours. I expect within less than a year, the time you spend investing in this platform will result in you turning more deals – and at greater prices than in your previous years. InternetTraffic.com’s parking program will continue to pay more than other PPC shops, but it is our goal to unlock the latent value of domain name portfolios by closing more sales, at higher dollar volumes, more consistently, than other sales platforms. I am so impressed by our site’s utility that I think, in 12 months, it will likely be the main reason that clients beat a path to our door.

Creating a great sales machine, unlocking the value of names and traffic, opening that platform for free to the masses – this may all sound very altruistic and too good to be true. But the cold truth is that I am doing this for me. If Jonathan Hart and my friend Pascal have taught me anything, it’s that I’m not getting any younger. I have a great deal of name inventory and it is my goal to unlock the value of those assets before Haley’s Comet graces the night sky above Lyford Cay again. If delivering a great product ultimately helps you to do the same for yourself, then all the better.

Frank Schilling

There is something about the end of summer that feels so very similar every year. The end of summer, of fun and frivolity always comes at the same time and echoes, like the lyrics from a Don Henley song. Aptly named “Labor Day” is like a starter’s pistol at a collective social race that has been programmed to begin through years of grade-school, college and university. Everyone around the world does it. Fighting the urge to be productive in September is like swimming against an unstoppable tide of human behavior.

A different more fearful tide of behavior continues to play out before us. People have come to the realization that the economies of the World are poised to get worse before they get better. Apparently printing more money to paper-over problems doesn’t work! I certainly believe that to be the case. Much of our economy today is powered by the Ponzi-scheme of government dollars recycled to the private sector, then recycled back to government. We have America, Greece, Portugal, Spain and others on food stamps. There are 20 million people in the US working for the Government, basically paying no tax. A government employee’s tax bill is just a return of cash back to those productive members of society who gave it to them in the first place. We have millions more on government social security and Medicare - all draining the system - taking more than they contribute. This is playing out in Europe, in America... everywhere.

I believe the US is facing difficulties, orders of magnitude greater than its recent financial downgrade. I noticed it in Malibu of all places, where for the first time I saw not only a dead-head sticker on a Cadillac, but also men, holding signs, begging for cash, at Cross-Creek and PCH (a celebrity studded shopping district North of LA)! There were many more regular-looking people and even women standing on corners throughout Los Angeles (not just the usual corners) with “need-help” signs in hand. The usual corners near freeway ramps had many more people standing on them, begging. Storefronts were closed and some stores had downsized even on Rodeo Drive. There is a strange inflation and parallel deflation occurring. Certain people are charging more for goods and services and chalking it up to inflation, while earnings fall or disappear for the industry in which they participate. Millions of people like you and I have not come to terms with the difficulty ahead, wrongly thinking things will soon get better. There is a great re-organization upon us where whole industries are going away. Cash is being printed by governments to prop up unsustainable routines which just shouldn’t exist anymore. The no-confidence vote of the world’s  productive members of society is reflected in the price of gold which has soared since I suggested you buy some back in 2004. Those who followed my lead nearly quintupled their money. Gold will be 3500 - 6000 an ounce in a few years – either that or it will stay at 2000 and the DOW will fall to 5000. You can diarize that remark as you did my last.

Gold of course is just another human behavior which men fight at their peril. Just a shiny metal without an intrinsic use... just like the tide of back to school, back to work mindset... and just like the rush for .com names which work just as well as .nets .info’s and .whateveryouwant. To return things to a domain context, no amount of new TLD’s are going to diminish the value of the human behavior gold standard - .com .. used.cars will not knock 20k in value off usedcars.com. It will increase the value of usedcars.com and set a permanent floor to its value. Make those words as you did my gold remarks in 2004, fight them at your peril.

Millions will be made and lost in the New TLD casino, on both sides of the table. We are creating a machine to enrich strangers, with a nebulous and unknown outcome for the participant. Most at the table agree it’s better to have tried and lost than to never have tried at all. I am not 100% sure I have the right answer for you, but it could be that the biggest winners at the new TLD table are those who buy the best SLD’s in each space. One recurring theme of all namespaces is that a TLD is only as good as the best SLD’s in it. If you buy the best second level names in each space you can do better than the registry itself. The .COM space is a good example. The top 10 million generic domain names in .com are worth more than Verisign. Only 5-10% of all the names registered in .COM are generic or meaningful in any way whatsoever. Newer spaces such as .INFO have seen even fewer good names with perhaps 1% of the .INFO space being worthwhile to anyone whatsoever. I could see just a few thousand good names per string in almost all new TLDs - a collective few million worth anything whatsoever to anyone.. and the demand fall-off being almost TOTAL after that.. Unlike .com which has “some” low dollar demand for $250 multiword strings, there will be ZERO demand for longer strings in new extensions. Better to be the registrant of the best SLDs than to embrace the clerical misery and competitive marketing-hell of running the registry itself. Only the deepest pocketed and most brave should walk down this college fraternity hazing gauntlet or roll the dice at this table of monsterous uncertainty.

The Internet Traffic business is at its annual low as I write these words. People are gone fishing and the economy’s ad dollars sit on the shelf in-wait, soon to be applied to dormant adwords accounts. The back to school rush will see millions of new, refurbished and toolbar-free laptops fire up in unison. Type-in traffic will spike. Ad dollars will spike. We will build to a crest through January, propelled higher by the Black-Friday shopping season. It all kicks off with Labor Day and we will be there soon enough. My hope is that the upstream ad-marketplaces (Yahoo and Google) will redistribute those returning dollars, pari-pasu, to the “partners” in the syndication engine-room, who are helping to move the ship forward. If they decide to skim off the top to “make their quarter” at the expense of those assisting below, I see genuine discord for the ad-marketplaces and difficulty keeping traffic next year. Like an abused spouse, Tina is two blows from stepping out of the limo and walking away from Ike once and for all. If the upstreams reap all the returning autumn gains at the syndication channel’s expense, I see platform abandonment ahead. I’ve heard it from too many partners and in too many quarters for this not to be the case.

More than in previous years, this is a season to be the squirrel – to gather nuts for the cold winter ahead. It’s a great autumn to “take the deal” and build a cash cushion to see you through in case this winter and the economy are colder than in previous years. I am advocating that all our partners save more of their earnings and build as big a cushion as they can muster. Higher renewal fees for .com names in January will bring discontentment in February as registrant margins get squeezed. Upstream partners will need to recalibrate their payouts to those partners doing the lifting downstream to compensate for the name renewal price increases, or risk losing their partners to alternative and unorthodox monetization implementations promising more revenues.

I expect that “pressure to pay more” on upstream ad markets will intensify because of the new TLD process. That process will put negative pressure on existing SLD name sales, which have been a crutch for low PPC rates over the past 2 years. Early next year, name buyers will wrongly question the value of existing .com/.net names against a barrage of press extolling the virtues and vices of new TLDs. The trifecta of a more difficult economy, lower traffic revenues from the Verisign price increase and lower name-sales due to the sideshow of the new-tld process will cause pressure on re-sales. It would be an Orwellian Animal-Farm moment to see Google and Yahoo crushing the numbers this February as the domain-industry plays the role of the horse in the engine room, turning the wheel for less and less revenue. I just don’t see that working any longer. So the takeaway for you all is to sell more of everything NOW and save it, then have that cushion so you can buy some courage to change partners or try unorthodox methods if you need to next March.

Despite that gloomy prognostication of what could come I remain hopeful that we have seen the collective low for traffic payments in 2011. The market and fixed expense reality simply dictates that type-in-traffic is worth more, and it is not equitable that any middleman takes a majority of a product which is produced. There are flat-rate shops buying traffic at higher levels. Walmart is a buyer. Target is buying traffic directly during the Black-Friday period. It’s a short curve of logic for those monster retailers to buy that traffic all year long. Walmart buys everything from Sundried Cranberry snacks and Garden hose directly through their buying center in Bentonville. I have been there and have seen that process in-action when I sold Walmart video game joysticks and gamepads 15 years ago. It is illogical that domainers wouldn’t eventually line-up at this same location with blocks of tens or hundreds of millions of unique monthly  visits, if the existing paid-search marketplaces get so greedy that the model of selling to those marketplaces becomes unsustainable.

In the end, the method which we use to implement domain name type-in traffic is not under our control. Upstream traffic marketplaces need to decide how much volatility they want to tolerate in their keyword marketplaces and how much value they ascribe to it. A healthy channel simply dictates that those who generate the traffic, need to ride along in the success, otherwise the market becomes volatile and ultimately, undone.

Your July payments are being keyed as I write this and are waiting for payment from our upstream partners for their release. I do not expect it will take more than a day to turn those around to you when the payment comes in, so your bank emails should be to you before you know it, standby and enjoy Labor Day. Our name-sales platform is undergoing some further improvement based on your input and should be live next week. Your squirrel friends at InternetTraffic.com have been busy throughout the summer to make sure our collective nest is well provisioned for the fall. We stand ready to serve you and will be riding the tide of human behavior along-side you, long after the boys of summer have gone.

Frank Schilling

I'm vacationing in Los Angeles (one of my favorite cities on Earth) and doing a lot of side trips to the North (Carmel), South (San Diego) and East (Arizona). When you drive and fly around outside of LA you can see what a miracle the city is. Mountains protect a fertile but dry land from the ravages of the desert. All the more amazing is that 12 million people live in the greater LA basin - all of whom use lots of water.

My wife gave me a book about LA and its colorful history including the birth of the California Aqueduct built by William Mulholland, who christened it's on time and under-budget opening with a mercifully short speech: "There it is, take it."

Well folks today I'm proud to give our InternetTraffic.com clients their own version of the California Aqueduct. The reborn DomainNameSales.com platform.



Those using our platform will be able to field and catalog sales inquiries coming via admin-email and (or) sales banners, to a central repository.

If you're one of our partners who do not place sales banners on their monetization pages and prefer to wait for email sales queries to come in to their administrative email, you will LOVE the tool that allows you to catalog and manage those inquiries in your account.

Now when you receive an email to your administrative address inquiring on a name, you simply need to forward that email to your sales-site address and our system will magically pull all details of the person inquiring, providing a suite of information that allows you to price, catalog and manage your inquiries within the domainnamesales.com site. You will be able to check the name's daily traffic and revenue generated at internettraffic.com, to allow you to research and price the name. If the name doesn't sell you'll have a repository of information you can reference for future inquiries on the name.



This powerful suite of information about your inquirer is your data and you will be able to manage the information and communications that you share with them. This system will ultimately help you sell more names for more money and help you make informed decisions about the trend of your names and their value. It is the secret of how I sell more names, for more money.

If you're like me, you don't have a huge team of in-house brokers. This system will let you select from a list of competitively priced third party brokers, or to broker the names yourself if you have the time. I use this platform myself and have said before that it is the single most valuable piece if software we use internally. It is now yours. To echo the immortal words of Mr. Mulholland; "There it is, take it."

You will be receiving a welcome email with your username and password to the new sales platform. Even if you are not using the "sales" functionality that the site offers you will still be able to use the platform to check statistics on individual names, you will also be able to upload new names there, so please save your account email.

In other news your June payments will be keyed this week and swift when our upstream partners pay us, sometime between now and the first week of August.

We are a maturing platform.. we have some very experienced and savvy partners using InternetTraffic.com to great success. I couldn't be happier for all of you, and truthfully had no idea how fractured and polarized the entire monetization space had become. You have all found a better place here. I intend to look after this channel as I would with my own traffic. If you need anything, don't hesitate to reach out.

Enjoy your summer.

Warmly,

Frank Schilling

Greetings from Cayman,

This last 2 week period was a remarkably busy one. We've continued to grow organically just by word of mouth based on our higher than average payouts. The network is presently supporting 107 partners with 326,000 resolving partner domain names. It is also running 380,000 owned and operated (O&O) names, and there are collective 1,525,000 domain names on the platform capable of resolving. Many more of these off-network names will go live in the coming days. The development team has brought our new serving hardware and DNS alive in 2 locations and migrated functionality to the boxes...

I've found page loads considerably faster and revenues flat or marginally better by partner. The partners doing well at INTERNETTRAFFIC.COM are those with larger portfolios of scattershot low-voltage names (names across many topics, with lower levels of traffic per name). Those partners showing the lowest increases have very small portfolios, focused on niches, where one good name is blocked by our add-partner and revenues then skew lower; or very sophisticated large partners who through their diligence, already optimized to their maximum potential to begin with.

Everyone is seeing cross-the-board increases though. The lowest revenue increase we've heard of is 5% and the highest is 180%. The average increase across partners from their previous deals seems to be in the 40-80% range.. That should continue to go upward as we do a better job backfilling your feeds with fail-over deals to support the traffic coming to blocked names and unsupported markets. You'll see that reflected in your monthly revenues but not necessarily in your daily stats.

I am 100% confident you'll all be very pleased with the advertising revenue results we provide to you as your next few wire payments roll in.

SALES SITE

I'm pleased to report that our sales site is open for business. We think this is going to have the kind of material impact on your sales business that INTERNETTRAFFIC.COM's monetization business has had on your parking revenues.

This is the same platform and technology that I use to sell my own domain names. It is the single most valuable piece of technology we've built for ourselves over the past ten years. Half my revenue originates from it. I've sold tens of millions of dollars worth of names using this platform. You will find it's a great way to increase your sales volume and keep your cost of sales down. If you'd like to try it, we'll register your interest and set you up an account. The process to create your account will take about a week. Once your account is set, you'll display the orange sales banner at the top of your landing page. When people click on the link our system will educate them about the value proposition of owning a better name like yours. It will take IP data, contact details such as phone/email, and other valuable information about the potential buyer. Then the system will pass the sales lead along so you can research the name, the potential buyer and price your name accordingly. There will be reports to show where your sales came from, you will be able to generate invoices. This is not a salesforce.com system. This is our own hard-won, custom tailored technology that we use ourselves. Anecdotally, we've heard that our platform is producing more offers than any other platform.

After selecting a name from your inquiry stream you can decide whether to pay a broker to manage the sale, or whether you want to broker the sale yourself. Our system will store information and prices for you, for future reference.

You will also be able to lookup individual domain level traffic and revenue statistics within this panel so many of you will (for the first time) know how much traffic and revenue your names actually get.

There are a whole host of advantages we hope this will bring to bear for you and some hard-learned tricks of the trade which will increase your sales prices.

There is no charge to use this system to manage your names when you monetize your parked traffic with INTERNETTRAFFIC.COM and this is not a way for us to change your traffic payouts. We intend to continue to pay you out nearly all of your first-dollar gross revenue.

If you have the kind of portfolio that requires you to sell names for cash-flow or you think you'd like to try this system, please send an email to sell@internettraffic.com with SALESSITE in the subject line and we will begin the process of creating an account for you.

PAYMENTS

While we haven't been paid by our upstream partner, they assure us their payment will arrive before the 15th and we think they're good for it, so based on that trust, your first payments have been keyed and sent to the bank with a valuation date of July 6th. You should get a separate email from HSBC shortly confirming your payment. I expect that a few of you will have payments bounce back due to incomplete/incorrect information. Please let me know if you do not receive your payment by Friday July 8th and please help me to help you by confirming the information you sent me is complete and correct. You do not need to email me if the info you sent was correct, but if upon checking you discover you made an error, please reach out to me so I can correct your wire info.

TRAVEL

That's about it. I will be traveling on summer vacation beginning Monday but my Cayman based team remains available to you in the event you need some assistance and I am always reachable in the event of emergencies via mobile or email.

Thanks sincerely,

Frank schilling

During my last stay at the Wynn Encore in Las Vegas I was surprised by the dichotomy between hotels in the town. Looking out the window toward the Stratosphere at the unfinished Fontaine Bleu and the old Frontier site abandoned across the street, the town looked broken down, yet in the face of a devastated economy and great uncertainty, the owner of the window I was looking through was talking about a top-to-bottom remodel of his hotel. Steve Wynn stood ready to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, not because his hotel needed it, but because he wanted his place ship-shape, BEFORE his guests noticed it needed an update.

I thought about that Vegas trip as we migrated to some new hardware at our data center this week and are now serving from a phalanx of state-of the art servers which are 4 times faster than our existing hardware, which itself was state of the art just a couple of years ago. It seems Moore's Law is alive and well. We didn't do it because we needed to. We did it because we want to upgrade our capacity, because that's what Steve Wynn would do if I were parking with him. We'll be back at that data center to upgrade again in 15 months. Flash memory is getting faster and we're going to try switching to flash-drives when we update our software-suite. Faster servers = faster page loads. Faster page loads = more user engagement, more clicks and more money.

Most of you with type-in names had a good week, the exception being those of you with a bunch of 404error traffic which encountered some problems for 3 days this week. This platform will not serve error operators well. Those of you who wrote puzzled by the decreases in your clicks have error, redirect or link traffic. You need to understand that that traffic is not long- term sustainable even though it may have worked fine for several years. It is not like type-in traffic and can be disrupted suddenly through no fault of yours or ours. I can tell by the silence across the rest of the partner landscape that all seems to be well, and I'm glad for that. We really need low maintenance partners and I'm pleased to have you on our system, even if we're not chatting via email each week.

We've slowed adding new partners but the name-count at dailychanges.com will continue to increase as partners light-up and migrate their traffic. If you're not on buy.internettraffic.com and sell.internettraffic.com name-servers and are using a redirect to get your traffic to us, I'd strongly encourage you to switch hostnames. Tests indicate you'll have a better outcome using our hostnames. We run DNS in Europe as well, and the larger our hostname footprint, the greater the incentive for caching services like UltraDNS to cache us in each Country where they operate.

I've made a significant 6 figure seed investment in a direct ad company called Komoona.com. They created a platform similar to our Linkbox product from a couple of years ago, which allows advertisers to take direct, flat-rate display ads across many small sites using PayPal. I like their system and our resources are spread thin, so I invested in their company rather than continuing to develop Linkbox. If they do well, I plan to test them across my own traffic first, and then, if successful, across your sites. If they do poorly, we'll have to dust off Linkbox. If anyone wants to make an investment in Komoona.com, you're welcome to ride along if you have extra cash and a good risk tolerance.

I expect our sales platform to be the next improvement now that the hardware upgrade is behind us and will have more information on that next weekend. We'll also try to provide a limited web based interface so you can generate email stats but want to avoid falling into the rabbit-hole of giving you all kinds of frivolous functionality because that development work and subsequent maintenance, costs money. The reason you came to us is to make more money and those pretty pages will absolutely take away from your net income.

Last things... If you know of any mid-sized type in traffic operators with generic names or generic variants who are not using our system, feel-free to recommend them to us. We are near our next revenue share tier and once reached we should all see a small bump in net revenue - It's 1-2% but every little bit helps. If any of you have NOT sent your WIRE INSTRUCTIONS and I owe you money, NOW is the time to send them. I need to key your wires this week to get ready to make your payments on- time. I am leaving for my summer break in 2 weeks and will not be in a position to react instantly to banking issues while traveling. IT stuff will be well in hand though. I will send out a separate email to you now if I do not have your wire instructions.

Thanks sincerely,

Frank Schilling

While many of you view me as a domainer, I do a lot of other jobs around the Schilling house. Family stuff, household stuff, travel-planning – I even do the garden variety financial investing for my family.

I am pretty sure many of you do the same thing. In our capacity as financial investors, we're privy to unique insights into the financial markets and their impact on the domain world. Just like search-box searches change based on the collective popular conscience and time of year, the business of monetizing traffic and selling domain names is a leading edge report-card on the immediate state of the global economy. The tip of the needle is an exciting and visceral place to be.

Two weeks ago the stock market was up every day and we had a record sales week, PPC bids were strong and all was well in the World. This last week was a lousy week in stocks and it's no coincidence that people were slower funding their escrow transactions and businesses got cautious, reeling in the froth from PPC budgets.

While you and I may view a good domain name as a permanent asset. Much of the business community still views a better name as a luxury. We are collectively early in an industry and the price of participating in an immature market is lack of liquidity and fair-value for our assets. While the financial crisis of 2008/2009 taught me that there is indeed a floor to sales prices (even in tough times), that floor is well below the present level and I would prepare for lower prices on discretionary (average) names if things get rougher in the months ahead.

Internet Traffic sales are a sail in the wind of the same storm. Marketers are people and people get scared when times are tough. While these people still need to advertise they will reel things in and get cautious if the economy softens. So with that obvious statement spoken you can understand why the only parking companies that can show you a perfectly linear upward graph in traffic and revenue are those that shave the tops from you and those run by Bernie Madoff from the prison library - None of us want to be on that platform. ;)

There has always been a rush to blame the upstream partner if payments drop. My revenue was down this week and I do it to. Based on the very helpful calls with the team at our upstream partner this past week, I think they are really trying to help us collectively achieve the opposite.

We have 3 developers working on improvements to my O&O traffic implementation and you will all piggyback those changes. I'm distributing some of my hosting for faster load times and will be adding a phalanx of new hardware to serve pages faster – something I had planned for my O&O for a while. You will ride those changes as-well. Load speed is a big driver of click-throughs, faster pages get more CTR. Our additional European based DNS is up now and I'll be at our colocation facility as soon as this coming weekend for a physical hardware upgrade. This coming week-end will also see us adding backfill partners to serve adds in unsupported markets (that's a smattering of revenue but it all helps).

All these technical changes have necessitated a pushback in the sales platform, which is still 2-3 weeks out. You'll be able to list your names and manage inquiries via email and a web based control panel. It's a nice little system (exactly the same one I use to handle sales inquiries on my names) and it will be available to you very soon. Our developers Roy and Ying are working on it.

We've been very busy adding accounts but that burst of newcomers is slowing down. There are nearly 90 of you on this list with 450,000 names on the system. We have another 200,000 names waiting to be added in the coming days, so if you include my own names we'll be managing over a million names this week. All that growth has happened in 3 weeks. If you can think of any other medium or larger operators who are not using us, or who could benefit on this platform, I'd appreciate if you could put in a good word to connect us. We know a lot of people in the industry but have lost touch with many as we've put our heads down to work over the last few years.

I have 37 of your wires set up – That's everyone who has emailed me wire instructions to date. As I said, there are nearly 90 partners on the platform. I would be really grateful if the rest of you could please take a moment to send your bank wire instructions, because if our upstream partner pays early, our first payment should go out in 3 weeks or so.

I've set the wires up so you will get an email from HSBC Cayman once the funds leave our bank.

Have a great week and thanks sincerely,

Frank Schilling