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March 8, 2003
New Company Promises New Life for Your Tired Old & Inactive Domain Names 

By Ron Jackson

The trusty old domain parking page is getting a major makeover and your income statement may start looking a lot better as a result. Before you say �Oh no, not another ineffective affiliate parking plan�, you might want to take a look under the hood and check out who is behind the steering wheel this time.

If you don�t know Igal Lichtman by name, you may have heard of a software company he founded called Magic Solutions. If you haven�t heard of Magic Solutions, you may have heard of Network Associates (formerly McAfee Associates), the company Lichtman sold Magic Solutions to in 1998 for $110 million dollars. Now that we have your attention, let�s take a look at Igal�s new baby, DomainSpa.com

For the new project, Igal retained his original experienced teammates CTO Efim Gendler and Chief Architect Vadim Mostov, and added new blood with  CEO Gal Moran. Moran brought additional business experience and an in-depth knowledge of advanced mathematics and statistical analysis.

DomainSpa.com is a unique product that was developed by using Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, Neural Networks, Text Mining, and Statistical Analysis technologies to  find the most appropriate sponsors (advertisers) for a specific domain name. Then (and this is what sets them apart from others) DomainSpa dynamically generates a monetizing domain parking page, complete with graphics and just 3 super-targeted  choices, with brief descriptions of the service offered by each. The company is currently testing an additional technology, GeoTargeting, that takes the geographic location of the �domain visitor� and the time of day into account to deliver even more targeted results.

Here is a quick illustration. Go to www.citybird.com to see a page parked with DomainSpa. When that domain was entered into the company�s system, the software searched the history of the domain name and found that it was once used by a small airline. So it generated a page with a small banner ad for airline travel and three highly related links to Car Rental, Hotel and Cruise companies (you may see different links as the software automatically changes them when various factors dictate). The DomainSpa team says this clean interface (similar to Google�s effective �less is more� approach) and super targeting is sending conversion rates through the roof, making all good domain names more valuable. Increased revenues allow owners to realize a higher price should they decide to sell.   

If the domain has no history, the software uses proprietary algorithms to match sponsors to the domain name. In addition, for the first few days after you submit your names to DomainSpa.com they analyze which of the three options people click on for each name and what terms they enter in the search box. That information allows them to further refine the selection of choices so they will generate the most activity for you and the best conversion for sponsors (advertisers). For example a domain with �football� in the title might draw people looking for gambling, or it could draw people looking for cheerleaders. By analyzing the early click-through patterns the company will know what market your name is attracting and target the links to that market. 

Of course, if you have a strong type-in domain, then you are really sitting pretty because surfers will be delivered to a page that promises to deliver an abnormally high conversion ratio. DomainSpa.com recently finished beta testing its technology with several well-known domainers who all claim their click-through rates jumped dramatically when they moved some of their domains there. Thunayan Al-Ghanim of Future Media Architects and MP3.TV (known to members of popular domain forums as Elequa) sent DomainSpa.com a note saying �Guys! Thank you for uncovering the best way of making money!

Japan�s Motohisa Ohno said �I have used DomainSpa.com for 3 months and the results are quite better than the service which I was using. It's very interesting that the results are getting better as time goes by. It's also important there is no annoying pop-ups. I have already assigned most of domains which have traffic to DomainSpa.com� 

Today�s affiliate search parking pages are notorious for low click through rates. As Ohno noted, most are a pop-up infested mishmash of dozens of links that normally turn surfers off rather than draw them in. Christian Chena N��ez of Paraguay says the interface and matching technology are paying big dividends for him too. �Wow! Your system have proved to be extremely efficient!� Nunez states in a testimonial letter on the site.  �My domains will generate $XXXX.XX net revenue/day... and this is less than HALF of the traffic I used to send to YYYYY!!! " 

The company claims that even a small number of hits can generate enough money to easily cover the annual registration fees for a domain. DomainSpa.com will track all of the domains in your account and provide you with enough information to make more intelligent decisions on whether you should hold, sell or renew a domain.

At the moment, the pages generated do not indicate that the domain is for sale, but company leaders say they will always respond to the requests of their customers. If customers want that information on the page it will be added in the future. 

The same management team is also involved with some other internet projects that are equally interesting, including www.iBoogie.TV . This special clustering search engine tries to go Google one better in a unique way. When you enter a search term, the page returns a panel that has the search results sorted into a group of neatly categorized clustered folders.  For example, if you type in �Computers� it will sort the results into folders for �Desktops�, �Brands�, �Accessories� and many others. You then open the folder to get the results you were really after rather than wading through page after page as you might do at Google. 

Even more fascinating technology comes from a sister company, Quigo, a pioneering search technology that digs through the �Deep Web� or "Invisible Web". That includes sites that utilize DHTML technology that doesn�t generate a page until the surfer clicks on it. Search Engines have always gotten trapped within such sites and left them without indexing the pages. The Quigo technology is so compelling that several government and military organizations in the U.S. and overseas have contracted the company�s products and services. In addition, Quigo has signed contracts with major search engines to supply them with PPC results that are inaccessible by other technologies

DomainSpa.com just went live this week. When you sign up for an account you will be asked to list 4 or 5 of your productive domain names. You will get an email back acknowledging receipt of your application and that will be followed by another email letting you know what kind of activity you can expect from the kind of names your submitted. Currently the company accepts all applications and since there is no cost to the domain owner, you have nothing to lose, especially when a trip to this Spa could rejuvenate those tired old domain names and put some money in your pocket!  

 

If you would like to comment on Ron Jackson�s article, write [email protected].

 

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