My Thoughts on GEO domains
POSTED BY Rick Latona IN Web Sites

While I made a promise to myself to never regurgitate press releases and only blog when I had something I wanted to talk about, I must chime in on the GEO domain conversation which my peers are having.

I suppose I'm more bullish than Sahar and more bearish than SimplyGEO and Elliot Silver.

Many domainers, myself included, value city dot com names by population. For example, poor U.S. cities have a minimum valuation of 10-25 cents per citizen and simply can't fall below that amount. Wealthier cities and cities with tourism can sell for 10 times as much. However, this is meant to be a guideline, not the rule. Let's look at a few examples.

The town of Edisto Beach doesn't even have 1000 citizens. Yet, edistobeach.com with stellar search engine rankings generates over 50 dollars a day in AdSense revenue. At just ten times earnings the name is worth $182,500. Not bad considering I bought this name for $50,000 only two weeks ago and the current design is just terrible. At the moment it isn't for sale because my guys are working on a better design and we will be signing up some new advertisers.

In the same breath I'd agree with Sahar that the upside potential of EdistoBeach.com is limited. Or to put it another way, it doesn't have long legs.

An even better example would be MyrtleBeach.com. The owners of that site are quick to tell you that they generate over a million dollars a year in revenue off that city of 28,000. They can do that because there are so many hotels and even more timeshare units. They've managed to land over 1000 advertisers paying 3000 dollars per year. Clearly it isn't just population but the number of potential advertisers that can determine how long those legs can be.

Everything I'm saying is also based on yesterday's metrics. Now we have a glimce at tomorrow's possibilities. Dr Ham recently launched his beta version of Vancouver.com. Not only is his site incredibly polished looking (yes I've forwarded the link to my designers) but he can do a few things that regular folk like us can't do. Most notably if you look at the image I placed in the start of this article you'll see that he doesn't have anything that says those ads are pay-per-click. Missing are "Ads by Google" or "Yahoo Publisher Network". I'm sure it is due to his relationship with Yahoo or possibly he's using a 3rd tier PPC provider. The user will surely think those ads are part of navigation so his click-through-ratio will be through the roof. It's a great design but I'm still looking for ground-breaking stuff on his site which I haven't found yet. Most of it is actually very normal. I would suggest to him that he ad more text to the home page for search engine optimization reasons.

I think Sahar's real point is that sites like funeralhomes.com can make more money if they could sign up funeral homes around the world and I'd agree with him on this point. That doesn't mean that great GEO names aren't great names that can make a lot of money. To me, it's just about having a balanced portfolio and they are a critical component.

There is really a lot to say on this subject so maybe this will be part 1 of another series of articles. There are cctlds like Tijuana.com.mx and foreign cites like ChristChurch.com which to me fall into a different yet still valuable categories.

I will say this. I think GEO names are easier to make profitable. It's realitively easy to get high search engine rankings and a whole lot easier to land advertisers.

  • http://www.isralog.com/2008/06/04/my-thoughts-on-geo-domains/ My Thoughts on GEO domains | E-commerce Blog

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  • http://adsense.luiscorreia.com/my-thoughts-on-geo-domains/ My Thoughts on GEO domains

    [...] Trish Jones wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptMost notably if you look at the image I placed in the start of this article you’ll see that he doesn’t have anything that says those ads are pay-per-click. Missing are “Ads by Google” or “Yahoo Publisher Network”. … [...]

  • http://henniemeijer.com hennie meijer

    why do you not just say that Mr Hamm,already very wealthy,is deceiving people, who come to his website, intentionally by not mentioning that they are clicking on ads instead of infromational links. Should he not go to jail for deceiving people like this? Or are you scared to go against one of your fellow domainers and are you promoting services products yourself without mentioning your financial advantage in doing so(like most of these blogging domainers seem to do ?

  • http://snowcaplabs.com Charles

    Seriously? Go to jail? You've got to be kidding. Its is still pretty clear they are ads. There are urls under each. To me thats clear enough. Just because ads by google was standardized by force by google doesn't make it the right way or the only way to show text ads on a site. And I see no bridge in ethics either. To me its like a banner ad of sorts. You certanly don't see an ads by valueclick on each of their billions of ads do you?

    Wouldnt want you in a jury of peers. "Fry 'em!"

  • http://www.ricklatona.com/ Rick Latona

    I don't think there is anything wrong with the way he is displaying ads. I'm trying to figure out how he is getting away with it.

  • http://www.brandonlaughridge.com Brandon

    The ppc ads are probably something they sell in house as part of ad packages. People make adsense/ypn looking all the time...it's nothing hard to do or out of regular domainers' reach.

  • http://dndoc.com Parminder

    I agree that the frontpage is fantastic. Much of what you click on looks like the same old parked page, except, as stated above, there are no references to google.

    I am not sure what the ethical issue is by not displaying the ads "warning sign". If the ethics of the advertising industry are to be discussed, my opinion is that omission of an ad signpost is much less contentious than advertising cigarettes or using anorexic models to advertise fashion.

    A ppc provider that allowed better integration into websites is surely the future.

  • scott

    The ad spots look similar to the format of a premium adsense publisher but I don't think Kevin would go that route when he owns Hitfarm. The links in the format are using some funky redirect so it looks like custom work from his company.

    The site is "pretty" but is very thin. Since it's still relatively new I'm sure more content will be added over time but right now their isn't much of value there compared to other Vancouver based sites.

    The site has around 60k inlinks pointing to it thanks to his huge network of other websites. I'm sure it's going to do very well in the SERPs once he starts adding more articles.

  • Mike

    Nice on Rick!!
    A series would be very much appreciated!
    Please more numbers (Uniques, RPM, CTR etc.) if you can...

  • http://www.DomainBELL.com Patricia Kaehler – DomainBELL

    Kevin's Vancouver.com site is a refreshing change...

    I love the big images...

    Great pictures do alot for a site...

    The 3d Map Feature is awesome...

    I've never seen anything like that before...
    Who provides that service ??

    About the ad block you have at the beginning of your blog post Rick -
    That's an excellent way to sell adspace in text only version...
    It could even have the entire block of say 5 ads - in a rotator
    new block per visitor... I like it...

    ~DomainBELL (Patricia)

  • http://adelaide.com Peter

    "Missing are “Ads by Google” or “Yahoo Publisher Network”.

    Maybe Dr Han has gone direct to the advertisers, and its not Adsense based. By driving ad sales in a small city direct you can get a much bigger better slice of the revenue pie than a passive reliance on adsense.

  • http://www.king.net Emil @KING.NET

    A summary of Rick's post and I will use it as a guidelines.
    "I will say this. I think GEO names are easier to make profitable. It’s realitively easy to get high search engine rankings and a whole lot easier to land advertisers."

    Cheers.

  • Scott Kozlowski (“Koz”)

    Rick,

    While I do think it's obvious to domainers that they are PPC ads I don't think they are obvious to the general public user. I agree that his click-throughs will probably be huge (wouldn't ya love to see those percentages?), but if this is the case, then why is it necessary for Google or Yahoo to continue using the current set ups "Ads by Google” or “Yahoo Publisher Network”? Wouldn't be in everyones best interest if they dropped it? Didn't they add that originally as advertising for themselves rather than a PPC disclaimer?

    Koz

  • http://www.tdvr.com Antonio

    "Many domainers, myself included, value city dot com names by population. For example, poor U.S. cities have a minimum valuation of 10-25 cents per citizen and simply can’t fall below that amount. Wealthier cities and cities with tourism can sell for 10 times as much."

    What about a place? How to evaluate them? For example a region

    Thanks for the great article

  • http://www.domainmagnate.com/ Michael

    Great article on GEO's and interesting thoughts!

    The ads on vancouver.com seem to be from overture.com (yahoo), they do all kinds of cool stuff for high volume publishers.

  • http://dnyap.com/2009/02/successfully-developing-geo-domains/ Successfully Developing Geo Domains « DNyap – the best of the domaining blogs

    [...] has been a lot of discussion about geo domains lately from Andrew, Elliot and Rick, to name a [...]

  • http://www.worthing.net Mark

    For a large developed geodomain the CPM is lower than for high paying commercial terms. (so Sahar is right on that).

    But having a large geo domain with a highish page rank eg PR 5 and above gives a really good opportunity to rank for geo + business terms ahead of most small local businesses.

    Geos take a lot more development to be comprehensive than informational sites about products and services, but once they reach critical mass they can be very valuable (and useful to the community too), even without a .com tld.

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