Of Relevance

I’ve always been on the lookout for the perfect start page.  I wanted something with links to everything that I do online, plus some extras like various feeds, news, my email, etc.  I tried iGoogle, but it didn’t really work for me, so eventually I settled on the simple Google search page as my home page, and then played around with the bookmark feature inFirefox that allows me to open various websites in tabs, with one click.

Until someone (sorry, can’t remember who) suggested I try Pageflakes.  It works like  dream, loads superfast, and gives me everything I want on one page, first thing in the morning!

It is a breeze to set up, easy to customize and works for me!

One of my favourite magazines, Business 2.0 is running a fascinating story on domain moguls. I have always known that there is money to be made in domain purchase and reselling, but the article blows my mind.

So how do domains make you money? Three ways:
1. They point to a revenue generating, legitimate website
2. They point to a web page filled with Adsense ads from Google (or other ad network). Every time anyone clicks on the ad, you make money
3. You can sell them on to someone who wants them for 1. or 2. above

So how much money is made? A lot.

Kevin Ham is the guy who is profiled in the Business 2.0 article., He trained as a doctor, but quickly figured out where the real money is. He owns 300 000 domains, and makes about $70 million a year.

Him and Cameroon. Cameroon? Yep. It turns out that the country extension for domains for Cameroon is .cm, which just happens to be a common typo for those of us who want to type .com. And now, thanks to Ham, if you type almost anything dot cm, you get taken to an ad page. Kaching, as they say. He shares his profits with Cameroon.

The article outlines his whole story and method – it’s a good read.

And you will be amazed at how much some domains actually cost. I bought this one (of relevance.com) for about $9, But Ham paid $171,250 for hoteldeals.com and $350,000 for greeting.com. Nice.

Personally, I think the days of making money from ad pages is pretty numbered. The trick for these domain owners is to get the “fake” page to feature high on search engine results by fooling the search engines into thinking that the page is full of relevant info. But Google is smart, of course, and is already knocking a lot of them off the front page. As the technology and algorithms improve and suss out the fake pages, the domain owners will have to rely more and more on actual typos to get people to visit their pages.

As a follow-up to my post on South Africa’s Top Bloggers, as ranked by Technorati, I whipped out my calculator, and did some number crunching.

There are approximately 16 million blogs tracked by Technorati.

I’ve been told that there are about 30 000 active blogs in South Africa.

That means we represent about 0.002 % of all blogs.

As I pointed out in my post, we also represent only 0.00045% of the Top 100,000 ranked posts on Technorati.

That means that we should have FIVE times as many Top 100,000 blogs as we do right now.

Of course:

1. I probably have not got a full list of our Top Blogs. (Help me update it by leaving a comment below if you know of a blog that is in the 100 000 rank on Technorati)

2. The audience ie. blog readers is also skewed away from South Africa, and if the theory that there are more people who read blog than people who blog, this would also affect South Africa.

But still.

Any comments?

Eric Edelstein is hosting the next OpenCoffee in Cape Town tomorrow, at 6pm at the Extreme Hotel.
He has changed the format slightly, and there will now be a 10 minute presentation by Henk Kleynhans from Skyrove.

Eric has done a great job getting the ball rolling for OpenCoffee in Cape Town, and the meet up between investors, and web entrepreneurs has already gotten some sweet results. If you are a player in the web world, and if you are hoping to make money of it (even if only one day!), or are looking to meet fellow colleagues in the space, go on over and sign up.

Eric has also set up a Facebook group for OpenCoffee, if you are interested. There are over 250 members, so you are bound to be in good company!

For those of you in Jo’burg who are interested in attending our next OpenCoffee, please sign up here.

Once every two months or so, I look at my inbox, see which emails in my inbox I have not opened, and unsubscribe from these newsletters. And every time I do this, I am amazed at the dance I have to go through to complete the process.

Take Barnesandnoble.com

1. They send me a newsletter, for which I probably signed up at some point.

2. They tell me that to unsubscribe, I must click “here”, log in , and change my prefernces.

3. I am already worried, because I know I do not know my password to enable me to log in. So I have to request it. It comes.

4. I log in, go to my preferences, and have to log in AGAIN with my email address. I do that.

5. IAM TOLD AN EMAIL WILL BE SENT TO ME WITH A LINK TO MANAGE MY PREFERENCES!!!!!

6. I wait.

7. And wait.

8. And wait some more.

9. No email. No unsubscribe completed. I KNOW it wasn’t that difficult to subscribe to the bloody thing.

10. Never buying a book from them again!

By the way, did you know (as I have now been told) that Barnes and Noble offers

FREE product Alerts and Newsletters

Wow. Free? Really? Free info that will allow me to buy books from you? Wow? Free? You’re the BEST!