Farming domains

To pick up a bit on yesterday's post, one strategy that smart domain owners are pursuing isn't particularly groundbreaking: they're putting up good content.

When you have millions of free visits, it's okay if you're sloppy, it's okay if you waste some and it's okay if you don't get organic traffic.

For a long time, domain owners acted like real estate investors. Buy. Hold. Sell.

Now, though, they're starting to act like real estate developers. Buy. Build. Hold. Make money on 'rent'.

To that end, we did a deal with the people who own ever.com. Ever isn't a particularly useful domain name (though it's short). So organic traffic is pretty limited, especially if you just put up a few links.

Enter the new ever.com. We hooked up the Squidoo engine to it and people have already built pages like:  best.cameras.ever,  best.lyrics.ever, funkiest.mammal.ever and even worst.president.ever. We're limiting the number of pages built per person, and after thirty days, if the page isn't improved and promoted, we put it back the pool.

I think it's likely that you'll see more domain holders invest the time and energy to make the domains actually useful. Development, not just investment.