General SEM Trends, From Spam to Highbrow

Domain Names
Oversee.net bought Moniker. They purchased SnapNames earlier this year. They must be pretty good at business to be able to afford over $100 million in acquisitions in one year.

Never trust Network Solutions again. They are now registering any whois lookups that occur on their network, and are challenging RegisterFly for the dirtiest register ever award.

Marchex has dropped below the sharp fall off back when they lowered Q3 2007 guidance. They currently trade at an 82 P/E ratio, and could unlock a lot of value if they had a real development strategy or started selling off some of their names. A Domain Tools blog post highlights how generic domains could appreciate if capital was more accessible for premium domains. I think before that happens companies like Marchex are going to need to issue a new strategic memo that is valid in the current marketplace. The Domain Tools blog post also had a comment from a search marketer:

Besides, the real downside to generic domains from my point of view is that every day, the type-in traffic generation becomes smarter, or dies off. More people use a medium such as Google or other search engines. With search engines, sites such as Travelocity.com and travel.yahoo.com become the apparent winners for the term Travel. Not Travel.com

As a search marketer who keeps spending more and more on Google ads, I firmly believe the above comment, and this is why I have been buying decent names and developing them. A balanced investment strategy where pieces build off each other and I put my marketing skills to work will outperform a strategy where I enter a saturated market late without a unique strategy. A strong domain is a great advantage, but you can still succeed with only a decent one and a bit ofsweat equity.

Yahoo! Buzz Index
Perhaps this is an old arbitrage strategy I somehow missed, but the Yahoo Buzz Index links to a list of popular searches. What better way is there to rank for them and drive traffic than to reference them on an high authority page, likeso:

That might be a nice strategy for other leading publishers to follow, though it makes Yahoo look a bit desperate in their marketing approach.

General Publishing Trends
Seth Godin highlights trends in the music industry, which is a set of trend applicable to just about every industry.

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