I am fascinated by the sheer amount of knowledge required to buy a domain, to setup and host that domain on its own dedicated server, to build and host a website, to generate content that draws traffic from search engines, and to produce a monthly income stream with that domain and website.  If you thought that was all you needed to know to be successful and make a decent amount of money, then you are dead wrong.

You might be able to eek out a couple bucks a day at best, but smarter Internet dogs are feeding on the bulk of traffic related to your strongest keywords and enjoying the free revenue that comes from every last visitor sent from from search engines at no cost. 

If you want to leverage the playing field and start eating the lunch of your .com competitors instead of letting them eat your lunch, then you should become a student of SEO to attract the largest stream of free search engine traffic to your .tv site (or your domain from another extension)…

Every day Richard Rosenblatt sits in his office, thinking about what Demand Media must to for the dot tv extension to reach the tipping point, which is the point at which the rate of adoption, growth, and public awareness of the dot tv extension increase exponentially. Some investors in the dot tv extension feel that Richard should focus his resources on running ads on television, the very medium the Internet threatens.

However, most of these domainers fail to understand that Richard believes that mass end-user adoption and the success of the dot tv extension shall only come with the success of the Channel Me venture, which is just one of numerous projects that consumes Demand’s resources, including labor and capital. Channel Me embodies Richard’s idea of “selling the overall experience of hosted solutions instead of the more technical concept of hosting itself.”

Will Richard’s strategy succeed? Will 2008 be the breakout year for dot tv assuming Channel Me achieves the kind of success Demand and its investors anticipate? 

When my interest in domain names took root, nobody explained to me that the learning curve I would face as a developer would be straight up. 

I was sucked into domain investing by the attractive and seductive nature of the .tv extension.  In my mind, the .tv extension is one of the strongest extensions for branding purposes (see any one of my many posts on this site) and there were countless generics available at discounted premium prices.  I felt like I struck gold when I could ping the database of available .tv names and a significant number of strong, single-word domains displayed “AVAILABLE: REGISTER NOW.”

After registering these names, I found that domain parking was not a business that would generate the kind of returns I sought from my domain investments.  Of course, I could cover the costs of my non-premium .tv names by parking those names with any of the parking companies that offer good payouts, but developing those domains would make those returns look insignificant.  This is where my experience as a developer began and development posed a new set of challenges when I started hosting and managing my own sites and servers…

Rational domain investors and web developers can agree that .com is and will remain king for the foreseeable future since it was the first domain extension to both gain widespread adoption and receive millions of ad dollars in promotional advertising in the form of print and broadcast ads. 

We also know that whatever site that can be built on a .tv domain name can be built on ANY domain name in ANY domain extension.  So why all the hype surrounding dot tv?

We are always looking for the next best thing.

Some people want you to look no further…

Its no surprise that .tv will become the second most preferred extension behind dot com.

What type of website can succeed in the future without video? Very few.

More and more companies realize that delivering a richer Internet experience with the use of video is critical to their company’s future success. The inevitable challenge that companies shall face is how to design their .com websites to accommodate delivering a rich Internet experience while providing all the company information that dot com sites historically provided without diluting a visitor’s overall experince.

In fact, several high profile companies concluded that the rich Internet experience they wanted to deliver to their customers should be separated from the corporate information provided on their dot com websites…

From time to time, I will post things that I notice, but don’t have much time to comment on.

Today, I noticed…

Did you miss me?

Forgive me for going MIA for so long; it was not my intention.  The last few weeks, I devoted my time to consulting on a few development projects, spent some time working on my own portfolio, and sold my first home. 

Some observations I wanted to share involve the future of the dot tv extension.  The extension has incredible promise, but currently the pace that companies adopt the dot tv extension is not as fast as many of us would like it to be.  This should change as the public’s awareness of the dot tv extension grows and understanding of the purpose of those letters that come after the dot in every domain name should mean.  Dot com was first, that is the default extension instilled in people’s heads.  The public was not taught what .com means or stands for nor were they told to question it. 

I imagine that over time and through repetitive visits to dot tv sites (or exposure to dot tv ads), they will either become enlightened that .tv implies interactive content or begin to wonder what in the heck dot com really stands for...leading them to the ultimate question of asking why not use dot tv if delivering video content to the world is the site’s purpose.  After all, video is the future and dot tv just fits better than dot com. 

Recently, Brightcove announced it would be using the dot tv extension…