Domaining.com is thinking Green not the industry

Francois is a smart guy and I know he can come up with a better model than charging subscriptions to provide other people’s content. I really appreciate the Domaining.com service, and even as an active domainer I would not pay to subscribe to Domaining.com. I have my favorite blogs that I read, and I can manage my own feeds. Francois has earned a ton of respect by keeping Domaining.com free and providing a great resource, but I definitely agree that paying for a subscription won’t do the industry much service — it likely won’t thicken Francois’ wallet any, either.

someone can easily step in and set up a free site to fill the void.
**Jamie Says**
Yes and No Tim. Francois has a lot into Domaining.com and the domain is also a perfect Fit. The reason behind my post is to hopefully provide Francois to hear from Domaining.com readers on what they would do if they had to pay to read Domaining.com. I think better options are available and Francois might also be forgetting the things that Domaining.com has brought him already. My blog is fed in Domaining.com but I think if anybody should be charged is the Bloggers, but then on the other side, why should I pay for content I am creating to be read on a different site…. Traffic I guess, but I do not make any money on DotWeekly.com either and that includes traffic from Domaining.com .

I think Francois is “thinking” of charging the bloggers not the readers? This would make total business sense imho. Consider all of the FREE traffic his site has been sending you for the past year? Besides the free traffic, your name and brand had been in front of the entire domaining community. I support a fee to all bloggers who use the service. I would not support a fee to the readers, as this would kill the service.

Domaining.com is owned and operated by a private company, and they have every right to charge people for a service – especially since it’s so valuable to people in the industry. Whether you choose to subscribe or not will ultimately be your decision, and the traffic implications may cause Domaining.com to reconsider – much like many newspapers tried making visitors sign up to read content, and that model didn’t work either.

If you decide to charge readers to read your blog, that’s your prerogative. Nobody should criticize you for your business decision. Perhaps you are being a bit selfish since the loss of Domaining.com could lead to the loss of many casual readers of your blog?

**Jamie Says**
I am looking out for the domaining community, not myself. I will and have already thought about PULLING my feed from Domaining.com but I write my blog to help people. Plus, how am I being “selfish” by offering to Pay Francois if I want my writings on Domaining.com other then charging the Readers?

I think if we together paid something like $40-$60 per year for access to the site would be worth while and could help with the costs of running the site.

Regards,

Robbie

Jamie,

Completely understand your concern. However, Francois has done a remarkable job launching Domaining.com. I can tell you that it is nowhere as easy as it looks and how it is delivered by Cybertonic.

We are going through some hassles launching GeoDomaining.com in the same caliber. Francois has set the standard and anything less will not be near as successful. Tough job for us.

I applaud his efforts, hard work and financial promoting of Domaining.com. He is one of the few people who has promoted this industry in mainstream without demanding to be paid upfront. This is very commendable in my book, as most leaders in this industry want to get paid for everything in advance if they are going to do anything positive for the industry to grow.

Francois is a domainer, but a businessman first and foremost. I for one would be willing to pay for this service because I know it will continue to grow into a valuable asset that no one has ever created in the last 10 years for the domain industry. You have your forums, which now are mostly full of crap. However, Domaining.com continues to deliver great content(Because of great bloggers), and valuable resources and tools to newcomers and old timers in the domain industry.

A persons time is worth money, regardless of the software only costed a dime. Francois consistent creative effort and drive to bring new innovations to the domain industry and community should be financially rewarded, and he should not be criticized IMO for planning to charge for this great service.

Bloggers are the true heroes to Domaining.com being a success. I hope all of them continue to do what they do. As I a blogger, I can tell you that I agree with Francois 100% when he says it is a win/win situation for bloggers. Bloggers have become successful and well known in this industry because of being located on Domaining.com.

More money to Cybertonic company leads to more promotion which in fact leads to more name recoginition and more business for bloggers. Additionally and more importantly, it leads to providing more education on the domain industry for all involved.

His selfless service all these months should be rewarded now. Though I do not think $30 a month is a smart move. =) I think $10 a month would be a great start and increase as more valuable tools, customizaion, etc are added. Perhaps different levels of paid membership.

In the end, Domaining.com is going to continue to grow because bloggers know how valuable it is to their sites, and those seeking knowledge are going to be willing to pay for the education that bloggers provide, etc.

I imagine that Cybertonic will eventually pay bloggers who perform well with great content, but that is for another post.

P.S. I feel domaining.com should be free to readers for 60 days to allow them to learn how to use the site effectively. Additionally giving them a reason to see how valuable it is to those serious about the industry and to add it to their tool box.

Readers and those seeking knowledge will pay for great content. This has been proven over and over on the internet. Domaining.com is not a newspaper, but a targeted service that can not be found anywhere on the internet for the domain industry in this quality.

However, this is not my business model, and I will support it regardless of the outcome.

I guess I am in the minority (from what seems to be the consensus) in that I am sure that I would not pay for it.

If it becomes a per month charge someone else will start another site that simply grabs all the feeds from all the same blogs and I will switch to their service.

It seems like he does not have any scarcity power, anyone can do what has been done. The domain name will likely not be as good but just a simple site that pools content will not be to tough to do (I am simply assuming this… perhaps it is very difficult and I am completely wrong).

I guess the only way to find out if it will work is to actually try it.

2 cents from a faithful domaining.com reader:

1. I love Domaining.com, and I visit at least twice per day

2. I wouldn’t pay even $1 per month for access. Why? There are a handful of blogs that I believe provide me value, I was aware of these before I found domaining.com, and I’ll continue to visit those blogs directly if domaining.com charges a fee. Much of the content on the other blogs is pure crap, although I sometimes read those blogs purely for entertainment value.

3. Although I wouldn’t pay anything for Domaining.com, you better believe that I’d try to figure out a way to further monetize the website, if I were in Francois’ shoes. He doesn’t owe me as a reader anything for free.

Domaining is nothing more then an RSS feed. Anyone can build one using iGoogle customized to what they read or even get headlines in their e mail box. Domaining only exists because domainers are igbnrant to RSS and SEO.

In fact alltop.com is already doing it. Francois is NOTHING without the content he carries and HE owes it to the blogging domainers who have for years invested so much in helping the industry and creating content and never asking for a dime in return.

I believe the traffic homepage should be the new domaining feed. Domainers are cheap fucks. They won’t pay and with what’s coming down the pike for domaining from Google and certain death of parking, few domainers will be left standing soon any way.

Any smart blogger has built equity in their own blog without needing domaining to deliver traffic. I know one of the top domain blogs has over 25,000 RSS feed subscribers and daily email newsletters that are passed around the web by thousands every day.

From a business perspective, Francois does indeed need to recover costs and also to get some form of compensation for his time, effort and skills.

As much as the domain industry may fun and be a mere hobby for many, it does take time and money to produce a service of any reasonable quality.

Now, I believe that charging readers may hinder further success. Imagine what would happen if DN Forum charged you before you could read any forum post? My suggestion is to let readership stay free, and entice readers to a premium subscription that offers an added and prized bonus.

With regards to bloggers, yes, we do provide the content. Without us, the domaining.com site would be rendered useless. We get traffic, and domaining.com gets content. However, what bloggers must bear in mind is that advertising costs are huge, and there is hardly another resource that offers such highly targeted traffic for FREE.

How do you strike a balance? Again, offer a premium service for a paid subscription. This could include listing the feeds of paid bloggers on the homepage, while non-paying bloggers’ feeds are accessed via a link to “Other Feeds”.

However, bloggers should not hesitate to pay a fee, as the traffic from domaining.com, when compared to even PPC traffic, is almost priceless. Domaining.com in my opinion delivers highly targeted traffic, which is not exposed to the risks of click fraud.

It would then be the bloggers responsibility to figure out how they can monetize the traffic that they get from domaining.com. Quite frankly, any one blog could make ten times more than what they pay to Domaining.com.

That’s a tough Cookie!

Making Readers Pay will not work. Why?
because the initial “free access period” that is being proposed to them is enough time for them to decide which blog they’d like to follow and bookmark them or subscribe to their RSS feed.
That option is (a la fin du jour) paying simply to receive a group of RSS Feeds.

Making the Bloggers pay ? will that bring in enough money? out of the 83 sources of information, quite a few I’ve noticed are inactive.
And Also how much to charge? Charging the Bloggers would make them expect a service and that’s good TRAFFIC! Great!

But if they pay for that I can see a few of them simply making the most of their money and Flooding Domaining.com with posts advertising their own domains.
(Not as if it’s not Already happening!)

Quality articles would get rare (IMO) and if quality goes down, audience will go down too.

If bloggers are made to pay, a limit on number of posts allowed per month should be enforced. I would certainly not want to see the first page of domaining.com flooded with just one person’s blog post.
(OR maybe charge a small fee PER post? – Now That would improve quality of the posts!)

Tu es le capitaine a bords Francois. Peu importe la decision que tu prends, je te donnerai mon support.

Thanks for this post Jamie

I thought I’d put in my two cents here too.

I have known Francois for a while now over correspondence and he has always come across as a top guy. Being a top guy does not also mean that he is stupid – on the contrary, he is a very smart businessman too – so, I am sure he will come up with a solution that will:

1. satisfy visitors who just want to read
2. keep them at the site and keep them coming back
3. finally get a revenue model that is deserving of the effort and money he has put into Domaining.com

Looking at my blog’s stats I can say that I get a daily boost from my posts that appear on Domaining.com – at least 50 visitors a day – max days have been even above 100 visitors a day ( these are stats that I could track via referrals, I am sure the figure is larger as Francois mentions). Considering my blog gets 500 to 1000 visitors a day, that is quite a percentage.

Not to mention, Domaining.com gets natural traffic so the visitors that come across from Domaining.com are usually a mixed bag of new and returning visitors which means my feed count has slowly grown since my posts started appearing on Domaining.com. As someone mentioned, some readers have come to my blog for the first time thanks to Domaining.com and the pulling power it has.

In any case, I am sure that Francois will come up with a solution that will keep his readers happy while improving the returns of Domaining.com.

All I can say is good luck Francois and keep up the great work.

John Motson

Francois,

Until you figure things out why don’t you put up a Donation button and see what happens?

You’ve beaten me to it Patrick.
I was just about to suggest that.

domain king

“I believe the traffic homepage should be the new domaining feed”

That is funny. Domaining.com is clear, unbaised and does not have tacky music. I respect Rick for what he has done to promote the industry but he (or you if its your post) is not a developer. Not to say Rick can’t be but there has not been one single example of any decent development projects coming from Rick and Howard – prove me if I’m wrong. Sure, great sales but anything more than awful looking adsense sites is all I have ever seen.

Francois knows what he is doing and everyone can bitch and complain all day long but domaining.com is the best resource we have for news and traffic – getting 30% of people to pay is better than 100% of non payers.

We all talk about how domains are worth 1,000’s, some of you will even say that you spend 10’s of thoushands of dollars in pre-development of a name to justify an asking price. Now you’re complaining about paying a small amount to one of your fellow domainers that has proven his commitment to the industry by continually developing new projects and promoting the industry many of us make a good living from.

Some of the post provide great suggestions and I’m sure Francois will find a balance between whats good for him and whats good the industry.

As for the haters … have a beer and chill

Am I missing something here?

Other than having an excellent domain, what does Domaining.com provide? As far as I can tell they have no unique content and nothing that couldn’t be easily duplicated.

As someone who uses a feed reader (Google Reader) and has subscribed to all the domain blogs I am interested in, I see no reason to have to visit Domaining.com on a regular basis.

A competitor is trivial to set up, and many feed aggregation scripts already exist.

I don’t see anyone paying for a “service” like this other than suckers who are unaware how simple it is to subscribe to any blog in their preferred reader.

I agree that Domaining.com is great for the industry and an excellent place to point people new to it, but I don’t think it provides any unique value that could be charged for.

asking bloggers to pay would be like, a company asking their employees to pay because they provide shelter and safe working environment, it’s quite absurd, but maybe they can be fooled. What value does domaining.com provide beside feeds? One Word, Shortcut!
Does the world need more reliable shortcuts? or more, search engines, and directories like yellow pages, the users will decide.

Hi,

Bad idea.

Peace!
dan

Francois is complaining about not earning enough via advertising space – its no wonder, have you seen what he charges. A friend of mine enquired and nearly fainted, and apparantly Francois didn’t even try to justify his astronomical prices with even a mention of his sites traffic.
Ok so domaining sends traffic to featured blogs, but the bottom line is Francois is getting FREE content from the very same featured blogs. He first went wrong when he required people to log in. He gets his content for free and is now wishing to charge the folks he gets the free content from. I personally think domaining is totally mismanaged and does anyone actually sell that many domains as a result of having a featured domaining listing?

Stephen douglas is right on, hopefully francois reads these comments, because he’s gonna lose on this deal. Dnheadlines is free, and I’m sure after reading about this other wbemasters are gonna launch their own free service. Having a good domain is one thing, but a bad business model flushes it all down the toilet.

I figured I would chime in too. I have a small blog, and Domaining.com certainly helped me get readers. I thank Francois for that.

But the fact is, I don’t get nearly the clicks that other bloggers do on Domaining.com. Is it because my content is inferior? Perhaps. I’d like to think that Francois’ own opinion is accurate when he said (i’m paraphrasing) that no one knows who I am, so no one clicks.

It’s the main reason why I focus on facts and content, rather than posting an opinion no one cares about. (before you slam me, i know that the trends themselves are based on opinions, but i try to support them with facts and proof. When I say ‘opnions’ I mean on the domain industry in general)

Because of my smaller amount of traffic from Domaining.com, I would be unwilling to pay for my blog to be featured there. I’m not saying it’s Francois’ fault, cuz it isnt. It’s just that I can’t justify the fee for the traffic I personally receive. And I think you would find many of the smaller “no-name” bloggers agreeing with me on this.

(In case you were wondering, I average about 20-30 clicks from Domaining.com when I post. Sometimes I get more, but not always)

Other bigger bloggers may get the clicks. But something tells me they would get traffic anyways without Domaining.com

And I am against charging readers.

I’m on the side that feels there are other ways to monetize Domaining.com. This industry is fully capable of working together to find a solution that benefits all three parties: Francois’ business, the bloggers and the readers.

Brokering seems to work well for large email lists, why not go there? I receive Rick Latonas newsletter every day, even though i never bought anything from it. I love it and don’t feel it is spammy in any way. Something tells me Domaining.com has a large amount of email subscribers.

Correction: I meant domaining.com top tool bars above.

Francois, charging people to view the aggregated content of others is absurd in my opinion. Do it and somebody else will fill the void quickly I would guess. I would suggest working on delivering more value on the site so that advertisers are more compelled to pay to be there.

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Francois is free to do as he wishes, but as a consumer, I have the right to not subscribe; as a reader, I can add whatever feeds I wish.

While domaining.com has been a nice feature, it isn’t a must-have site for me, and I would not be subscribing.

But I still wish Francois the best.

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