Business 2.0 Magazine has a fascinating article on Kevin Ham, one of the top “domainers”. He reportedly owns about 300,000 domains that generate an estimated $70M per year in ad revenue.
Sheesh. No wonder I can’t find any good domains anymore.
See also my previous post on this topic.
A few days ago I mentioned Arizona trying to stop Zillow from providing zestimates within their state.
Here’s an update from John Cook’s venture blog:
UPDATE 4/24/07: The bill, including the amendment in support of Zillow, was defeated today by a vote of 32-22 in the Arizona House of Representatives. A spokesman for the Arizona house said that the bill was defeated because it dealt with increasing fees, though he said it was likely that sponsors would re-introduce the legislation along with the amendment related to Zillow.
By the way, John Cook is worth reading if you’re into tracking US ventures, especially on the west coast. He works for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and blogs regularly on entrepreneurial happenings.
In the US, the Communications Decency Act says it’s the person who created the content. In Canada, as far as I know, that question hasn’t been settled conclusively yet. There is now a lawsuit underway that should shed more light on it. From the Globe and Mail:
The hosts of the speed-of-light world of Internet blogs and interactive websites that publish anonymous commentary should be forced to pay when reputations are damaged, says a former Green Party staff member who is suing three such sites.
Google, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and openpolitics.ca, a Canadian political website based in Toronto, are being sued in Vancouver in a libel case that could change the way Internet opinion is monitored and published.
This case is critical to track for anybody who is thinking about hosting user-generated content on a Canadian-based website. Which would be just about anyone doing a Web 2.0 service.
Arizona is trying to stop Zillow from providing “zestimates” — their algorithm-based home valuation estimates — on the grounds that Zillow isn’t a licensed appraiser in the state.
That’s just plain silly. Zillow is, so far at least, a benevolent information provider, not a company people need to be protected from. And its estimates are just that: estimates. They should be taken with a grain of salt, just like all other analysis that tries to predict market behavior.
The Globe and Mail published a story this morning on the Competition Bureau’s investigation into alleged anticompetitive behavior in the Canadian real estate industry.
In a court filing, Jean-Pierre Bornais, a senior competition law officer, said 90 per cent of residential resale transactions in Canada involve the MLS database. He added that information already obtained by the bureau from industry participants indicates that the changes enacted by CREA “have restricted, and will further restrict, access to the MLS database, and have prevented and limited and will further prevent and limit, the entry and expansion of potential competitors.” The inquiry will determine whether CREA “has engaged in, or is engaging in, a practice of anti-competitive acts,” he said.
…
At CREA’s annual meeting this weekend in Ottawa, delegates approved a series of proposals that tighten listing rules and prevent homes from being put on MLS without follow up by the agent. Mr. Linney said the changes will go into effect despite the bureau inquiry.
…
Last November, one of Canada’s largest online realty services, Toronto-based Realtysellers Ltd., shut down “pending a resolution of the Multiple Listing Service issues.”
Read the full Globe story here. Read the post I wrote last week here.
A year and a half after launching their new search engine, Microsoft’s US market share in web search has declined from 13% to 9%, while Google and Yahoo! both gained. Microsoft is treading water while the market overall has grown. Here are the share numbers.
Yesterday brought more bad news for the Windows Live Search team: VP Christopher Payne is leaving Microsoft to start his own company.
It’s hard to imagine how to spin this one positively. Christopher was one of the first to pitch Bill and Steve on building a new search service in-house rather than continuing to outsource to Yahoo!. He played a huge role in recruiting key people to the team, creating a vision, and integrating marketing, business and customer focus into what was undoubtedly a pure engineering team. And as you can imagine, his business performance goals were tied in no small part to gains in market share and profitability. So this is not just the departure of the chief cheerleader and visionary; it’s a sign that success in search is not coming nearly as fast as Microsoft had hoped.
Having been on the team myself I have mixed feelings about this changing of the guard, and I imagine many of the people I used to work with are feeling the same way. When a key leader heads for the door you stop and question what keeps you there. Is it your passion for the technology and business challenges? Your allegiance to the company, the leaders, the team you helped build? The paycheck? How does that stack up against the negatives of the job? (Unless things have changed radically, the main down sides were: unattainable performance expectations pushed down from above, grueling hours, and a maddening culture of prima donna behavior that was tolerated and even rewarded.) Most importantly, how does all that measure up against time you could be spending doing something else? It’s worth doing that math once in a while.
Of course, the search battle is not over. In fact, it’s barely begun. But it will continue to be uphill for Microsoft. From the Seattle PI, March 5: “You have to think that, with the heavy lifting behind it, Microsoft has got to be in a good position to execute, and execute well,” Nielsen NetRatings’ Cassar said. “But they’re competing against two of the strongest companies, between Yahoo and Google, and so Microsoft can’t just execute well. Microsoft needs to execute in an extraordinary fashion in order to just keep pace.”
Good luck to all the warriors.
update March 8: Danny Sullivan gives some history on search at Microsoft.
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