When Mark of Kanoodle told me about the business of putting search ads on <keyword>.com domains, I laughed a little. But then my opinion turned pretty quickly. Those who were able to see the thirst for more search traffic by marketers and matching that to the dramatically declining price of domain names should be respected on some level. It has some undesirable consequences, but in the end I couldn’t but think there was something cool about the obscure business.
I recently caught up with MarchEx who are starting to do some interesting things around the space. For instance, go check out videocamera.com. As well as the search ads they are now mashing them with product feeds. On the example is one from Best Buy. They call the space Direct Navigation.
In my opinion, there is very little creativity or innovation but it is a neat little niche direct marketing business that has me fascinated.
