Domain market wants Aussie registrars

Domain name marketplace Sedo has made a whirlwind visit to Australia to try to drum up some relationships with local domain name registrars.

The firm, which is based in the U.S., participated in the Traffic Down Under conference on the Gold Coast this week.

Its head of business development, Matthias Meyer Schönherr, told iTnews that Sedo was seeking relationships with local registrars.

"We have other registrars [on the books] but none are Australian at the moment," said Schönherr.

"We partner with them to get our inventory displayed on their websites."

The firm also wanted to use its visit to meet some of the Australian domainers that park and sell through the firm’s marketplace.

Schönherr estimated it has around 14 million domains for sale via the web site.

Many of the domain owners (called domainers) park their domains with Sedo and use its templates to feed predominately Google advertising onto the sites while they are awaiting sale, according to Schönherr.

But he denied that Sedo was aiding the practice of domain name squatting.

“I think we’ve overcome terms like squatting [in the domain name selling market] and we’re pretty glad because it’s not about squatting, but finding the best way of using and monetising these domain names,” Schönherr told iTnews.

“One way of monetising of course is to sell them, but during the period of waiting for an offer you can also park these domain names [and serve ads].

“Of course, there are still issues with domainers registering trademarks and typos and if we see it we take it out [of the marketplace], but we have 14 million domains so we can’t actively look at this,” said Schönherr.

Schönherr claimed to have ‘a lot of Australian domainers parking and selling’ on Sedo. Large domainers can typically have a ‘couple of thousand’ names in their portfolios.

Sedo claimed that it was able to give domainers a larger cut of Google ad revenues than if they pursued a relationship with Google themselves.

“We have a pretty exclusive contract with Google,” said Schönherr.