Make sure you read this post to the end, there’s a bonus

Contents:
1. Affiliate program
2. Appraised droplists
3. End-User Lead Generator
4. Domain Sales History
5. Free eBook update
6. Bonus

1. Affiliate program
Did you know that as an Estibot subscriber, you’re already an Estibot affiliate, and that you earn recurring commissions for each subscriber you refer? You can even refer our existing users back to us, and earn commissions when they upgrade to a higher plan! We pay for new member registrations as well as for existing members who convert to a paid account or upgrade their plan.

Simply educate people about how they can benefit from an Estibot.com subscription, and earn 25% of the membership fees they generate, each month, for as long as they keep their subscription!

All you need to do get started is go to your Estibot.com affiliate links page:
http://www.estibot.com/affiliate.php?a=links

Just use these links to send people to Estibot.com and start earning! For best conversions, I recommend a pitch page or a review, where you tell people about how they can benefit from the Estibot.com tools. Make sure you promote the Exclusive tools, to maximize your commissions. The Exclusive plan is the best value for money and enables users to do real power research, including appraised drop lists, end user lead generation and much more.

2. Appraised droplists
Let Estibot do the legwork for your dropcatching and drop auction research! We publish complete daily pendingdelete, Snapnames, Namejet and GoDaddy auction lists, as well as dropped domains available for registration, all pre-appraised with an estimated end-user valuation and a wholesale valuation. That’s a couple of hundred thousand domains daily, all pre-appraised to save you time.

Just download the lists, fire up your spreadsheet program and sort by Estibot valuation to make sure you won’t miss any great drops. The appraised droplists are available for Exclusive subscribers, and can be found here:
http://www.estibot.com/drops.php

3. End-User Lead Generator
Selling or brokering a domain name? Estibot will find potential buyers and even contact them on your behalf! Simply appraise your domain name at estibot.com, and click “Help Me Sell This Domain” on the results page, or go directly to:
http://www.estibot.com/leads.php

Just type in your domain name and sit back while Estibot does in a few minutes the research it would take you a full day to do manually.

Estibot will find similar but inferior domain registrations, or similar registrations in inferior extensions, filter out the parked and unused domain names (unlikely buyers), and then provide you with contact information. Website metadata is analyzed, including website title, meta keywords and so on.

Estibot will also find advertiser based leads – potential buyers based on who is bidding on your domain’s keywords in the cost-per-click advertising market.

Furthermore, Estibot will email the leads on your behalf – just provide your email account information and use our preset email template or create and save a custom sales email template using variables that will automatically insert the proper content into your email for each domain you submit.

You can even create custom filters to ignore certain types of leads.

To get started, create your mail templates and enter your mail account details here:
http://www.estibot.com/leads.php?a=settings

4. Domain Sales History
Estibot.com has the most complete, hourly updated database of past domain sales. We retrieve data from various sources to compile a comprehensive sales database, which we use internally to hone our valuation algorithm, and you can use our database to browse recent sales, or search for certain type of past sales using various search filters. Check it out at:
http://www.estibot.com/sales.php

5. Ebook update
In case you haven’t yet checked out our free eBook, a 40-page guide to domain development, please go to
http://estibotpro.com/downloads/
and download your copy, free of charge, with redistribution rights. I’ve updated the adsense data since the last release.

Finally, please make sure you explore all the links on our Tools page, to make sure you’re not missing any great tools that will help you increase your productivity in the domain business. Try the bulk IDN converter, trademark risk analyzer, domain idea tool…….the list goes on.
http://www.estibot.com/tools.html

6. Bonus
As a small thanks for the time you took to read this newsletter, please find below a list of available domain names I recently found while testing new versions of the Estibot Domain Idea tool. All the domain names were available at the time of this writing. Some very developable names, and some names you could flip to end users, using our Lead Generator.

Domain    keywords    CPCbid    ExactSearches#
AutismInAdults.com  autism in adults 0.49    1900#
AcuteRheumaticFever.com  acute rheumatic fever 0.13    1600#
AdultAutismSymptoms.com  adult autism symptoms 0.38    480#
RheumaticHeartFever.com  rheumatic heart fever 0.30    390#
AnticoagulantTherapy.com  anticoagulant therapy 0.57    1600#

ActiveFitnessGym.com  active fitness gym 0.05    91#
ExerciseBikeEquipment.com  exercise bike equipment 1.99    720#
CrossTrainerEquipment.com  cross trainer equipment 2.36    390#

ArabicLanguageLessons.com  arabic language lessons 0.81    1300#

VintageTreeTopper.com  vintage tree topper 0.45    1900#
OrnamentDisplayTree.com  ornament display tree 0.82    1600#
SnowmanTreeTopper.com  snowman tree topper 0.31    1300#
GlassTreeTopper.com  glass tree topper 0.53    1000#
CrystalTreeTopper.com  crystal tree topper 0.96    880#
LightedTreeTopper.com  lighted tree topper 1.07    720#
VintageTreeToppers.com  vintage tree toppers 0.43    720#
XmasTreeToppers.com  xmas tree toppers 0.05    480#

CastIronAntique.com  cast iron antique 0.61    590#

OralAntifungal.com  oral antifungal 0.44    590#
DryMouthMouthwash.com  dry mouth mouthwash 2.81    320#
AntifungalMouthRinse.com  antifungal mouth rinse 0.05    260#
OralMouthwash.com  oral mouthwash 0.82    260#
PlaqueMouthwash.com  plaque mouthwash 0.05    260#
BreathMouthwash.com  breath mouthwash 1.23    210#
GumMouthwash.com  gum mouthwash 0.92    210#

OnlineAntiqueAppraisal.com  online antique appraisal 0.62    480#
HomesAppraisal.com  homes appraisal 1.24    170#
AutoAppraiserJobs.com  auto appraiser jobs 1.18    720#

WeddingDressesDesigners.com  wedding dresses designers 0.43    1300#
BacklessWeddingGowns.com  backless wedding gowns 0.41    880#

BlankCertificateTemplates.com  blank certificate templates 0.05    2400#
PrintableCertificateTemplates.com  printable certificate templates 0.05    1900#

LedBalloonLights.com  led balloon lights 0.05    880#

BarrelRacingTimer.com  barrel racing timer 0.89    720#
CloseContactSaddles.com  close contact saddles 0.52    1300#
WesternSaddleBlanket.com  western saddle blanket 0.56    1300#

BirthdayCardsByEMail.com  birthday cards by e mail 0.58    4400#
BioIonicStraightening.com  bio ionic straightening 1.39    720#

FishSoupRecipes.com  fish soup recipes 0.38    1000#
FountainMachines.com  fountain machines 0.91    320#

BursitisRemedies.com  bursitis remedies 0.88    260#
BursitisRemedy.com  bursitis remedy 0.84    210#

CheapestEmailHosting.com  cheapest email hosting 0.05    210#

CarburetorProblems.com  carburetor problems 0.36    1300#

CardiacStethoscope.com  cardiac stethoscope 1.86    480#
StethoscopeEartips.com  stethoscope eartips 1.73    320#
StethoscopeNameTags.com  stethoscope name tags 1.51    320#
StethoscopeTags.com  stethoscope tags 2.54    320#
DisposableStethoscopes.com  disposable stethoscopes 1.42    320#

VillasGrandCayman.com  villas grand cayman 3.05    110#
VillaGrandCayman.com  villa grand cayman 3.29    170#

AllergyHomeopathy.com  allergy homeopathy 0.96    260#
PepperAllergy.com  pepper allergy 1.01    260#
RagweedPlant.com  ragweed plant 1.18    1900#
ItchyWateryEyes.com  itchy watery eyes 2.25    1600#
RagweedSeason.com  ragweed season 0.05    880#

BenignRolandicEpilepsy.com  benign rolandic epilepsy 0.85    1600#
GrandMalEpilepsy.com  grand mal epilepsy 1.13    1300#
PetitMalEpilepsy.com  petit mal epilepsy 0.36    1300#
EpilepsyPictures.com  epilepsy pictures 0.67    1000#
EpilepsyDisease.com  epilepsy disease 1.26    480#
PsychomotorEpilepsy.com  psychomotor epilepsy 2.39    480#
TemporalEpilepsy.com  temporal epilepsy 0.70    390#
EpilepsySpecialist.com  epilepsy specialist 1.40    260#
BabyEpilepsy.com  baby epilepsy 0.53    210#
AtonicSeizures.com  atonic seizures 0.47    1300#
EpilepticDogs.com  epileptic dogs 0.61    2400#

HowToGetDivorce.com  how to get divorce 2.34    880#

ChristmasDoorMats.com  christmas door mats 0.05    720#

YogaMatsForKids.com  yoga mats for kids 1.17    480#

SeashellShowerCurtain.com  seashell shower curtain 0.73    1600#
PirateShowerCurtain.com  pirate shower curtain 0.54    1300#
WesternShowerCurtain.com  western shower curtain 0.73    1600#
VintageShowerCurtain.com  vintage shower curtain 0.75    1300#

LedClearanceLights.com  led clearance lights 0.94    1600#

MetatarsalWorkBoots.com  metatarsal work boots 1.27    390#
SteelToeCapShoes.com  steel toe cap shoes 1.25    1600#
RiggerBoot.com  rigger boot 0.83    1000#

BabyBedRail.com  baby bed rail 1.35    1000#
DoubleBedRail.com  double bed rail 0.84    720#
BabyBedGuard.com  baby bed guard 1.98    880#
BabyBedGuards.com  baby bed guards 0.96    320#

CribTeether.com  crib teether 1.06    480#
CribTeethers.com  crib teethers 0.05    110#
CribTeethingGuard.com  crib teething guard 0.71    590#
TeethingRail.com  teething rail 0.96    1000#

WweBedding.com  wwe bedding 0.67    6600#
ButterflySarees.com  butterfly sarees 0.17    880#

BuiltRefrigerators.com  built refrigerators 1.00    2400#

EmployeeRecognitionCertificate.com  employee recognition certificate 1.33    4400#

OvernightTampons.com  overnight tampons 0.05    1000#

FirefighterTurnoutGear.com  firefighter turnout gear 1.99    1300#
FiremanShirts.com  fireman shirts 0.79    480#
FiremanOutfits.com  fireman outfits 0.05    390#
FiremanCareers.com  fireman careers 1.22    260#
FirewomanCostume.com  firewoman costume 0.54    880#

Estibot TotalSearch™ Data

TotalSearch™ is by far the coolest data you will acquire for your domain name. It represents the total number of searches across all known search engines, in the U.S. search market. It is an estimate of the true search popularity for the exact phrase match of the search term that your domain is made of. The data is from 2008, so it is well representative of the current search market. Forget Overture, this is the new benchmark.

TotalCPC™ An up-to-date estimate of the highest advertiser bid for the search term from 2008.

TotalCompetition™ Represents the amount of advertiser competition that exists for the search term, again the data is from 2008.

These data are available for the single appraisal at this point. I will get to work on improving the bulk appraisals, and will include the data soon.

 I first started toying with the idea of automated appraisals around Christmas time 2006. The reason for my interest was that I was fairly new to domaining, and wasn’t sure how to tell which domains had value and which did not. I had hand regged quite a number of domains (as we all seem to do when we first start out), most of which turned out to be what are referred to in the business as crap domain names. Hand regging a bunch of crap names seems to be the baptism of fire we all have to go through before we decide to try and learn a thing or two about domaining. I figured there must exist some general rules for determining domain value. I set out to discover those rules, and somewhere in the process I started thinking, if indeed there are rules, then it should be possible to devise a computer program that would employ those rules to come up with a value estimation. After all, IBM’s Deep Blue beat Kasparov in Chess, surely domain valuation should be simpler than that. 

I searched the Net for domain appraisals, and found some sites that would offer automated appraisals for free. The most popular such sites then were Leapfish and Nameboy. I tested them with a largish number of domain names but wasn’t satisfied with the results they produced. I liked what they’d done, but their results just didn’t compare to known sale prices very well. 

I decided to attempt to make such a program for my own use, to help me make informed decisions about buying and selling domain names. Armed with a knowledge of programming in Basic (from owning a Sinclair Spectrum in the 80’s) and some idea of Pascal (yes, there used to be a programming language by that name), I set out to embrace the task. Pretty soon I found out that my programming skills, such as they were, were horribly outdated and I had to look at other options. I dediced to go mathematical, which would require no programming, just mathematical analysis done by a spreadsheet program. I fired up my Excel and started experimenting. 

I gathered information about the various factors that were generally considered important for domain value, and soon discovered that what makes or breaks a domain name is the quality of the search terms, or keywords, within the domain. I learned about search popularity, term frequency, and also discovered other parameters that were considered important, such as the TLD, length, hyphens, digits and so on. I started gathering that data for a number of domains, and tried to figure out a mathematical method for determining domain value based on those factors. After a few weeks of experimenting I realized I was not getting anywhere. No matter how I tried, the model would spit out seemingly random values, certainly not much better than what I’d seen Nameboy or Leapfish do.

 Thanks to my then girlfriend and now mother of my 4-month-old son (one thing leads to another as they say…), I decided to take another approach. She suggested I try to employ scientific principles in the analysis. I have a fairly extensive training in the natural sciences, with two doctorate degrees, one of them being a Ph.D. in Neuroscience. So I decided to apply what I had been trained to do: find order in apparent chaos – correlations, associations, and ultimately, hopefully, rules and laws that would explain the workings of the domain market. Using the very same scientific principles as I’ve used in my Neuroscience research, I gathered keyword and other data for thousands of domains, and finally after a few weeks I found a way to produce a reasonably good correlation between the characteristics of a domain name and its market value. For the statistically inclined, I reached a p<0.05 for positive correlation between what my model spat out, and the known sale price of domains – in large samples. 

I spent another 3 months honing the algorithm, and in the process made some surprising findings, for instance that the length of a domain name, contrary to popular belief, does not correlate with domain value except in the extremes of the spectrum. I analyzed each factor separately, and all combinations of known factors, and settled on, originally about 8 parameters that could be used for determining value. Since then, the algorithm has swollen and more factors have come into play, but in the end, I was fairly happy with my algorithm as a rough indicator of potential value. It still had severe shortcomings, and would be easily fooled by abnormalities in the search popularity data. I was using Overture data, and as we know, Overture has some serious disadvantages, resulting in overestimations of value for a large number of domain names. 

What I had in my hands was a single mathematical formula for domain valuation. It looked something like this: 

$VALUE=((((c*sqrt(h*i)+E*j+f*k)*SIGN(e-c*l)+ABS((c*m+e*n+f*o)*SIGN(a-b*q)))/2)+r/(g^(g+(g-2)))+(-SIGN(e-c*s)*f*t)+f*u+(-SIGN(e-a*v)*g*w)+h*x+(-SIGN(c-a*y)*e*z)+d*a+c/z)*x/SQRT(g)+100/h 

Just one look at that formula and I knew I was at the end of the road for improving it. I found it hard to edit, as I wasn’t quite sure what was what anymore. As the mathematically inclined will see instantly, I’m no mathematician and decided to pursue other ways to improve the valuation algorithm. 

I needed to learn programming again. 

Since I was going to have to learn programming, the idea came to me, why not learn a language that I could use for other purposes as well, such as making websites. The obvious choice, then, was PHP. After a crash course in PHP programming, I found that I was able to hone the algorithm programmatically, and make the mathematical bit a lot neater. Finally I arrived at an algo that I thought was as good as I could reasonably expect to achieve. It worked for me; even with its limitations, it helped me make sense of d
omain values. 

By that time I had been hanging out at the NamePros.com domaining forum, and had made many new friends in the world of domaining. I wanted to share with them my creation, such as it was, and decided the best way to do it was to publish it online. With the help of Bill from NameClerk.com and of AvailableDomainNames.com fame, I found the perfect domain name for it, Estimation Bot -> Estibot.com, and finally I had a bunch of friendly NamePros members to alpha test it privately, and, encouraged by their positive feedback, Estibot.com went live in June of 2007.

The original website development was done by eTechSupport.net for about $800. Since then I have learned enough PHP to have redone everything by myself. Only the center column colors are what’s left of the original website. The new look is in part thanks to another NamePros member, Bannen, who designed the new logo (asking for absolutely nothing in return) and also has designed a whole website layout for me, which I haven’t had a chance to implement yet. If you haven’t seen Bannen’s Ice Photography yet, you’re missing on some of the more beautiful things in life – go check it out now!

So you see, Estibot was never intended to become a website, or otherwise public for that matter – I made it for my own use, but looking back, releasing it was the right thing to do. The reception was cautiously positive, but, predictably, it got mixed reviews in the domaining peers. Some loved it, some absolutely hated it. The consensus, however, seemed to be that it was the best auto-appraisal system to date, for what that was worth. Knowing well the limitations of automatic appraisals – or human appraisals for that matter – it was good enough for me, and I decided to keep at it, keep improving it. 

The last changes to the algorithm were done around Christmas time 2007, a full year after the initiation of the project. I had spend countless hours on this thing, I decided it was time to focus on developing the website more and leave the algorithm at that for now, because it had come to the point in complexity where even a small change could have unpredictable results. That is not to say that I won’t try to improve it in the future – I’m just taking a holiday from the mathematical side of it, if you will. 

To my utter amazement, the website got pretty popular, and today it has an Alexa rank of about 18,000, with about 750,000 hits per month. In order to keep it functional, I had to get a dedicated server for it, and added Adsense and affiliate links in order to cover the server costs. Originally I used screen scraping of Overture, Google and other services to get the keyword data, but, having educated myself of good Webmaster practices, opted out of that and started using API access to various services to retrieve the data.

Website growth is a two-edged sword – as the popularity grew, I was starting to exceed the limits my API access quotas, Google even banned the site at some point, and I had to constantly keep tweaking things to keep up. I have since then added paid API contracts to retrieve some of the data. Each “free” appraisal actually costs me money, which is one of the reasons I decided to go premium, but more on that later. 

Some of the more significant later improvements include the website traffic estimation, which I developed – it uses, among other things, paid data retrieval from Alexa. It enabled me to add the “value considering traffic” feature, which I think works reasonably well, although you can’t really valuate a website based on traffic alone. But it’s a nice addition, and the traffic estimation seems to do a fairly good job at estimating external website traffic at ballpark level. 

But Estibot would only be a shadow of what it is now if it weren’t for the support of two very generous members of the NamePros community. The intervention of these men really made all the difference. Call it serendipity if you will, but these two events turned a whole new page in the development of Estibot. First, Justin of NameBio.com (you may know him as Spade from NamePros) offered to give me access to his veritable database of domain sales known as NameBio.com. I confessed to him that I had extracted most of my original data for the analysis from his site, and he offered the whole database for my use, again asking for nothing in return. Estibot is now able to compare entered domains to Justin’s database in realtime, resulting in even better appraisals, and also there is now a “related sales” feature which helps users to instantly see prices retrieved by related domain names. Justin and I are talking about deepening the integration now that the subscription service has been started up.

Another huge turn of events was the offer from another NamePros member, Michael Goldman, to provide me with access to his gigantic database of archived search data, enabling me to offer realtime search popularity data and bulk tools that can retrieve data very fast. I cannot stress how important this was, and I am to this day extremely grateful to this fellow domainer. All Michael asked for in return for this invaluable resource was that I make him a few simple bulk tools to enable him to run bulk estimations and keyword data retrieval. Needless to say, this was a major show of generosity and support for my project. Michael posts interesting domain news at his website, Domain Magnate. 

So you see, Estibot is actually the product of many people – fellow domainers who have supported me, given me money in the form of donations, access to their data, volunteered to test my tools, and publicly supported me on their website, driving more traffic to Estibot. It’s a great community, NamePros, people are ready to help and bend backwards to assist a fellow domainer in his endeavours to make something of value. I hope I can pay these favors forward, as I certainly can’t pay many of them back. 

I hope you en
joyed reading about the history of Estibot, and my take-home message to all is this: network with people, be polite, help each other out and good things will come your way. 

As I said before, success in website development is a two-edged sword. Since Estibot became popular, it has been operating at a loss that even the ads and the user donations could not turn around. Domainers don’t click on ads, donations are few and far between and affiliate marketing ain’t what it used to be. I have a mortgage to pay, family to feed, and I could not justify running Estibot anymore, considering the efforts it demanded from me, time away from my family in the evenings (I have a day job as well, you know), and having to pay server and API access costs out of my own pocket. I had to make a choice: take Estibot down altogether, or make parts of it subscription-based. I decided to try the latter, hoping that it would enable me to keep developing this service, and hopefully if I get enough subscribers, justifying the continuation of the service, I can go back to improving the free tools as well, which is what I originally intended to do. More about the subscription based service in my next entry. Until then, keep on domainin’