Known best for its eNom.com domain registry, eHow.com website with how-to articles, and YouTube how-to videos, Demand Media has an interesting business model. Instead of focusing on targeting consumers performing generic online searches, the company focuses on specifics. Or as it says in the IPO registration, “Our approach is driven by consumers’ desire to search for and discover increasingly specific information across the Internet.”

While having an interesting model, the company lost $22 million last year, and $6 million in the first 6 months of this year. For a low-cost business, these losses are hard to believe. The company has about 10,000 freelancers working writing and creating videos for them. They only pay writers about $15/article and the makers of videos about $30. Producing approximately 5,700 new items each day, the company sets a standard for freelancer productivity.

eHow.com and other how-to websites owned by Demand Media are reported to have approximately 86 million unique visitors each month, producing 550 million pageviews each month. Looking at those numbers, I can’t believe how a company like this is unprofitable. After reading an article on Tech Crunch, I learned a lot about where Demand Media was making money and where it wasn’t. Here are some quick facts about Demand Media’s profits:

- 44% of the company’s revenues are from its domain business, eNom.com.

- 45% of  the company’s revenues are from advertisers.

- 26% of the company’s revenues are from Google’s ad program, Google AdSense.

- 21% of the company’s revenues are from the eHow.com website.

After seeing this, I determined that the company is spending way to much money on its content creation for eHow.com. Let me break this down for you. Out of the 5,700 new articles and videos everyday, let’s say that 5,200 are articles and 500 are videos. That means Demand Media is spending about $78,000 on articles and $15,000 on videos each day. That accounts for approximately $33,480,000 in the company’s yearly expenses. Seeing that $33,480,000 in spending is only making up for 21% of the company’s revenue, I think the company should use some of its resources elsewhere.

With all of that being said, it’s still yet to come out where and how Demand Media has lost and is still losing money into this year. Would you invest in Demand Media if it goes public? What do you think of their business model? Submit your comments below.

On my way back from the city today, (surprise, surprise) I received my 9th call from Doba this month. When I asked to be taken off their calling list, the representative laughed and refused my request. He then proceeded to insult me multiple times. I immediately asked to speak with his superviser. I wasn’t going to sit on the phone and listen to this jerk, nor was I going to continue getting calls from Doba. I explained my story to his supervisor, who told me that I was out-of-line and his employee did nothing wrong. The employee fought me about being put on the do not call list (which may or may not exist for Doba), and ended the phone call by hanging up on me mid-sentance.

This experience makes me question 2 things about Doba. First, it makes me question their employment procedures and practices. How exactly do they find these employees? I can promise you that because both the employee and his supervisor I spoke to disrespected me to the extent they did, Doba clearly isn’t too worried about their employees maintaining respect to clients and potential clients. Seeing as that is the first thing most companies look for in positions where employees deal with people, I think calling to question Doba’s employment procedures is reasonable.

Secondly, it makes me question Doba’s business practices. You’d think after asking a total of 5 representatives to be put on a do not call list, you’d be on that list. And yet everytime I ask, the calls continue coming in (and in today’s case, my privacy gets disrespected). Thus making it more than appropriate for me to question their business practices.

Anyways, what’s the moral of the story? Don’t sign up for Doba’s trials or for more information unless you’re ready to be harassed by numerous phone calls until you sign up.

Here’s my thoughts as to why it’s a such a solid concept. The owner only has 8 auctions in a given day. He must be selective because he’s limited to picking such few domains. Therefore, he has the ability to pick the best names to auction off, allowing bidders to bid on these better names.

Now, on a website like TDNAM.com, GoDaddy’s aftermarket, there are tons and tons of auctions going on. It’s tough to find a good name, and takes a lot of your effort and time. With AuctionPus.com, there are normally 8 great names that go through a highly selective process for you to choose from, so you don’t need to waist your time searching and searching and searching some more. As the title says, AuctionPus.com is more selective, which allows bidders to bid on better names, which results in less time and effort on your part because AuctionPus.com won’t spit out thousands of junky domains you’d have to scroll through.

Feel free to leave your reviews or thoughts below in the comments section.

Take Fusible.com’s article on the sale of HomeRun.com as exhibit A. As the article says, one would think HomeRun.com would be used for some sort of baseball-related website, whether a fantasy baseball site or a baseball news website. Instead, it’s used as a website that gives you great deals for activities in your city.

Now, let’s go back to how we defined brandable domains. One of the main pieces of criteria is that the domain generally has little or no meaning. Does a home run have a significant relationship (in terms of meaning) with great deals in a city? One might think there’s SOME relationship between the two, but definitely not much. Does this make HomeRun.com a brandable domain name? In this case, they took a domain name that has specific meanings and turned it into a name with little or no meaning. This is why I think it’s both a brandable domain name and general domain name.

Is it a good thing that this idea of brandability is beginning to clash with generality? Will this have an effect on the value of brandable or general domain names? Do you even think the two are clashing? Submit your comment below and let’s hear some thoughts.

For example, I have a close friend who created a FormSpring.me profile a couple of days ago. At first, she was receiving questions from friends who were joking around and sending her inside jokes anonymously. She got a kick out of that. But don’t be fooled, it went all downhill from there. She began receiving messages related to sex, and even received a threat related to her “social status”. While I can’t go into details for her own privacy sake, I think I made my point clear. Harassment and bullying happens on FormSpring.me. It’s not made up.

For those of you who have been members of Facebook for some time, you may have remembered the honesty box. Almost every teen and young adult had one. It’s an application that allows you to submit anonymous messages to another Facebook friend. The amount of threatening and harassing messages sent and received through the application was unbelievable. That’s the whole reason the honest box application has died down.

Are we really going to let a website like FormSpring.me take the place of the honesty box and continue to allow kids a place to anonymously harass and embarrass others? What’s going on can’t be continued. Websites like FormSpring.me shouldn’t exist.

After logging into Facebook, I saw a link posted by a friend of mine leading to a website with a .me extension. She isn’t in the domaining industry, and it’s not everyday that I see someone outside the domaining industry surfing websites that aren’t based on a gTLD. Being curious as I was, I decided to click on the link. The link led me to her profile on FormSpring.me. The website had an interesting concept, but that is besides the point.

The thought that somebody not in the domaining industry could’ve found a website on a ccTLD was still bothering me because I just couldn’t imagine it to be possible. This is when I decided to check out the website’s Compete rankings. The website was formed in November of 2009, and over the few months of its operation, it has grown to have approximately 2,000,000 visitors in a single month.

This is a website that is clearly seeing success with the .me extension and is making great use of it. I’m also shocked to see such a rapid growth in a website as simple as FormSpring.me. Feel free to submit your comments on the FormSpring.me website or (preferrably) the .me extension.

Head over to GoDaddy.com, and use the coupon code BUY2010. These coupons normally only last for a day or two, so make sure to grab your domain before the promotion ends.

An interesting twist to promotion that we haven’t seen with GoDaddy’s $0.99 promotions in the past is they are allowing you to use the coupon code with any domain extension that they offer.

In this case, New Yorker Mike Grimaldi owned a vintage Camaro that was in need of repairs. When searching on Google, he found an ad for Mr. Guinn’s reapair shop in Pennsylvania. Grimaldi called Guinn and spoke with him about his car. After deciding to choose Guinn to do the repairs for his Camaro, Grimaldi shipped his beautiful Camaro to Guinn and didn’t hear from Guinn for about 14 months. Now 14 months later, the only thing Guinn has done is took the car apart to a point where it needs more repairs than before and has lost value.

Grimaldi decided to file a case against Guinn for the loss of value of his car. The place where Grimaldi screwed up is he filed the case in Brooklyn, near his home. Guinn’s attorneys told Brooklyn courts that they didn’t have jurisdiction because Pennsylvania is Guinn’s place of business. Grimaldi’s attorneys responded that by advertising on Google AdWords in the state of New York, they are conducting business in the state of New York, therefore giving Brooklyn courts jurisdiction.

The county court where the case was originally filed denied Guinn’s motion, finding that advertising on Google AdWords in the state of New York and doing business with a person in the state of New York means that Guinn is doing business in the state of New York. When Guinn appealed, the Second Department upheld the lower court’s decision stating, “Despite the fact that Guinn was not physically present in New York, the exercise of jurisdiction over him by the courts of this State does not offend due process.”

Although there are other reasons for the finding of this case, do you think that by advertising on Google AdWords in another state and then conducting business with a person from that state means that you no longer have the personal jurisdiction you thought you had? My take on it is this; if you’re advertising in another state and providing any type of goods and services to a person in that state, then the courts are absolutely right to say you can be tried or sued in that state. If you are just advertising using Google AdWords in another state and not conducting business or providing goods and services to a person in that state, then you should be able to keep personal jurisdiction. What’s your opinion? Make sure to comment below.

Take a popular Chicago radio station like 103.5 Kiss FM. They’re always giving away concert tickets and money to the 103rd caller. Then the next thing you know they have thousands of people calling in and they have them all anxiously listening to the radio station as they sit on hold.

It’s simply a great idea to give away huge promotions to mark milestones. Apple’s promotion will probably get more people buying songs on iTunes, in hopes that they’ll win this gift card instead of illegally downloading the song off of freeware like limewire. Good job Apple. Feel free to comment what you think of promotions during milestones in a company’s lifespan.