Domaining Europe 2016 – Day 1 (Summary & Photos)

Domaining Europe 2016 officially started on Monday with the event organizer Dietmar Stefitz welcoming the attendees arriving from all over the world: USA, France, Italy, Portugal, Norway, Australia, Netherlands, Spain, Germany, Cayman Islands, Bulgaria, Ecuador, Belgium and of course Greece among others.

Braden Pollock once again moderated the event.

Most than 100 people from all over the world arrived in the Hague to attend the conference. The event moved this year to the Netherlands after years of being held in Valencia, Spain.

This is the hotel and this year’s venue, Grand Hotel Amrâth Kurhaus, that is just a few meters from the beach.

This is the group photo of the Domaining Europe 2016 attendees.

First day of the conference was the DOT COM day sponsored by Verisign, the .com and .net registry.

Here is the agenda of the 2-day conference:

Pat Kane, Senior Vice President of Verisign, gave some very interesting .com statistics in his presentation:

• 75% of newly registered .com domains have never been registered before.
• 10% of expired domain names get reregistered within 24 hours.
• In the past year or so half of all the domain registration are coming from China.

Then it was time for the first panel that featured the “European Industry Leaders” that mostly talked about ccTLDs in Europe and the problems of buying, owning and selling domain names:
Arno Vis, Freddy Schiwek, Michele Neylon, Yancy Naughton, Giuseppe Graziano

Joe Styler from Godaddy gave a presentation of how to find good names in the Aftermarket. He talked about how to search in Go Daddy auctions to find good domain names and how to use Afternic to sell to more than 100 registrars.

(Paul Keating wasn’t able to make it to the conference because of personal reasons.)

Andee Hill of Donuts filled in and gave a presentation on ICA and how you can join for $600 per year and help shape the future of the domain industry. The Internet Commerce Association (ICA) is a non-profit advocating for the rights and interests of domain name owners and related service providers.

Sevan Derderian from Uniregistry gave a brief “surprise” presentation on their registrar new functionality.

Arno Vis, of Dutch registrar Open Provider, gave a presentation on “Cost-Benefit analysis for a domain registrar that implemented all new gTLDs”. He talked about his experience working with all the different new gtld registries.

Then there was a 2 hour lunch break:

Shaun Wilkinson, of Nidoma, talked about the benefits of a cosmopolitan company in the European domain space. Nidoma offers domain registration, backorders and brokerage especially in the ccTLD domain market in Europe.

Adam Epstein, ‎President & COO at adMarketplace, talked about how Google is not paying domain name owners what their traffic is really worth. AdMarketplace is an independent search advertising marketplace based in New York City.

Giuseppe Graziano, of GGRG Domain Brokerage & Consulting, talked about short .com domains and numerics and the “China Goldrush”.

Michael Gilmour, of Park Logic, presented in great detail and with real examples what his company does in terms of monetization optimization and domain portfolio management.

It was then time for the much anticipated Parking Panel with speakers from adMarketplace, HasTraffic, Rook Media, Sedo, ParkingCrew, Bodis, Park Logic:
Adam J. Epstein, Yancy Naughton, Simon Pupo, Ana Paula Vazquez, Axel Kaltz, James Tuplin, Michael Gilmour. It was a heated discussion with arguments around Google and the other search engines and zero click advertising.

Reza Sardeha, founder at Undeveloped, talked about introducing liquidity in the domain name market and some new ideas about renting domain names.

Jackson Elsegood then presented the new features of Escrow.com from domain name holding and concierge to extended support times and live chat among others. The Escrow buy it now buttons can be customized and integrated into any website. Escrow continues expanding and plans to have many new regional websites with many more languages and currencies supported.

At the closure of the day it was time for the “Domainers TALK”.
A group of domainers with big portfolios discussed the future of domaining and the problems, they face with registries, registrars and parking companies:
Frederick Schiwek, Christoph Gruneberg, Hennie Groot Lipman and Michael Bereslavsky.

And this is me at the back writing this post: