Most importantly, Domain Pigeon now has free domain names, not available domain names. They’re free now? Well… not really. Depends on what you mean by “free”. No one owns the domains, so they are free of ownership. However, to own one, you do have to pay for the registration, which costs a few bucks.

I talked to a bunch of people about whether to make the change. Their responses ranged from “sure, why not?” to “well… they’re not really free in the way that people mean free.” I wanted people to say the first answer, but most said the second.

Ultimately, I ignored them and made the change for two reasons:

Traffic

The competition is a lot tougher, but, hey, why not go for gold? Bronze should never be your goal.

Humanitarian

Just kidding. Here’s the thing: none of the other search results for free domain names are really free either. They all are “free” if you sign up for some expensive hosting plan:

It costs registrars something like $6 to actually register a domain name. None are free w/o a catch.

So in a sense…. I’m doing people a service if I get domain pigeon high enough on the search results.

You’ve got to love rationalization.

I’ve started doing a little exploration on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and came across this excellent video by Matt Cutts, an engineer at Google. I was trying to figure out how to control the site links that appear below some search results, but, per Matt and Google, these are produced algorithmically. I suppose this is a good thing though, as it would clutter up the search results if every page had them.

Domain Pigeon is currently the eleventh search result for available domain names.

It’s also #12 for “available domain”. Looks like my quest to hit the Google pinata is starting to pay off. Now the question is whether or not to make a play for the “free domain names” market…

The new Domain Pigeon:

By far the most radical change to Domain Pigeon is that it is now completely free.

Until recently, only 25% of the domains on the site were viewable to everyone. The remaining 75% were viewable to members only, which cost a one time fee of $14.95. During the first two weeks there were a fair amount of sign ups, but surprisingly, the site was bringing in a nontrivial amount of money via the affiliate links too.

Here’s a brain teaser:

Say Domain Pigeon makes $10 when it displays 1,000 domain names. Will it make $40 if it displays 4,000?

I can see arguments being made that the revenues would become less than, about equal to, or more than $40. My hope is that more domain names = more selection and more word of mouth advertising = more registrations = more affiliate revenue. Brilliant, huh? Seems simple, and on one hand it is, but then you also have to factor in how much revenue I’m losing by not charging people for full access. Say 1/1000 visitors would have signed up for an account. Will I now make more than $14.95/1000 people? What if I had 1/2000 sign ups, but I make $X/1000 from affiliate revenue? And does that even matter? I’d rather make $3/1000 people with 10K visitors than $14.95/1000 with 2K visitors. Head asplode.

We’ll see what happens. Regardless of how the profits play out, I think its a good move because it makes Domain Pigeon a better service for its core audience: people looking for domain names.

The second major change is that domains are now added automatically throughout the day. Currently the homepage refreshes itself every 20 minutes with 20 new domain names. This works out to be 60 domains/hour, 1,440/day, 10,080/week. This likely will change a lot in the next few days. I’m going to make the amount of domains released proportional to the number of people that are currently on the site. This adds a whole new dimension to Domain Pigeon it’ll be interesting to see how it goes.