Changes are making a dent in direct navigation traffic — How browser
Browser features change the way people navigate the web.
The prior week I wrote regarding how Sedo’s domain name parking business continues to struggle.
The firm cites a few reasons for the decline, counting “advances made in browser technologies, which alters the circumstances surrounding monetization in the parking business”.
There’s no doubt that browsers are blurring the lines between typing in a domain name and a search. What that means for type-in traffic can be subject to debate.
I asked Sedo regarding what it is seeing from a direct navigation standpoint and why it thinks browser changes are affecting its business. Here’s what Sedo CEO Tobias Flaitz has to say regarding it:
In general, fresh browser technology and browsing trends are changing the way people navigate the web. For example, those of us who browse the web using Google Chrome see no differentiation between the URL bar and the search function. This means that more users are typing searches, and not domain names, directly into the URL bar. Auto-fill technologies and search algorithms are also improving rapidly, so browsers do not accept as many misspellings. Overall, this means that browsing often begins with a search instead of direct navigation, which inevitably affects type-in traffic to parked names. Still, any web user who knows a site’s URL or is interested in purchasing a domain can still navigate to that domain name directly.
