Reglikedomain industry desk

The Death of Overture

The Death of Overture

Yahoo’s fresh search marketing platform will eliminate Overture as a domainer’s tool.

“Overture” is a well-known term to domainers. Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) purchased Overture, a pay-per-click search marketing firm, and renamed it Yahoo! Search Marketing. But the moniker “overture” has stayed in the domainer lingo.

More specifically, the domain industry refers to the “Overture Score” of a domain as the number of times the domain was searched for on Yahoo properties in any given month. For example, if a domain had an “Overture plus extension” score of 100, then 100 people typed the domain name with the extension (e.g. domain.com) into a Yahoo-related search box during the month. The theory is that if that many people mistakenly typed the domain into a search box then many more people managed to type the domain into the browser. Thus, the domain gets a lot of type-in traffic.

Although an unwilling participant, Yahoo has helped bid up the value of domain names by providing third party data regarding type-ins. For example, the typo expired domain Voyuer.com sold for $112,100 in 2005 thanks in part to its 2,549 Overture+Ext score.

But the gravy train of valuable data is coming to an end. Late last year Yahoo released its long-awaited “Panama” update for search marketing. It is a completely overhauled search marketing system. Among the changes is removing specific data regarding the number of searches a particular keyword receives. Instead, advertisers only see a bar graph with one to five units indicating the amount of traffic:

Yahoo Search Marketing Overture Score

Furthermore, advertisers can no longer search for a particular keyword. Advertisers must input at least three keywords to generate results and these results may not include the actual keyword searched for:

Overture Search

For now, access to search data is still available to advertisers who have not migrated their accounts to the fresh platform. Additionally, the free site inventory.overture.com still offers the data, although the site is down more than it is available.

The era of Overture scores is coming to an end.

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