I just returned from the 4th Annual SedoPro Partner Forum, which was held at the Casa Marina Resort, located on the island of Key West, Florida. The interactive workshops with Sedo’s management team and special guest speakers gave the attendees lots of opportunities to converse and mingle with domain experts and industry leaders.

I participated in a discussion panel entitled The DNA of TLDs, where DNA represents the inherent value that the end users can immediately recognize and experience in a TLD, making it more valuable than simply a mere alternative to .com.

This was a great opportunity to talk about our newly developed data analysis tool, which allows us to identify and study how .ORG domain names are being developed. While in the past .ORG was thought of as a domain space for non-profit companies, when we looked closely at recent data through the lens of our analysis tool, a different picture emerged. What we see is that .ORG is being developed heavily for educational purposes and online communities, including sports and teams, arts and culture, and various green initiatives worldwide. This is very much aligned with the findings of our recent brand study, which indicates that .ORG is a place for informative, trusted, valued, and reliable content.

With the build-out and investment around education and community on .ORG, a truly great opportunity emerges for domainers to develop high quality domains and ultimately, monetize it. By leveraging the DNA of the .ORG TLD, end-user credibility and acceptance is high. The best way, as most folks agree at the forum, to build value and traffic behind a domain name is through high quality, fresh and relevant content. Now, take the inherent DNA of .ORG and combine it with rich media, , such as Enom’s Rich Content Service, loaded with educational content and how-to videos, one can quickly convert a basic website into a media rich, informative, very relevant and comprehensive web presence, where monetization becomes a natural extension.

Another interesting finding of the analysis tool is the number of indexed pages within .ORG versus .COM. Overall, we found that there are about 952 million indexed pages within the .ORG domain space, across roughly 7.7 million domain names. By comparison, .COM had about 2.3 billion indexed pages across approximately 80 million domain names. This means .ORG has about 123 indexed pages per domain name average versus 29 for .COM. That’s great SEO.

Here are some examples of recent sales of .ORG domain names: usenet.org sold for USD$100,000, homeloans.org sold for USD$37,000. Other notable sales in 2008 include revolution.org for USD $120,000, and coffee.org sold for USD$100,000 (source: DNJournal 2008 and 2009 Global Contenders List)

With 7.7 million names registered on .ORG versus more than 10 times that on .COM, the opportunities to produce high value domains with .ORG is outstanding. Very good names are readily available and coupled with its inherent highly regarded DNA, it’s a winning combination.

Written by Lance Wolak, Director of Marketing & Product Management at PIR