I visited Metaverse.com this morning after hearing they launched a new ecommerce domain monetization platform. The first thing I noticed on the site were the huge words “Put Your Domain Name to Work”. My first thought was that this was going to be a ecommerce solution similar to Epik.com, and boy was I wrong! After a few minutes of checking out the site, I realized that this is a very different type of program.
Metaverse does not monetize domains through amazon, adsense or any other affiliate network except for their own. The service Metaverse offers to domain portfolio holders is they build a site on each domain accepted into their program for the purpose of selling art prints or posters from their own estore, FulcrumGallery.com, domain owners get a commission on each sale generated. For this reason, Metaverse only accepts certain types of domains and their focus is on product related names they can easily match with their own prints and posters. There is an appropriate domain names page on their website so that domainers can see if they have names in their portfolio that will work well with the Metaverse platform. Something I found very interesting is that Metaverse only accepts three TLD’s right now: .com, .net and .co. Yes, this is enough to spark another .co debate, but today were talking about monetization.
So here’s the deal, there are two types of accounts – Standard or Gold. Standard accounts are free and pay 15% commissions on all products sold on all domains/sites you host with Metaverse. There is no limit to the amount of sites you can build with Metaverse, as long as your domain is accepted into the program. Gold accounts are $3.99/month and pay 20% commissions on all products sold on all sites you host with Metaverse, and include additional features like site analytics and detailed customer data.
Metaverse has a very interesting history, it started out as a content management system where FulcrumGallery.com was simply a side project. That side project quickly outgrew the software company that had created it and is now a major Internet retailer of artwork, prints and posters with over one million products in its brick and mortar location in New Jersey. This is one of the first Internet retail companies that sees a huge opportunity with domain name owners that are trying to find better monetization solutions for their portfolios and I think they will have success.
Let’s take a look at a couple Metaverse sites: SportsWallDecor.com and JazzDecor.com
They are nice, clean looking ecommerce websites with plenty of products to choose from. SportsWallDecor.com is not a hugely searched term but even when searching Google for ‘sports wall decor’, I could not find the site on the first few pages. However, it is the number four result on the first page when searching in Yahoo and Bing and it is indexed (somewhere) in Google. JazzDecor.com is an even less widely searched term but the Metaverse site does rank as the number one search result in Google, Yahoo and Bing. This is good news for Metaverse and I see no reason for these sites to be de-indexed as there is no evidence on link farming, etc.
I think I will try out the service on a few select domains for a couple months and see what kind of commission one can earn from Metaverse for domains, expect a follow up. I don’t know if Metaverse is the first retailer that has developed a platform specifically built for developing on unused/underperforming domain names but I can foresee many more companies following suit and looking to increase online sales by trying to tap into domainer portfolios.
