We're excited to announce the addition of new features to EstiBot that help our domain investor customers monitor their portfolio for value changes as well as new end-user leads.

Use the EstiBot Portfolio Tool to monitor your portfolio for:

• Change in Value - All domains in your portfolio are appraised daily and you can easily view your portfolio value over time.


• Lead Alerts - We will check similar domain registrations, existing domain development changes (domains changing from parked to developed), trademark filings, and much more for domains and terms related to your domain. If a new lead is discovered, you will be alerted.


• Unlimited Guest Lookups - Guest users won't have to solve a captcha and will be able to perform unlimited appraisals on domains in your portfolio

It's easy! Just add your domains to the portfolio tool and get alerts when new leads are discovered!

Want to crawl up to 100,000 domains and extract site title, description, web page count, SSL/MX/WordPress data and even contact EMAILS? Checkout the EstiBot web crawler tool available here.

We've worked hard for the past year to completely recreate the back-end and front-end systems of EstiBot.

The newly designed service features many interface improvements as well as powerful features to help you identify opportunities as well as assist in selling your domains to end users.

The new site is currently in beta testing mode. If you are an active customer, send an email to luc@estibot.com and request access to the new web site. We'll be more than happy to set you up!

Thank you for giving us the opportunity to serve you and we hope that you have a wonderful holiday season!

Values of LN/NL domains (number letter or letter number, ex: A1.com, 1A.com) have been increased to reflect the latest market conditions. Most domains effected by this change will be in COM/NET.

Values of NNNNNNN (number number number number number number number, ex: 7129114.com) domain names as well as other long numeric domain names have been reduced to reflect the latest market conditions.

We've added support for buzzwords and now maintain a daily updated list of trending words that effect domain values (ex: coin, bitcoin, etc).

The Chinese NNNNNN.com and NNNNN.com buying spree has cooled off in the last 12 months and prices are bottoming out for many of these domain names.

We have updated the algorithm to reflect current market conditions. NNNNNN.com and NNNNN.com (as well as many secondary extensions) prices have been lowered. As always, we will continue to monitor the latest trends and make adjustments as necessary.

The domain industry's most professional event kicks off on January 22nd, 2017. EstiBot staff will be attending represented by Luc Lezon and Ivan Rasskazov from Jan 22nd until the morning of the 25th.

We hope to see you there! If you'd like to schedule a private meet up please contact ivan@intelium.com.

We've released another algorithm update that provides a valuation upgrade for LLL.com domain names. This update is due to a recent increase in average sales prices of LLL.com domain names.

We've also added back "word" search volume data on nTLD appraisals as per request from our customers. So, in addition to getting search data for "estibot guru" you will also get search data for "estibot" just like in the past.

We are constantly working on improving our algorithm and making sure it reflects the latest trends in the domain name industry. Stay tuned for more updates.

This news update is just a follow up to inform our users that we've switched to the new algorithm for all appraisals and users. Please read the previous news update for a full update on the algorithm changes.

We're excited to announce major upgrades to the EstiBot algorithm that will affect the value of your portfolio.

One of the most notable improvements is that we now factor the number of registered businesses that can benefit from your domain into the appraisal. This will improve the appraisal of some low priced domains to better reflect their true market value.

The Business Match update takes into account the number of businesses matching your domain name, their location as well as the population and median income of that location. This helps in deciding whether the domain is desirable by multiple businesses in Chicago and New York, or a single business in a city with a small population (ex: Kupreanof, Alaska). All of this information is used to determine the value of your domain name.

Other highlights include:

• Major improvements to valuations of nTLDs and support for 300+ active new extensions
• Significant value bumps for domains matching businesses registered in the US (business name match).
• Significant value bumps for some domains with favorable pronunciation flow using a new phonetic score matching system
• Significant value bumps for two word rhyming domains
• Significant value bumps for three and four letter domains
• Improved "Similar Sales" matches
• nTLD appraisals now use sld+tld as Search Volume / SERP match (ex: camping.tips = [camping tips]
• Improved word parsing on all supported languages
• Added a large database of DomainNameSales sales which increased the average domain sales price for all .com domains
• Over 30 other algorithm changes that affect nearly 100 million domains

This algorithm is still in BETA mode and is not selected as the default option in your EstiBot accounts. Registered users can click on the link below to change the account settings to the beta algorithm and test their portfolio.

Click HERE to toggle between the live and latest algorithm

Example screenshot:

The algorithm will be switched on for ALL users after extensive testing and based on feedback we receive from current customers.

Thank you,
The Estibot Team

Tired of copy-pasting domains across open tabs when researching domains? Ready to simplify your life? So were we, and that's why we developed the EstiBot Add-on.

https://addon.estibot.com

Most of our domain name research happens in the browser, so our tools should exist in the browser too!

The EstiBot browser extension for Firefox and Chrome provides instant access to domain appraisals, CPC and search volume, whois, domain availability and much more, for EVERY domain name on the site you are actively browsing.

The extension automatically parses each domain name on the active page, turns it into a clickable menu and provides appraisal information next to it. To view detailed information such as search volume or CPC or whois, simply click on the domain.

This extension was created to streamline the domain research done by countless domain investors every day. This is accomplished by reducing clicks between sites, copy-paste actions and by providing all pertinent information in a single popup window. The extension is extremely fast, secure and free to everyone, although some advanced features require an EstiBot account.

Feature Summary:

* Fast and Reliable - Instant parsing, appraisal and pertinent data sets for every domain found on the site you are actively browsing

* Flexible and Feature Packed - Automatically highlight domains you really like by creating custom filters (ex: CPC > $5.00)

* Convenient - View all domains on the active page in a sortable table with
appraisal, CPC, searches and TLD information with one click. Easily copy to
clipboard and export to CSV, all domain names on the active page, with a
single click

* Smart - Discover dead domains with backlinks and traffic just by browsing sites using the "Domain Discovery" feature

* Safe and Secure - All data sent to and received by the extension is secured with SSL encryption to prevent eavesdropping and front-running. All data is kept in strict confidence and never sold, republished or used to buy domains

Check it out, it's free for everyone, but only active EstiBot users get access to the advanced tools and high volume queries.

https://addon.estibot.com

The EstiBot team is proud to announce the launch of our latest service, domainIQ.com.

domainIQ is a powerful domain and internet research tool designed to help you find out EVERYTHING there is to know about a domain name, its owner, the server it's hosted on, all related domains, and much more.

The service stands out by providing a large array of data, not just whois data, in multiple formats, including text, visual graphs and PDF.


domainIQ portfolio view

In addition to simple whois reports, domainIQ combines many other data sets to provide the most comprehensive whois reports available. For example, you can view a breakup of domain names by category, value, extension, DNS, registrar and many other data points.

Check it out today by visiting www.domainiq.com

Active EstiBot customers get 25% discount on all plans and reports using coupon code "estibot"

We're proud to announce we have just launched an iPhone app that will make your EstiBot usage more efficient on portable devices.


A few features the app offers include:
•Instant appraisals with full analytics
•Lead research tool, research end-user leads and brainstorm domain ideas anywhere
•Whois research tool with access to historical whois records
•Watchlists to keep track of domains you like for later
•Simple, fast and responsive user interface


Download the free EstiBot mobile iPhone app and increase your productivity:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/estibot-mobile/id877814979?ls=1&mt=8


*The mobile app is currently available for iPhone/iPad. We are currently working on an Android version and will update you when it's available.

-Estibot

EstiBot Advanced and Expert users receive free access to our latest site, Dropping.com, a feature packed service designed to help domain investors find and acquire expiring, recently expired and available domain names.

With Estibot's Advanced account you get free access to the Dropping.com Basic plan - $49/m value!

With Estibot's Expert account you get free access to Dropping.com Intermediate plan - $99/m value!

We're extremely excited to once again fly to beautiful Santa Monica for the domain industries BEST conference, WebFest Global (previously known as DomainFest).

We're very picky about the conferences we attend, because being a small company, our time is very valuable and our resources very limited. Every year however, we visit DomainFest (WebFest) and we strongly recommend it to our customers.

This conference is about networking and making money. It's extremely professional, corporate and fun. We generally do not recommend 3rd party services because the quality of service is usually poor or questionable, but after years of attending DomainFest, we feel comfortable and confident in putting our seal of approval on it. We visit it, and so should you.

Luc will be representing EstiBot.com and Dropping.com and will be available throughout the week to answer customer questions, get feature suggestions and much more.

Shoot an email to luc@lezon.com and meet the programmer behind the service!

Drinks are on us for all EstiBot/Dropping.com customers :)

See you there!!!

If you follow domain industry news, you may have noticed that many domain sellers are significantly increasing their sales by categorizing their domain portfolios, making it easier for buyers to instantly find domains that are relevant to their business.

Categorizing hundreds of domain names by hand is extremely time consuming - let alone thousands or tens of thousands, which is practically impossible.

What do the pros do? They use the Estibot.com categorization tool. Used successfully by many of the world's largest domain sellers and registrars, Estibot.com Domain Categorizer will automatically categorize your domain portfolio within seconds, saving you valuable time and resources - and most of all, improving your domain sales.

All you need is an Estibot.com account, and you're ready to get your domain portfolio categorized right away - in addition to getting access to all our other high power domain tools. Here's a drilldown of the options available to you:

Novice $29.95 per month - categorize 500 domains daily
Intermediate $49.95 per month - categorize 2,500 domains daily
Advanced $99.95 per month - categorize 5,000 domains daily
Expert $149.95 per month - categorize 15,000 domains daily

Enterprise solutions are also available on request for very large volume queries.

Do what the pros do, go to our registration page right away to see what else you get with your subscription, and power up your domain business with Estibot.com.

The domain industry is full of competing interests and shady companies. It is often compared to the wild west, and rightfully so.

In our industry, it's normal for a company, such as a parking company, or registrar, or even registry, to compete with its customers and build its own domain portfolio using data collected from customer queries. Some of these companies take measures to hide their actions, while others are open and proud to be in the same business as their customers.

In the last ten years, we have found that nearly every single service provider in the domain industry (that we are aware of), from drop catchers to parking companies to drop-list providers to registrars, to portfolio management and monetization services is in the same business as their customers, except EstiBot (if you know of more, let us know and we'll gladly add them to the list!).

Stories of registrars front-running domains, or parking companies resetting stats so that they can re-register a domain for themselves, or drop-list services removing the top drops from their lists, are fairly common in our business.

Whether this is legal, moral, or ethical is up to you to decide, but one thing that is for certain is that this type of behavior creates a major trust issue, not to mention a conflict of interest issue, between the customer and the service provider. After all, how can you trust a company you park your domains with, or one you register your domains with, when they are in the same business as you, and may be acting against your best interest (such as showing you false stats, or registering a free domain you just looked up).

At EstiBot, we realized early on that appraising domains and investing in them would not be fair to our customers. We made it our company policy not to invest in domains (unless they are to be used on a new service, or if we are testing a service, such as a DNS service, for which domains are required).

This means that our staff, owners and in some cases even API partners, are prohibited from investing in domain names (with exclusions on domains for personal development, such as family domain names or domains owned by the staff member before they joined the company).

We take great pride in doing what we do best, which is creating software, tools and services for the domain industry. Our passion is software and we intend on sticking to that.

It is in our best interest to ensure that you feel safe using EstiBot, and that you know that your data is in good hands, after all, our business depends on it. As a result, we take extreme measures to safeguard your queries, and to ensure that domains you put into our search box remain safe and confidential.

The measures we take to protect your privacy...

First, we do not query any external sources such as the Registry, Registrar or domain marketplace or partner sites for availability or marketplace results (these are the most common types of data leaks that result in front-running).

For availability checks, we download the entire zone file daily, for all extensions, and we perform a local database query to check domain availability. This ensures that Registrars and the Registry do not have access to domain names you are checking on EstiBot. While this may seem like overkill for some customers, it was actually discovered some years ago that the Registry and many registrars were front-running (registering clients queried domains and trying to sell it to them for more).
Same goes for all marketplaces we use to display the "Similar Domains for Sale" list and "Buy Now" buttons. The database for these lists are downloaded nightly from the marketplace and inserted into a local database on EstiBot's end. Your queries are never exposed to the marketplace operator.

Certain queries, such as SERP and Keyword Search Volume queries, are either performed live or pulled from cache. We believe that these queries are not subject to privacy issues because they do not contain the actual domain (but the keywords) and are done on services such as Google or Bing which have no interest in competing with domain investors (nor can they identify the queries as such).

Next, we regularly wipe all personally identifiable queries from the log. We believe that holding onto this type of data is a liability and we do not want to store more data than our customers need.

Finally, all EstiBot servers are owned and managed by EstiBot, at a local Chicagoland datacenter. We control everything from server installation, to data backups, to the firewall and security settings.

As a tiny company, the most important goal for us is to keep our customers happy. One way we do this is we focus on creating great tools to make it easier to find, acquire and sell domains. Engaging in competitive practices is shady and unprofessional and does not help our customers or our company.

Always be weary of cheap or free services appraisal services, or any domain service provider that seems too good to be true. Do a quick check on the service operator to see if they are trustworthy, where they're incorporated (ex: US, Europe or Cayman Islands), if they are likely to compete with you using your data. And remember that you always get what you pay for!

Thank you for your business. This tiny company appreciates the opportunity to serve you!

EstiBot.com
Luc & Team

EstiBot's business policy is not to purchase domain names or engage in any behavior which competes with our customers. EstiBot staff (including CEO, etc) are prohibited from registering domain names. We feel that appraising domain names and also investing in them creates a major conflict of interest.

Our passion is software and services, so we focus on serving our customers and not competing with them.

We do buy domains for new projects and when the time came to buy a domain name, we visited Sedo® and BuyDomains® for our search.

Our budget was ~$15k, and that was for two domains, for two different projects. We were the end users for these domains.

The Sedo search interface proved slow and hard to use. It would show IDN domain names even though we specifically wanted to exclude those. It also showed extensions other than .com and unpriced domain names (which we also set to filter out). We ended up eventually giving up on Sedo because of the interface and difficulty in searching.

The next service we checked out was BuyDomains.com. The service was faster than Sedo (although it wasn't blazing fast) and the filter feature actually worked.

We were able to find two great domain names within an hour of searching on BuyDomains. Both domain names were available using the "Buy It Now" option which was important to us because we didn't want to waste time submitting offers and waiting for responses from domainers who expected millions of dollars for four or five figure domains.

The final checkout price was a bit out of our range though and we emailed BuyDomains to see if they were open to negotiation (stating our budget and letting them know we are ready to buy right now at this price). We heard back within 30 minutes (ON A SUNDAY) and finalized the transaction by that evening.

Now, for the part that is usually most problematic. After making payment, we expected the transfer process to take anywhere from 2-3 weeks, since one of the domains was owned by BuyDomains while the other was owned by a domainer (who listed it on Afternic). They were both at different registrars too.

Within 3 days of the payment being sent we had possession of both domain names, a welcome email with login credentials for the two accounts and a confirmation from our BuyDomains account representative asking if we were able to access the domain names.

Throughout the entire process the BuyDomains/Afternic team has been EXTREMELY professional, fast and accommodating. Their professional conduct should serve as an example to all domain industry service providers.

It's very hard to find companies in our industry that respect the customer and provide a great service. We can say with full confidence that BuyDomains/Afternic is recommended by EstiBot!

A big thank you to the BuyDomains/Afternic team, you've made this small business very happy by providing just what we wanted, domains, quickly, smoothly and without the headache!

Checkout BuyDomains.com

Link to us from your website or newsletter and earn 25% monthly recurring commission for referrals - just go to the affiliate page and start earning right away!

We would like to wish all of our customers, friend and partners a happy, healthy and prosperous new year.

We have been extremely busy developing powerful new tools that will help you find great domains and sell domains you already own.

All active EstiBot customers will soon receive beta access to these new tools and sites!

SOPA, a new bill making its way through congress will allow anyone to take down web sites and domains belonging to anyone else by submitting a "this web site violates my copyright" notice.

What does this mean for domainers and web site owners?

It means that your online existence will be at the mercy of a government employee who will make the final decision as to whether or not your business or domain stays online. If they decide that some word or phrase on your web site violates some copyright, or if they are simply in a cranky mood, your domain will disappear.

This bill paves the way for Internet Censorship. Once this system is in place (from a technical level) it will be easy to add additional provisions to it and disable any site/domain for any reason.

Why was this bill introduced?

Hollywood lobby groups thought it would help them prevent unauthorized content distribution.

How does it work?

All Internet Service Providers, Search Engines, Registrars and backbone network providers will be given a list of domain names which must not resolve, show up in search results or be accessible.

What can I do to stop it?

1. Sign the petition - http://wh.gov/DfY
2. Email your elected representative and let them know not to support this bill - Get their Email Here
3. Tell your friends, family, customers and other businesses about it.

More info:

- http://www.theverge.com/2011/11/17/2567793/sopa-ad-nyt-twitter-facebook-google-oppose/in/2405432

- http://www.theverge.com/2011/12/22/2648219/stop-online-piracy-act-sopa-what-is-it

EstiBot is proud to announce the addition of the following new tools...

1. Domain Categorization - After months of work, we have created what we believe is the best automated domain categorization system in the industry. EstiBot will now categorize domain names with every appraisal. We also offer the categorization feature as a separate tool here. Check it out and let us know what you think.

2. Advanced Drop Lists - We recently begun to offer drop lists with over 60 analytics (previously we only offered drop lists with appraisal). These analytics include search volume, CPC, pagerank, Alexa, advertiser counts and much more. The lists are available to Advanced and Expert account level users. Click here to download a sample.

3. Monetization Appraisal - EstiBot can now appraise your domain names by looking at a revenue multiple or domain traffic. This new addition allows you to instantly increase the value of your entire portfolio. Even if your domain names receive very little or no revenue, EstiBot will still perform a bonus appraisal on the domain's traffic. This new addition was designed to increase the value of domain names that receive revenue or traffic but were normally under priced in EstiBot.

We have lots of great new features in the works so stay tuned!
EstiBot :)

The EstiBot staff wishes all of our customers, partners, friends and visitors a wonderful Easter holiday!

The ultimate domain organization, parking optimization and sales tool is now available exclusively to EstiBot customers.

Designed with simplicity and scalability in mind, our domain manager will forever change the way you buy, sell, optimize and manage your domains.

The system was created to solve the complex problem of consolidating all information pertaining to domains into a simple yet comprehensive reporting, sales and optimization tool.

With such features as automated valuation, categorization, lead generation, negotiation engine and instant end-user contacts, the system is capable of not just organizing your portfolio, but also at selling individual domain names to end-users.

The tool is currently being made available to EstiBot customers with at least 1,000 domain names.

To request more information or to schedule a live demo, email luc@estibot.com.

DomainFest is the industry conference and it's just around the corner!

If you haven't booked your ticket yet, do so at www.domainfest.com.

Wanna meet up for dinner or drinks? We're always interested in hearing your feedback. If you are interested in meeting with us please shoot an email to luc@lezon.com.

See you at the conference!
Luc

We've been busy working behind the scenes to add new features and enhancements that will not only improve the quality of appraisals but will help you sell your domain names to end users.

We will also start to roll out an informative new newsletter, with information ranging from legal domain issues to tax and accounting practices and much more.

We are very thankful for all of your business and feedback in the past year and promise to deliver bigger and better tools for you in 2011!

EstiBot :)

Esa and I would like to wish all of our customers and friends a Merry Christmas and a productive New Year!

Thank you for all of your business, feedback and kind words.

We look forward to serving you in 2011 with lots of new features in the works!

One of the best kept secrets of experienced EstiBot users is our end-user lead generator tool which has been available since the release of EstiBot 2.0.

This tool is capable of generating end-user leads for domains you own and can even automatically e-mail those end-users.

The end-user tool is optimized to sell domains in the $500 - $2500 price range, and the leads generated are usually small businesses that use inferior domains or which do not have a web presence at all.

This tool is available in Exclusive accounts only and can be accessed by clicking "Help me SELL" this domain name (after appraising a domain).

More information can be found in our guide page,

End User Tool - Guide

Good luck!
Luc

We're happy to announce that we will be attending the Epik Developers Conference in Seattle from September 15 - 17.

If you are a domain investor and want to learn more about developing your domain names, then this event is for you.

It's the first conference of its kind and it's brought to you by the best domain development team in the industry, Epik.com.

Want to meet up for dinner or drinks?

We're very interested in hearing your feedback so that we can continue to improve EstiBot. If you are interested in meeting with us please shoot an email to luc@lezon.com.

See you at the show!
Luc L.