EVO clients, partners, investors, and friends-

A Little History…
One year ago today, EVO Landing was conceptualized with the purpose of creating a comprehensive media network built upon the emerging principles and resources of the open Web.

A survey of the landscape at the time revealed a vast amount of barren Internet real estate which remained underdeveloped and which provided little utility to Internet users. Meanwhile, new and exciting sources of rich content, community and monetization were materializing on Web 2.0, yet these experiences largely remained disconnected and underexposed. While the land and the building blocks were readily available, the tools and infrastructure needed to develop these raw materials were not.

With this in mind, our vision for EVO was to create a platform upon which all these resources could be easily combined, organized, and distributed - creating a network of unique properties on the Internet which benefitted from the sum of all these parts. Barren sites would gain from the infusion of new sources of content, community and monetization, while these sources now gained access to more forms of distribution. Most importantly, internet users would receive value and utility from websites focused on unique content and community.

To do this was no easy undertaking, as we had to form relationships with both domain owners as well as content and monetization partners in addition to building the technology platform with which this entire exchange could occur. Over the past year, a number of developments have occurred to enable us to reach this vision:

- Over 2.5 million domains have been submitted to the platform.

- We have partnered with hundreds of different web properties, aggregating thousands of different types of content across a wide range of media and industries.

- We have iterated through five rapid development cycles to arrive at a platform with true scalability on the back-end and flexibility in the front-end.

This brings us to today… Version 5.0

We are excited to announce the latest platform upgrade which will dramatically improve our network of sites. Built from the ground up with complete modularity and flexibility in mind, sites are no longer inhibited by pre-set templates and constraining design parameters. The technology platform still provides a high degree of automation but also permits customization for unique properties such as:

In addition to development on barren domains, existing sites developed in the past can now be ingested directly onto the EVO platform to take advantage of the platform’s SEO and monetization capabilities. Some simple examples include:

What’s in store for the future?
We’re also excited to provide a preview of upcoming capabilities enabled by v.5. Because of the flexibility and modularity we have incorporated, a WYSIWYG editor ideal for customized site design and content creation will be extended to select clients and development partners in coming weeks. This approach will extend the toolset and resources of the EVO platform, providing a trusted community with the power of rapid creation in a way the Web has never seen before.

A Sneak Peak…

More to come in a few short weeks. We hope you are as excited as we are!!!
Get Ready for a revolution!
-Team EVO

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EVO to attend T.R.A.F.F.I.C. | New York
Representatives from the EVO team will be attending the upcoming TRAFFIC domain conference on September 23-26, 2008 at the Brooklyn Bridge Marriott Hotel in NYC. Mark Michael, cofounder and SVP of Strategic Marketing & Sales, will be speaking about the Company’s progress to date and its upcoming revolutionary exchange platform. If you haven’t already, sign up here. We hope to see you there!

Scheduled Maintenance (Aug 29th to Sept 1, 2008).

We will be performing upgrades, revenue partner additions and maintenance to the EVO Manager/ Admin.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Have a great weekend.

–EVO Team–

From our Engineering  Department:

At 3:45 in the morning is when our sites are getting indexed by search engines and so is some of the heaviest and most ruthless traffic we get.  We are working on the physical architecture for our upcoming release on August 14th, but the kind of traffic we’re getting means that we’re getting pretty heavily referenced by search engines.
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If you are a client, feel free to call regarding any strategy, concerns, future plans…etc. As you can imagine we get flooded with hundreds of “one line emails,” and many of the questions are answered in our Questions and Answers section of this blog.

However, in an effort to keep all clients in the loop regarding platform performance, I (Mark A. Michael) will update this blog more frequently as our latest release on August 14th nears.

EVO clients, partners, investors, and friends-

Three months ago at a domain conference in San Francisco we formally announced the release of the fourth version of the EVO platform - a fully flexible framework that would allow us to expand the features and robustness of our network on a number of exciting fronts. With v4 as our launching pad, the Company has forged ahead at a rocketship’s pace…

On scalability and stability:
To maintain and grow a network comprised of hundreds of thousands of dynamic sites and millions of unique visitors, we instituted a customized, virtually scalable datacenter in April/May. With this datacenter built within the v4 framework, we are now aggregating, storing, and distributing data feeds across 1500+ sources and are integrated directly with over 25 partner databases. To load one page on the EVO network can require pulls of anywhere from 2 to 10 different data streams from our partners around the web - our new architecture can do this in less than one second. We continue to push for even better site-load performance and have dedicated an entire team to handle this process as the network continues to scale.

On services-based verticalization:
Moving beyond v3’s ability to create media-rich portals (news, photos, video, podcasts) and product-based eCommerce sites, the launch of v4 has enabled EVO to extend its reach to the buildout of services-based domains. Verticals such as careers, travel, real estate, education, and local-based services are now addressed via partnership integrations with best-of-breed Internet properties including Careerbuilder, Priceline, Homegain, Foreclosure.com, CUnet, Superpages, and TicketNetwork. Users can now apply for a job or school, book a flight or hotel, find a property, get concert tickets, or even chat with a live agent directly on an EVO site! The result, bounties that yield multiples beyond simple ad-supported models.

Find Real Estate:

Book Travel:

Find a Local Business:

Get an Education:

On unified revenue reporting system:
As you already know, the EVO platform has a multitude of monetization partners that pay out out on various bases: per impression, per click, per action, and per lead. Because of the lack of standards-based reporting, every monetization partner integrated on the EVO platform provides us with a different reporting format: online portal, email, excel sheet, CSV, etc. To add to this complexity, partners vary in their reporting updates: real-time, daily, weekly, and even monthly. We have dedicated resources over the past few months to automate partner report ingestion and tracking to provide our clients with a unified view of all revenue streams and full reporting transparency down to the per site level.

On community features and user-generated content:
To add further depth and increase value to the users of our network, we have instituted a number of community-based features over the past few months to encourage a higher degree of user engagement. EVO’s proprietary content gateway now allows for commenting, profile creation, and content submission from users across our network, helping to improve return user rate. In addition, a recent partnership with wiki-leader Wetpaint gives users the ability to easily create pages of media-rich content with tools directly integrated on the site. Upcoming partnerships with social networking tools and file sharing companies are slated over the next few months as we continue to target increased site interactivity and return visitor rate.

On platform intelligence:
In addition to infrastructure buildout, EVO has injected key pieces of intelligence into the platform in the last few months. After being assigned a domain quality index (DQI) score, domains brought onto the system are now run through a semantic filtering system and categorized by topic, geography, and industry. ‘ComeVisitNYC.com’, for example, is semantically understood to be travel-focused and NYC is recognized as New York City, thus building out a site with hotel and transport offerings in New York. For sites without a geographic-based domain name, the platform automatically locates a user based on IP, allowing a more general site like ‘JobSnagger.com’ to offer jobs specific to your local area. More intelligence to be developed over the next few months includes optimization of color, logos, and content/ad placement as well as additional user profiling for a more targeted user experience.

So as you can see, we’ve been very busy manning and building the EVO Rocketship these past few months. As always, we are glad to have our clients, partners, and investors onboard as we continue to blast onward and upward!!!

- EVO Team
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EVO Partnership Network Growth

EVO would like to welcome the following premium partners now integrated into our network:
- Careerbuilder (Careers)
- ClipSyndicate (Videos)
- CondoCompare (Real Estate)
- CUnet (Education)
- Dominion Enterprises
- Foreclosure.com (Real Estate)
- Homegain (Real Estate)
- Marchex (Ad Network)
- Payscale (Career)
- Priceline (Travel)
- Superpages (Local Business)
- TicketNetwork (Local Events)
- WetPaint (Community)

EVO partners on deck:
- 5min (Video)
- Almondnet (Profiling)
- Amazon (eCommerce)
- Ebay (eCommerce)
- Flux (Social Networking)
- Scribd (Content sharing)
- SharedReviews (eCommerce)
- Trulia (Real Estate)
- Thumbplay (Mobile)

ALL of us here at EVO have been working/ developing non-stop. Below is a Road Map of our upcoming releases for the EVO platform including (but not limited to):

AD Network
Portfolio Manager
Analytics Upgrade(s)
Page By Page (Sections of Sites that get the Most Traffic)
Search Terms
User Stats (Account Signups/ Active/ Inactive)
Activity Stats (Commenting, Forum Posting)

Platform Intelligence
Spam Filter
Ticketing
Custom Pages
Forum Upgrades
Real Estate
Travel
Movers
Videos
Music

The current traffic stats and revenue reporting are merged together, except for the current day’s traffic. So the traffic stats are reported for past days when the revenue stats are available for that day.

We are in the process of revamping our reporting to allow for traffic stats viewing even if there is no revenue reports for that day. You will see that in the coming weeks.

We are currently transitioning our caching, analytics, and web servers to a new data-center to take advantage of our new module based version 4 framework. This process should be completed by early next week and you will see a considerable change in site speed and uptime.

Great post by Elliot and great follow-up from Owen on this subject here (http://www.elliotsblog.com/index.php/2008/03/21/domain-industry-tsunami/#comment-3774)

The paradigm shift is finally happening, and we are now forced to re-think the true potential of a domain name. What we have come to realize is that providing legitimate value is really the only key to sustainability.

This is what has broken the parking industry. Domain investors and parking companies were provided with monetary value, but two very key parts of the equation felt they were left out: 1) those that provided means to monetization (advertisers) and 2) the users that landed on parked pages.

1) result: GOOG and YHOO tightening up on parking practices
2) result: Snowe Bill tightening up on domain name use

A little over a year ago, we saw the tide receding (using Elliot’s analogy). Rather than head to higher ground, we put in a lot of time and effort building out a platform that can maneuver the coming ‘tsunami’ - EVO Landing (www.evolanding.com).

The EVO platform was built with an understanding of the need to provide legitimate value to all parts of the equation - monetary value to domain investors, qualified leads to monetization partners, and quality content and features for users who happen upon one of the sites in our network (as seen by our average return rate of 10%).

If you have a great domain name for jobs, it should be a place where people can lookup local jobs, compare salaries, and apply. If you have a great domain name for travel, it should be a place for people to read about a destination and book travel/accommodations. etc.

To develop them out one by one would be ideal - but to acquire relevant content and figure out a means to monetization one by one across a portfolio of varied domains is not always feasible - cost and time prohibits.

If you are in such a situation and have great domains, feel free to take a look at what EVO has to offer. We are here to help build sustainability.

(we will be speaking on this subject at the next Domain Round Table coming soon!)

I have been wanting to post; here is what I/ the team have been up to…

The key to EVO’s growth and sustainability is our ability to provide legitimate value - to the domain investors on our platform, to the partners that provide content and a means to monetization, and to the actual users who navigate to and use the sites in our network. Bringing these three fronts to a point remains the core focus of the EVO platform buildout.

Our tiger team of developers has been furiously working throughout February and March to meet the massive task list outlined in Project Spitfire (on our blog). Hopefully you’ve noticed the changes, but just in case you haven’t, here are a few of the more prominent features already spun out of Spitfire:

- Podcast module launch (partnership with Podcast.com)
http://www.mercedesmonthly.com/podcasts

- Downloads module launch (partnership with Software.com)
http://www.stocktrades.com/downloads

- Video module upgrade (partnership with ClipSyndicate)
http://www.hollywooddaze.com/videos

- Jobs module upgrade (partnerships with CareerBuilder and Payscale)
http://www.motorcycling.com/careers

- Deals module upgrade with subcategories and wishlist (partnerships with Shopping.com & Wishpot)
http://www.bluetoothshopper.com/

As we extend our platform reach and provide more value to site visitors, we have realized an increase in user return rates (network average increase from under 5% to 12%) and search engines have rewarded us with higher rankings and additional search traffic. With the launch of our internal ad distribution network and geo-targeting capabilities, EVO is able to capitalize on the value provided to visitors and translate this into increased revenues for our clients and partners.

We value any feedback, feel free to contact me at 206-441-4399 to discuss our strategy.