WASHINGTON, November 4 /PRNewswire/ --

FairWinds Partners, LLC, has been working with Verizon Communications to develop and implement an innovative approach to optimizing Verizon's domain portfolio. This new approach has enabled Verizon not only to better provide its customers with more relevant online experiences that deliver desired content, but also to do so in a more cost-effective manner.

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Verizon's domain name portfolio strategy has enabled cuts of over US$1.1 million in unnecessary spending while at the same time increasing incoming revenue and the overall strength of the brand. Verizon and FairWinds worked together to halt the wasteful registration of domains which offered little or no value to the company. It is estimated that it would have cost Verizon US$725,000 over the next two years to maintain the unproductive domain names it cut from its portfolio.

In the past, domains that generated little traffic, including some that were hugely expensive to maintain over time, were added to the portfolio, said Sarah Deutsch, Vice President Associate General Counsel of Verizon Communications. Moving forward, we are making a concerted effort to be vigilant in our efforts to create a targeted and effective portfolio.

In addition to the cuts made to the portfolio, the two companies together identified unbranded domains owned by Verizon that were not critical to Verizon's online strategy and may be desirable to other companies. As a result of these efforts, Verizon can now broker these unneeded domains to third parties to produce as much as US$2 million in new cash which can be applied to other areas of the business or returned to shareholders.

These savings highlight important ways in which other companies can retool their domain name program to increase brand visibility, cut wasteful expenditures and identify new sources of revenue. Verizon will be able to bring in approximately 3 million new visitors for its Web sites with its new strategy, often by redirecting domains in order to provide customers with expected content.

We want to make sure that our customers get to where they want to be on the first try, said Brian Price, Executive Director of Verizon's Online Center of Excellence. This provides a better experience for customers and benefits the company as well. The top ten domains that we redirected have garnered a quarter of a million visitors and over 1K sales in the last six weeks alone.

Yvette Wojciechowski of FairWinds Partners, LLC, +1-202-223-9355, news@fairwindspartners.com; Photo: NewsCom: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20070810/NEF018 , AP Archive: http://photoarchive.ap.org , PRN Photo Desk, photodesk@prnewswire.com