A good friend of DNN’s and domainer (and winner of DomainFest pitchfest) is participating in the GM Road Trip Challenge. They’re competing against other teams to win money for charity. If you want to help their team, you can do so by checking out their site at their cool domain RoadChallenge.com and contributing a comment in their blog posts or just tweeting about it and encouraging their team on via Twitter. All you have to do to help is send out a tweet and maybe request retweets. We suggest “GO CHAD ! domainers representing #sxswsf “ :) or “helping some friends win some money for charity PLEASE RETWEET this #sxswsf” Good luck South Florida team and Chad.
Oh yea and if you blog about it throw in the #sxswsf hashtag in your title as it might help get distributed further on twitter. :)
Company brings new meaning to “pumping”.
I’m not sure what it’s like being a company traded on the pink sheets. But a lot of them try to do whatever they can to hype themselves.
Today The Amergence Group (PINKSHEETS: AMNG) sent out a press release titled “Amergence Group Successfully Bids on and Acquires PanPacific International Domain Name.” The company bought PanPacificInternational.com from BuyDomains “in concert with its venture partner, PanPacific Business, Inc.”
I know what you’re thinking. That doesn’t seem like premium domain, or anything important enough to send out a press release. But when you read “bids on and Acquires” and “with its venture partner”, you’re thinking there must be some serious money involved here.
$1,088.
Yep, that appears to be the “buy now” price that The Amergence Group paid BuyDomains to acquire the domain name. A listing for the domain is still on Sedo with that price.
“Bid” might be a strong term for “made an offer” or “clicked the buy now button”.
But I suppose if The Amergence Group was trying to get some visibility from this, I just gave them some. Now if only they updated the web site at the domain from BuyDomain’s content page to something relevant prior to sending out the press release.
© DomainNameWire.com 2009.
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Complete anonymity isn’t guaranteed with whois privacy services.
Using a whois privacy or proxy service to register and set up a gripe site? Or perhaps some other web site or domain you don’t want attached to your name? Be prepared for the potential that your information will be disclosed.
There are two types of whois security services: privacy and proxy. A privacy service generally shows your name but includes a service’s address, phone, and email. With a proxy service, the service usually registers the domain name on your behalf and then licenses the use of the domain to you. The preliminary results of a whois privacy study released last year (pdf) show that as many as 25% of domain names use some sort of whois identity protection service.
When someone files a complaint, be it law enforcement or a UDRP, the proxy service doesn’t want to be stuck holding the bag.
Consider the most popular service, Go Daddy Group’s Domains by Proxy (DBP). If someone files a UDRP against a domain name that uses DBP, the service changes the whois to reflect the owner’s true identity. Kelly Lewis, Deputy General Counsel for Domains by Proxy, explained to Domain Name Wire:
DBP provides privacy services for millions of domain names, and it takes the protection of its customers’ information very seriously. As a proxy service, DBP substitutes its name and contact information in the whois database in place of the customer’s information, thereby providing privacy. In disputes under the UDRP, however, the registrar is required to provide a verification of the registrant and the registrant’s contact information. This allows the customer to defend his or her interest in the domain name. Before the registrar can make that verification, it is necessary that the privacy services be temporarily terminated so that the verification process can be completed and dispute resolved. If the customer prevails in the UDRP proceeding, the customer can then have privacy services reinstated.
Of course, if you signed up for the proxy service to protect your identity, all another party needs to do is file a UDRP to unmask it. Sometimes the respondent prevails. If the respondent wins, DBP will reinstate the whois proxy information at no charge upon request. But the information has already been disclosed.
Many, but not all, proxy services provide contact information to UDRP providers upon the filing of a case. Registrants should be aware of what proxy and privacy services are as well as their limitations.
And remember, nothing is completely anonymous.
© DomainNameWire.com 2009.
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Big UK domain name to sell later today.
An auction for MobilePhones.co.uk ends today on Sedo at 6:31 PM EST. The domain name has attracted 6 bidders and 18 bids, pushing the price up to 40,500 GBP — roughly $60,000 USD.
Another sale in the works at Sedo is the web site and domain name Species.com. Sedo listed this in a Great Domains auction and it did not sell. A later bid of $37,500 was received, and the domain name is now in auction, closing in two days. It has one bidder.
Look for some potentially big travel and geo domain name sales soon, as Sedo’s travel auction ends Friday.
The top bid so far is $75,000 for Belgium.com, but that is still well short of its reserve of $250,000-$500,000. Osaka.com is up to $60,000 but its reserve is at least $100,000. So far the highest domain in the auction to meet its reserve is giappone.it, a highly trafficked name that is up to 6,000 EUR.
© DomainNameWire.com 2009.
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American Express gets into .me UDRP game, Samsung starts collecting ccTLDs.
American Express has joined a list of companies to use domain name arbitration to get their .me domain names. The company filed a complaint with WIPO for AmericanExpress.me, which is owned by a New Jersey resident. The domain currently has a GoDaddy parking page. First ad? “American Express® Cards”.
Other companies/brands to get their corresponding .me domain names through UDRP include Overstock, Mozilla, Firefox, ExxonMobil, Sprite, and Porsche.
In other UDRP news, Samsung is starting to get results from a slew of UDRPs it filed for country code domain names a couple months ago. So far it has picked up Samsung.cd (Congo), Samsung.la (Laos), and Samsung.md (Moldova). It has cases pending for Samsung.nu, .nu, .as, .com.ve, .bz, and .tm.
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6 updates from Domain Name Wire.
Here are six quick updates. Four are related to domain names; the other two aren’t but are worth checking out.
On-Topic
1. I have updated the DNW disclosures page. It describes my role in the domain name industry as it is relevant to the site. Please read it.
2. If you have any three character .com or .net domain names and are interested in auctioning them off, please contact me directly at editor (at) domainnamewire.com.
3. Many thanks for the congratulatory notes on Domain Name Wire celebrating five years. It means a lot to me.
4. I have two ad positions available right now: one of spot six and the newsletter ads.
Off-Topic
5. If you are in college or have a kid planning for college (or in college now), check out my friend’s company MyEdu. They just picked up $5.5 million in investment from Bain Capital. It’s a great service.
6. If you manage anyone in Gen Y (primarily 20-somethings), please check out my friend’s new book Y Size Your Business. It’s really a must read for anyone that works with this generation.
© DomainNameWire.com 2009.
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Large affiliate network trims its ranks.
In a major shakeup in the affiliate network world, Hydra Network has dumped 88% of its affiliates, leaving it with fewer than 2,000 large publishers.
Back in my days of affiliate arbitrage through pay-per-click, I frequently earned more than $5,000 a month from Hydra. I basically stopped using it a year or two ago, as I became frustrated with the terms of each of its offers changing from day-to-day.
Hydra’s new, more stringent membership requirements call for affiliates that earn at least $10,000 a month with a good track record at a major affiliate network.
Apparently Hydra is trying to move upmarket and attract big name advertisers. This is a major shift, as described in its press release about the move:
“This move sets Hydra even further apart from the bulk of ad networks peddling nutraceutical diet remedies, cash grant opportunities, tooth whiteners and other non-branded campaigns of low consumer value.”
Many of Hydra’s previous offers have been for the very products it is now disowning. Its network of affiliates has also been responsible for a massive amount of unsolicited e-mail promoting the products, and many of its affiliate offers historically have been open to e-mail marketing only.
The CPA affiliate industry is going through somewhat of a shakeup thanks to FTC clampdowns on bogus claims as well as continuity offers and “free” offers that aren’t clear about future billing.
© DomainNameWire.com 2009.
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With the buzz circulating around the upcoming Sex.com sale, mainstream press is picking up the story of “the world’s most expensive domains”. Several people contacted us to tell us about CNN running the Sex.com domain sale on the ticker this morning.
Now HuffPo is getting in on the story with their take on the top domain sales. They’ve included a couple domains on their list that many reading will point out were more than just domain sales (insure.com,casino.com, fund.com ). The story actually looks like it may have been sourced from the Daily Telegraph story from today. See I told you that everyone is getting in on this story.
The best part of the HuffPo story though is that they allow their readers (the average Joe) to rate, on a 1-10 scale, whether these were good buys or not. Only a couple domains have broken out of the 5 range so far. If you’ve ever wondered what people thought of these sales. Now you can see first-hand
(c) 2009 DomainNameNews.com
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Myths about sales prices grow like weeds.
With Sex.com hitting the auction block next week, mainstream media are in a tizzy writing about the auction of the “world’s most valuable domain name”. As usual, they’re comparing it to other big ticket domain sales. The only problem is that many of the sales they refer to have misleading sales figures.
Consider The Huffington Post’s “The 11 Most Expensive Domain Names Ever“.
Casino.com is on HuffPos’ list at $5.5 million, but the caption notes that it was the web site and domain. So that wasn’t a domain sale.
You’ll also see Business.com, which was widely reported as sold for $7.5 million. But that was in illiquid equity. According to the buyer, the equity ended up being redeemed for only $2.0 million. (The seller claims it ended up being more than $7.5 million.)
Then there’s the granddaddy of them all, Insure.com. Look, Quinstreet did not buy the domain name Insure.com for $16 million. It bought an active web site, and it generates substantial leads. The domain itself wasn’t worth that much.
Buyers and sellers often times have an incentive to pump up the sales price for domains. The buyer gets lots of publicity, and the seller gets an ego boost. Yet it’s painful to see this sort of misinformation continue to spread.
© DomainNameWire.com 2009.
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Company defends generic domain name and explains legitimate reasons for blocking robots.txt from parked domain names.
Marchex subsidiary MDNH has successfully defended the domain name Clara.com from an attack by a magazine publisher in Spain.
Complainant Rba Edipresse, S.L. owns a magazine called Clara, and argued that it should get the domain name because it has trademarks for the term “Clara” and that Marchex hadn’t used the domain name since it was registered.
Clara.com was one of the domain names Marchex acquired when it bought UltSearch. It pointed out that the domain name is generic (woman’s name, translates to “clear” in Spanish) and that the parked page at Clara.com didn’t contain links competing with the magazine. In other words, the magazine didn’t have exclusive rights to the term Clara. The panel agreed with this assessment.
The complainant argued that Marchex’s use of robots.txt to exclude bots from visiting the site, including Archive.org, was a sign of bad faith. Complainants frequently suggest that using robots.txt to block archive.org is a sign of bad faith, especially when the block is placed after a complaint is received. In this case, robots.txt was in place well before the complaint was made. Further, Marchex and sttorney John Berryhill explained many legitimate reasons why the company uses robots.txt on parked domain names:
1. Lowers bandwidth costs
2. Limits click fraud and appearance of click fraud due to same IP
3. Avoids reverse engineering, copyright issues, click fraud, and other issues inherent with archiving
4. Keep parked pages out of search engines
5. Archived pages show only what was visible in one location; geo-targeting of parked domains means archives not accurate for all users
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Second domain name auction in Las Vegas scheduled for later this month.
DomainConsultant premiered “Domain Madness” last year, a (mostly) online auction that was broadcast live from The Palms in Las Vegas. They’re back at it again this year, organizing an auction that will conclude on March 23.
This year’s auction will be limited to only a dozen or so premium domain names, and the auction will take place online at OneofaKind.comsite to be named soon. The sales commission is 8%.
Last year’s event was supposed to be online only, but the group organized a last minute trip to Vegas. This year will have a small crowd, as DomainConsultant invited a handful of people who were willing to pay up for an all-inclusive 48 hours in Vegas. Sounds like fun, but I won’t be able to make the last minute trip this year.
The 2009 event sold $150,000 in domain names. Here’s some video from the KingPin suite at The Palms, where the event took place.
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Online pharmacy argues “Rugs” is merely a typo of “Drugs”.
Here’s an interesting UDRP case from National Arbitration Forum.
The company that runs CanadaDrugs.com, a popular online pharmacy, filed a complaint against the owner of CanadaRugs.com, which is a parked page featuring links for rugs.
CanadaDrugs.com tried to argue that the owner of CanadaRugs.com was typosquatting:
Complainant submits that the Domain Name is confusingly similar to its website and Canada Drugs Marks and that respondent has merely removed the letter “d” from the spelling of the word “Drugs” in the Domain Name. Complainant also submits that this omission of the letter “d” constitutes typosquatting and that Respondent has registered the Domain Name in an effort to take advantage of internet users’ typographical errors. Complainant argues that this alteration is not sufficient to distinguish the Domain Name from its own domain name and registered marks.
Hmm. Did it not occur to their lawyers that “Rugs” is a word?
The links on CanadaRugs.com are clearly unrelated to drugs, but the complainant argued that the parked page was a sign of bad faith intent to profit on the “typo”.
The panelist found that the two domain names were not confusingly similar for this reason. He then considered the last two elements of the UDRP “for completeness”, finding in the respondent’s favor. But for some reason he neglected to consider reverse domain name hijacking, even though the respondent asked for it.
The kicker? CanadaRugs.com is available for purchase on Sedo for only 500 EUR.
© DomainNameWire.com 2009.
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Go Daddy set to hit another milestone.
[Update: Go Daddy hit the milestone earlier today.] About six months after crossing the 30 million domain name mark, The Go Daddy Group is set to surpass 40 million domains under management, most likely on Wednesday. So if you register a domain name tomorrow, you might get some extra notoriety if you time it just right.
Ten years ago there were only about 17 million domain names registered, and now there is a single registrar with more than twice that many domains under management. When you do the math, it’s no surprise the company grossed about $750 million last year.
It was on March 10, 2000, coincidentally the same day Go Daddy is likely to hit 40 million domains under management, that the .com bubble is generally thought of to have “burst”, with the NASDAQ topping out at 5132.52. In the period that followed, many people and companies let their domain names expire. It was during this time that the domain name gold rush caught its second wind.
Network Solutions was the biggest registrar at the time. Ten years later it has only about 6.5 million domain names under its umbrella.
Given the role Go Daddy played in bringing domain names to the mass market, I’m somewhat surprised it wasn’t nominated to The .Com 25. But rather than look at the past, I’m sure the company has its eyes on a bigger milestone: 50 million domains under management. At this pace, it could hit that number later this year.
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Sedo sold Guagua.com (several meanings possible) for $100,000. Other notable sales include risultati.it (Results in Italian) for 32,000 Euro (appx. $43,000) Gastronomie.com (gastronomy in German) for 35,000 Euro (appx. 47,500 USD) and Pepe.com for 45,000 Euro (Appx. $61,400 USD). According to Domain Name Wire, the domain name had been bought by Francois of Domaining.com on Bido for $15,000 just a few months ago and then was listed on Mocus where it was sold with the help of a Sedo broker.
See the full sales list and some translations after the jump.
Domain name Date Price Currency Translation(c) 2009 DomainNameNews.com
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As reported by Mashable Retweet.com Sold for $250,000 on the Flippa.com market place. After receiving bids by 34 bidders up to $202,000, a new bidder joined the auction and bought the site domain for its listed BIN (buy it now) price of $250,000. The identity of the buyer has yet to be revealed.
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.Org registry PIR wants to bring best practices to IDN top level domain names.
One of the big questions facing registries of existing top level domain names is how they should pursue Internationalized Domain Name “equivalents” of their domain names when they become available. These so-called IDN.IDN domain names will be available once new gTLDs — such as .nyc and .music — come out.
Last month we learned more about VeriSign’s plans for .com and .net; today I reached out to Lance Wolak, Director of Marketing & Product Management for Public Interest Registry (PIR), which manages .org.
PIR hopes to take a leading role in IDN top level domain names, as it has in other initiatives such as DNSSEC.
“We’re not primarily commercially driven in what we do,” explained Wolak. “We’re really driven to do what helps and protects the domain name registrant.”
When it comes to IDN top level domain names, PIR wants to show support for various communities.
“We’re doing this in the public interest and to show our support and respect for the different language communities,” said Wolak. “Idn.idn is a technology that we want to see move forward.”
IDN.org domain names, with the standard .org at the end, have been available in many languages since the middle of the last decade. Wolak said that many of these have been registered for search engine optimization purposes (i.e., exact match to what the searcher types in his or her language/script).
Wolak said it would be premature for PIR to give definite plans for .org-as-IDN domains, given that new TLD guidelines aren’t finalized yet.
“Right now we are watching the information that’s coming out of ICANN, and looking over the Draft Applicant Guidebook,” said Wolak. “Until that is finalized, we won’t have a hundred percent picture of the requirements to launch a new gTLD, which would include IDN TLDs. So we don’t have anything to announce on how many scripts we’ll go after, which ones, etc.”
Wolak noted that, in addition to Chinese script, Cyrillic and Arabic, PIR is looking at other popular scripts that have large populations behind them. Script tables are currently being developed for some scripts sets, including Arabic. PIR has been working with the community as it develops the tables. In addition to settling the tables, there are other issues for IDN TLDs that need to be worked out, such as current getting them to work with email systems.
There are still a number of open issues for IDN TLDs. But regardless of how they develop, PIR wants to be a thought leader.
“We want to take the approach that we can bring the best practices with what we’re doing in the .org space to a new IDN TLD,” said Wolak.
© DomainNameWire.com 2009.
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Guagua.com hits six figures, Domaining.com owner scores nice sale.
Sedo has sold the domain name Guagua.com for $100,000. Guagua has a number of different meanings, including being the name of a language and a municipality in the Phillipines.
The company also helped broker the sale of Pepe.com for 45,000 EUR. It looks like Francois Carrillo of Domaining.com scored a nice flip on this domain name. He bought it at Bido.com a couple months ago for only $15,000, and then listed it for sale on his Mocus.com domain listing site. Sedo brought a buyer to the table, helping Carrillo score about four times his money in just a couple months.
Here are other notable sales for the week from Sedo:
.COM
gastronomie.com 35,000 EUR
telemar.com 12,000 EUR
xtrader.com 10,000 USD
afx.com 8,100 USD
mallchina.com 6,000 EUR
buffalogroup.com 5,432 USD
cosmetiques.com 5,150 USD
okta.com 5,100 USD
bookmate.com 5,000 EUR
jpsports.com 5,000 USD
qualcos.com 5,000 USD
landingpagedesign.com 5,000 GBP
stayfair.com 5,000 USD
tridien.com 5,000 USD
ccTLD
risultati.it 32,000 EUR
energieagentur.de 21,500 EUR
escortservice.de 16,660 EUR
transpower.nl 15,500 EUR
ioffer.co.uk 11,500 USD
jb.de 9,500 EUR
stelle.it 8,000 EUR
shirts.co.za 8,000 USD
73.de 7,500 EUR
87.de 7,500 EUR
call.at 6,750 EUR
drucker-toner.de 6,500 EUR
carworld.eu 6,000 EUR
designshop.ch 6,000 EUR
luxury.co.za 6,000 USD
tmb.de 5,950 EUR
healing.de 5,950 EUR
mamme.it 5,900 USD
xa.de 5,700 EUR
hurghada.ch 5,000 EUR
Other
sys.net 12,500 USD
open.org 6,200 USD
analytics.info 5,000 USD
docs.net 5,000 USD
© DomainNameWire.com 2009.
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Domain Name Wire started publishing five years ago today.
On March 9, 2005, I wrote the first post on Domain Name Wire, reporting on the sale of Local.com for $700,000. 3,141 posts later, Domain Name Wire is running as strong as ever.
If you’re reading this, I’d like to thank you for making Domain Name Wire a premier news source for the domain industry. It’s because of your readership that I commit my time reporting on and analyzing this exciting industry.
Of course, that’s all possible thanks to DNW’s many advertisers. Please take a moment to peruse the ads on this page. If you haven’t visited any of the advertisers, please take a moment to do so.
A lot has changed in the past five years. Looking back at what I wrote in March 2005 is like a time capsule:
TrafficClub now open to public – Moniker launched one of the first major “traffic splitting” systems for domain parking, which closed down after upstream providers limited the practice and Oversee.net eventually bought Moniker.
Go Daddy launches radio show – Bob Parsons revved up the publicity act. I was later a guest on the show.
Yahoo to challenge Google Adsense – “Challenge” was probably too strong of a word. Yahoo Publisher Network is still in beta, five years later.
MSN readies pay-per-click system – Microsoft announced its Adcenter program. Fast forward to 2010, Adcenter will soon be the management platform for PPC ads on both Microsoft and Yahoo.
Thanks again for reading DNW over the past five years. If you haven’t yet done so, please subscribe to the DNW RSS feed and follow it on Twitter.
Here’s to the next five years.
© DomainNameWire.com 2009.
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SocialDomainers.com, a new social network for Social Domainers has just been launched by Tony Kanakaris, a Long Island, New York based domainer. The network was set up in order to help local domainers meet and connect. For today’s launch, the site is giving away an Apple iPad for the 1,000th member to sign up for the site, which has been running in a private beta for a while.
[Update] Tony just told DNN that two more lucky members who sign up before April 1st, 2010 will also have the chance to win an iPad.
(c) 2009 DomainNameNews.com
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ICANN meeting in Nairobi running well, report attendees.
With all of the hype around security and possible disruptions, those in attendance at ICANN’s meeting in Nairobi say all is going well.
Attorney John Berryhill writes “The summit and the ICANN meeting are both running smoothly here. The “security issue” is waaaay overblown by those who simply didn’t want the meeting held in Kenya. The conference center is huge and in a secure block with Kenyan military around the perimeter…”
Berryhill surmises that it’s probably safer than Philadelphia.
Berryhill sent this picture from the room of the conference center in Kenya. He said the buses enter a secure gate and then all guests go through a second perimeter. The conference center is huge, and there were no difficulties with the African leadership summit.
Reports on Twitter show that ICANN leadership is actually making progress on issues at this meeting, holding various groups accountable rather than letting them just delay progress.
Here’s a picture of the Mount Kilimanjaro climbers arriving at the Nairobi conference:
Finally, a little humor for you. A celebrity guest interrupted the ICANN meeting today:
Notice the tattoo on Kayne West’s forearm.
Thanks John for keeping us all up to date.
© DomainNameWire.com 2009.
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