- XYZ asks appeals court to force Verisign to pay legal expenses
- Track your domains even after you decide not to renew them
- CrazyDomains owner buys Singapore domain and hosting company
- Rick Schwartz gets RDNH win on Queen.com
- Normann Copenhagen and DLA Piper team up in bad reverse domain hijacking case
News
XYZ asks appeals court to force Verisign to pay legal expenses
Keeping the legal system busy.
The long-running court battle initiated by Verisign against .XYZ continues as XYZ has asked an appeals court to help it recover legal expenses.
A quick synopsis: Verisign sued XYZ for false advertising. A federal district court granted summary judgment to XYZ, and XYZ asked the court to award it legal fees of over $1 million. Verisign then appealed the original case and lost the appeal. The federal district court then ruled against awarding legal fees (beyond about $57,000 related to discovery.)
Now XYZ has appealed the last decision on fees to the same court that heard the other appeal.
The district court ruling on legal fees declared that XYZ “did not prove with clear and convincing evidence that this is an exceptional case.”
In its initial appeal filing, XYZ states “By doing so, the district court did not follow Georgia-Pac. Consumer Prod. LP v. von Drehle Corp., 781 F.3d 710 (4th Cir. 2015), which held that a clear-and-convincing evidence standard does not apply in a Lanham Act motion for attorney fees.”
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Track your domains even after you decide not to renew them
You never know when a domain’s chances of selling will increase.
I renew many of my domains six months or more in advance. If I know I’m going to renew them, I like to knock them out in bulk so I don’t have to worry about them and deal with reminder notices.
When I’m on the fence about a domain I usually wait until the last couple months to decide if I want to renew it. I run analytics on them to determine the likelihood of them selling, see if people have registered the domains in other extensions, and check how much pay-per-click revenue they make. I often make a delete decision a couple of months before expiration and turn off autorenew.
But I learned an important lesson recently with one of my domains. I originally registered the domain back in 2004. That was before Google had figured out that it should take search juice away from expired domains. Back then I’d create crappy sites on domains and, at one point, was earning over $1,000 a day in Adsense revenue across lots of these expired domains.
Alas, that revenue has slowed to a trickle. Earlier this year I examined this particular domain name and it was making less than the cost of renewal and hosting. I saw little value in the domain beyond its previous SEO value, and none of the other extensions were registered. So I turned off autorenew.
As I was searching for GoDaddy drops in FreshDrop the other day I saw this name pop up. I was confused because one of my FreshDrop filters is that the domain must be registered in at least one other extension.
It turns out that someone just recently registered the domain in multiple extensions and variations. These extensions were registered after I turned off autorenew on the domain. I had to pay a small redemption fee to renew the domain this late in the game, but I think it’s worth it.
Going forward, I’ll probably make a final delete decision closer to expiration to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
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CrazyDomains owner buys Singapore domain and hosting company
Australian registrar gobbles up Singapore company.
Dreamscape Networks, owner of Australian domain name registrar CrazyDomains, has acquired Singapore’s Vodien Group for AUS $30 million (about USD $23 million).
Vodien Group has 27,000 customers and 52,000 domains under management. It ranks first in hosting market share in Singapore and third for Singapore’s .sg domain registrations with 19% market share.
Dreamscape, which owns 30% of the market for .au domains, has been trying to move beyond just domain names to increase its share of the hosting market. Earlier this year it acquired Australian hosting company Net Logistics for AUS $2.55 million.
Dreamscape Networks went public last year. Shares trade on the Australian Securities Exchange under the ticker DN8.
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Rick Schwartz gets RDNH win on Queen.com
Flower company guilty of reserve domain name hijacking over Queen.com domain name.
Knud Jepsen A/S has been found guilty of reverse domain name hijacking in the UDRP it brought against Rick Schwartz’s domain name Queen.com. The complainant is known as Queen Flowers and uses the domain name Queen.dk.
It reached out to Schwartz in 2015 about buying the domain name but was unhappy with his offer of $2 million or $15,000 per month. Queen Flowers responded, “Are you kidding me?”.
It should be fairly obvious why the dispute failed on the grounds of rights and legitimate interests and registration in bad faith.
The World Intellectual Property Organization panel said this was a classic example of “Plan B” reverse domain name hijacking in which a company tries to buy a domain and then files a UDRP when it isn’t happy with the price. It also blasted Queen Flowers for not mentioning its purchase overture.
The panel further pointed out that the domain is a common dictionary word, and it didn’t provide any evidence that Schwartz would have heard of the company when he registered the name in 1997.
Queen Flowers was represented by Patrade A/S. Schwartz was represented by Zak Muscovitch.
Commenting on the case, Schwartz wrote:
I get to call Frands Jepsen, Managing Director of Queen.dk and their attorney, Patrade A/S, Denmark, CONVICTED LOW LIFE THIEVES for eternity and do it in PUBLIC anytime I choose just like my friend from the saveme.com RDNH decision.
Reverse Domain Name Hijacking THIEVES are nothing but low life cattle rustlers of the old west that got caught. In those days they would have been HUNG for their crimes! Wish the decision was a bit more detailed with a monetary penalty, but a big win, is a BIG win!! This was a BIGGIE!
And as promised, I now OWN their reputations and promise to make the public penalty much worse than any monetary one!
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Normann Copenhagen and DLA Piper team up in bad reverse domain hijacking case
With help of well-known law firm, furniture company tries to take Normann.com away from guy whose last name is Normann.
Normann Copenhagen ApS, a seller of Scandinavian furniture, has been found guilty of reverse domain name hijacking over the domain name Normann.com.
This is a really, really bad case of reverse domain name hijacking. It’s particularly surprising that the international law firm DLA Piper was behind it.
The guy who owns the domain name has the surname Normann, so the case was bound to fail on the rights or legitimate interests prong.
Even worse, the guy registered the domain name before the furniture company existed, so there was no chance on bad faith.
Normann Copenhagen knew that the domain had been put to use, too. It argued:
The Respondent has merely used the disputed domain name for a personal mail server, and the Complainant claims that the Respondent does not even use the mail server, since the Respondent has a business engaged within software programming and that the Respondent uses a different mail server for this business.
It turns out that the furniture company and the domain owner had communicated via an @normann.com email address.
Also, a simple look at the Wayback Machine shows that he used the domain name at one point.
Here’s another amusing argument:
[the Respondent] has been offered due compensation by the Complainant in exchange for the domain name on three occasions, but has probably decided to await higher bids, in an effort to profit on the ownership in bad faith. The registration of the domain name in 1996, with no use for 21 years must be interpreted as the Respondent acquiring it as an investment. Thus, the Respondent continues to renew the registration of the domain name in order to higher the domain names value [sic].
It’s too bad the domain owner won’t be compensated for having to hire a lawyer.
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iOS 11 might make QR codes cool again
QR reader built into camera in next version of iOS.
You can scan this QR code rather than type in DomainNameWire.com.
Remember QR codes? Scanning one makes it easy to visit a URL or get other information. It’s supposed to be a lot easier than typing a long URL. But they never really took off, at least in the U.S.Part of the problem is that users have to install a third-party app in order to read QR codes. So if I see one, I have to download (or open) an app made by some obscure company before reading the code. I’d rather just type a domain name.
But this friction appears to be changing in Apple’s iOS 11, due out later this year. In the beta version, you can merely open the camera on your iPhone and point it at a QR code to read it.
That’s simple, and it might mean greater marketing adoption of QR codes.
I’m not saying these will supplant domain names, but don’t be surprised if the most prominent navigation call on an offline ad in the future is a QR code instead of a domain name. Apple has a unique capability to push adoption.
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17 end user domain name sales up to $50,000
Three letter domain name is top end user domain name sale of the week.
Sedo’s top reported sale of the week was Nom.com. However, the domain is still in escrow so the buyer isn’t known. This isn’t an investor price these days, so it was probably an end user.
But another three letter domain name has cleared escrow and tops the end user list this week: EPG.com for $50,000.
Find out details on this sale and other end user domain buys in this list:
(You can view previous lists like this here.)
EPG.com $50,000 – Ehrhardt + Partner GmbH & Co. is a logistics software company. This is a nice improvement over ehrhardt-partner.com.
Amedico.com $9,000 – Amedico provides in-home, on demand healthcare. It originally registered Amedico.life, but with the .com purchase the .life domain now forwards to .com.
EPXT.com $8,687 – Electronic Payments, Inc. does what its name says. I imagine the domain will be used for a product name.
TeenDrivers.com $8,200 – Tail Light, LLC makes apps for car dealers.
Bluevent.com $6,000 – Luwa Air Engineering AG bought this domain. It might be connected to bluevent-gmbh.de.
Wmax.com €4,500 – The owner needs to update the Whois for this domain. The email in whois is dns (at) wmax.com, so the owner has set up email on the domain already.
Wise.de €4,300 – a CSC client bought this domain.
Menu.ch €4,000 – MENU Technologies AG has an app that lets customers order and pay for their food at restaurants. They use the domain UseMenu.com.
Mediket.com $4,000 – The domain name now forwards to skincare site Mediket.ch.
Jung-Group.com $3,490 – Building control company Albrecht Jung GmbH & Co. KG uses the domain name Jung.de.
NYC.ai $2,999 – The buyer is the managing director of Future Labs, a business accelerator in New York City.
CallMed.com $2,999 – MedCore provides onsite medical services for companies and government entities.
Meinfest.com $2,875 – Mobile payments company MEINFEST GmbH in Germany.
BrandPropeller.com $2,650 – Kwikee’s Brand Propeller is a product photography service.
MeetAtlanta.com $2,500 – Atlanta Convention & Visitors Bureau
EdBell.com $2,377 – A guy whose name is Edward Bell.
PineLife.com $2,000 – Pine Life is an outdoor clothing company like Patagonia.
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.NYC’s most trafficked websites are actually legit
40 are in Alexa’s Top Million, and they are real websites.
Since most sites that use new top level domain names are relatively new, you wouldn’t expect to find many that get a lot more traffic than well-established .com sites.
Typically, when I use DomainPunch’s Top 1 Million Alexa tool and search for specific new TLDs, the top ones are all spam sites.
But I decided to take a look at .NYC after seeing this tweet:
40 .nyc domains are in top 1 million by Alexa. .nyc usage and adaption is growing. @NYCMayorsOffice @dotnyc @JeffSMerritt #nyc #dotnyc pic.twitter.com/VA8zjChEqo
— .NYC Meetup (@MeetupDotnyc) June 19, 2017
Indeed, .NYC has 40 sites in the top million. The top one is around #60,000, but the most important thing is that all of the domains look legit. This makes sense given the relatively high registration fees for the domains and the nexus requirement that registrants live or have a business in the city.
Alexa isn’t the world’s best ranking source, but this is still an indication that use of .NYC domains is growing.
I haven’t been to the city in a while, but I’m curious if people there have seen .NYC domains displayed in ads and on buildings in the city. It’s this offline promotion that will be critical to the domain’s success.
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Analyzing Donuts’ deal to acquire Rightside
Rightside had to sell and Donuts is the logical buyer.
Last week, Donuts agreed to acquire Rightside (NASDAQ: NAME) for $213 million. As luck would have it, I was vacationing in Costa Rica when the deal was announced. I gave some initial thoughts right after the news broke, and now I’ve had more time to think through the deal and the ramifications.
Rightside had to sell
There was no question that Rightside was going to be acquired or go private in some way. After selling eNom to Tucows for $83.5 million earlier this year, the company was just too small to remain public.
It also had lots of pressure to perform, and the numbers weren’t heading in the right direction.
It had to sell eNom because it was about to lose its biggest customer. This move increased the attention on new top level domains, and new TLD revenue was stalling.
Here’s a look at Rightside’s registry revenue, which includes sales of its 40 top level domains as well as fees collected for managing technical registry services for Donuts’ top level domains:
Revenue grew as the company launched top level domains, but stalled once the funnel of new domains dried up.
The company continued to forecast $50-$75 million of registry revenue per year within a few years time, and that was going to be a very difficult target to hit.
The company also faced headwinds with the unpredictable revenue stream it made in the domain name aftermarket, and predicted lower overall revenue in 2017 than 2016 thanks, in part, to the aftermarket.
Wedding Partners
Donuts and Rightside have been partners since the beginning of Donuts’ history. The two companies applied for a pool of roughly 100 domains together through a partnership, and some people even suspected that Donuts was acting as a backdoor in case Rightside (then part of Demand Media) was disqualified from owning new top level domains.
Rightside also runs the technical backend registry services for all of Donuts’ domains.
One of Donuts’ founders and its first CEO, Paul Stahura, founded eNom, which was later purchased by Demand Media and became part of Rightside.
It hasn’t always been a peachy relationship, though. There was Donuts’ unsolicited $70 million offer for Rightside’s registry business, which Donuts made public after it was rebuffed by Rightside. Donuts also seemed to use Google’s open source registry as a way to negotiate a good deal when renewing its registry contract.
Hidden Figures
Donuts’ $213 million offer is a lot more than its first $70 million offer, but there are a couple of things at play here.
First, this is for the entire business, not just the registry business. For now, the registry business is the smallest part of Rightside. Registry generated $11.8 million last year. Donuts also gets retail registrar Name.com and Rightside’s portfolio of about 300,000 domain names. The registrar generated $29.1 million revenue last year and aftermarket (which includes the portfolio and parking revenue) generated $22.6 million.
To be sure, the registry business has much higher margins than the business as a whole.
Rightside also has a ton of cash after selling eNom. It started to use some of it for buybacks, but the $213 million offer net of cash is probably closer to $150 million or so.
It will be interesting to see what Donuts does with the registrar and aftermarket business. So far it has avoided the conflict of interest of owning a registrar, but vertical integration between registries and registrars hasn’t ended up being as big of a deal as some predicted. Rightside has leveraged Name.com to boost some of its own TLDs, so perhaps Donuts will decide to keep it. If not, there are probably a lot of willing buyers.
The aftermarket business is a different matter. It would be kind of funny for Donuts to hold onto this business and its hundreds of thousands of .com domains in light of its new top level domain mission. I don’t have much insight into what’s in the portfolio, but GoDaddy would be a logical buyer for the “clean” part of this portfolio.
Different Strategies
Donuts was already the big dog in the new TLD game with about 200 domains. It’s now even bigger.
Donuts and Rightside took different approaches to new TLDs and it will be interesting to see if Donuts shifts.
Historically, Donuts has done little to market its domains. It’s an economies-of-scale business. Rightside is different. It has marketed its domains. It had no choice because it had to show topline growth, even at the expense of profits.
Rightside cultivated certain top level domains. For example, it used streaming video influencers to grow .live.
Will Donuts drop all of this activity in favor of harvesting Rightside’s efforts to date?
Honestly, this might make more financial sense than plowing money into marketing. For the sake of the industry, I hope Donuts ramps up its marketing. I just don’t know if the numbers will add up. Donuts doesn’t have the same short-term pressures that Rightside had as a public company.
Both Donuts and Rightside also took an analytical approach to premium domains, but Rightside took it overboard. Will Donuts pare Rightside’s premium inventory?
From a trademark protection standpoint, expect the two companies’ similar trademark blocking services to be combined (and sell at a higher price).
Efficiencies
Despite recent layoffs, Rightside still has a lot of overhead. A lot of positions are now redundant with Donuts. Depending on the strategy Donuts takes going forward, now would be a great time for domain industry companies looking to bolster their ranks to take a look at some of Rightside’s staff.
Summing it up
Rightside had no choice but to sell. Donuts was the ideal buyer given the existing partnership and Donuts’ role in the new top level domain business. Two things to watch are what Donuts does with Rightside’s non-new TLD businesses and if it changes its marketing approach.
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Another day, two more RDNH domain cases
Two more cybersquatting cases were filed in abuse of the UDRP.
It probably seems like I’ve been writing a lot of posts about reverse domain name hijacking lately. Hey, I don’t control the flow of unscrupulous companies filing bogus RDNH cases. I take them as they come.
Here are two more.
First up is Crestron Electronics, Inc, which filed a UDRP against a former partner for crestronasia.com, crestronasia.asia and creston.asia.
The domains are owned by Transtrade Hong Kong Co. Limited (formerly known as Crestron Asia Limited). As you can probably guess, these two companies used to be partners. It’s basically a case of a distributorship that went sour.
Panelist Tony Willoughby noted that the respondent clearly didn’t register the domains in bad faith when it registered the domains. Just because the relationship has ended doesn’t change the state of the relationship when the respondent registered the domains.
The second case was filed by Platterz Inc for the domain name platterz.com. Platterz owns the domain name Platterz.ca.
The company was formed well after the registrant registered the domain name. The complainant tried to buy the domain name. When that failed, it filed the UDRP.
Intriguingly, respondent Andrew Melcher said he has never sold or leased a domain name. Since he owns over 10,000, I wonder what he’s doing with these domains. Because he didn’t argue he is a domain investor, the panel didn’t find him to have a legitimate interest or rights in the domain.
Still, he clearly didn’t register the domain in bad faith well before the complainant existed. The panel was miffed that Platterz cited a case in which bad faith was found when a domain was registered before the complainant registered its trademark, because in that case (unlike the present one) the complainant had common law rights before the registration.
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Domain names in Costa Rica
.Com is the favorite in Costa Rica.
I just returned from a weeklong vacation in Costa Rica. I hadn’t been to Costa Rica in 15 years, and my visit reminded me why people like to vacation there, but also the niceties of living in the United States (like well-paved roads).
Of course, I also paid attention to what types of domain names people used. Here’s what I observed:
1. Almost all of the domain names were .com.
2. Very few businesses used .CR domain names. A more common approach was to use .com with CR right before the .com.
3. Even though many businesses had a .com domain name, many used free email accounts for email (such as @yahoo.com or @hotmail.com).
One of the funniest photos I took was of this jack-of-all-trades storefront near the beach. How about some SEO work with your kayak rental?
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Dynadot CEO Todd Han – DNW Podcast #141
How a bootstrapped domain name registrar attracted a loyal following.
What’s it like bootstrapping a domain name registrar for 15 years? Find out today as we talk with Todd Han, CEO of Dynadot. The mid-sized registrar has had to grow organically while battling a maze of regulation, but it has found a loyal following. There are some great business discussions in this week’s episode.
Subscribe via iTunes to listen to the Domain Name Wire podcast on your iPhone or iPad, view on Google Play Music, or click play below or download to begin listening. (Listen to previous podcasts here.)
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Oil company Tupras is a reverse domain name hijacker
Company went after domain name Hexmon.com, which is owned by a fan of hex-based wargames.
Do you watch TV or listen to the radio? If so, have you heard commercials for Tupras or Hexmon?
My guess is you haven’t, especially if you live outside of Turkey. But Tupras Turkiye Petrol Rafinerileri A.S. made the claim in a recent UDRP that “it has advertisements all over the world, from subways to advertisement spaces on the side of the roads, streets and buildings, and that its thousands of commercials appear on almost all TVs and radios every day.”
The company made the claim in a UDRP for Hexmon.com. The domain name was registered by a guy who is a fan of hex-based wargames. He adopted the name Hexmon as a handle on twitter in 2009 and registered the domain name before the complainant ever started using the name “hexmon” for one of its products.
The domain name owner represented himself in the UDRP and did not request a finding of reverse domain name hijacking. But panelist Ian Lowe did his job, noting that it is appropriate for a UDRP panel to consider RDNH on its own volition. Low wrote:
There was no doubt in this case that the Domain Name was registered more than two years before the Complainant registered its Turkey trademark. The Complainant made the bald assertion that it had prior rights in the trademark that preceded the registration of the Domain Name, yet it produced no evidence whatsoever that this was the case and the factual background as to the Complainant’s application for a patent in respect of an invention for which it may have used the trademark strongly suggested that any such use must have been long after the Domain Name was registered.
The Complainant made no allegations of bad faith use of the Domain Name beyond its passive holding by the Respondent. Even after the details of the underlying registrant were disclosed to the Complainant, it does not appear to have made any enquiries as to what rights or legitimate interests the Respondent may have had in respect of the Domain Name. Although scarcely relevant, as stated above, the Panel found the Complainant’s assertion that advertisements for its products or services under the HEXMON mark appeared on almost all TVs or radios every day to be grossly exaggerated.
In the circumstances, the Panel considers that the Complainant must have known that its allegations of bad faith were unfounded and that on proper consideration its Complaint was bound to fail. For these reasons, the Panel finds that there was RDNH in this case.
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Domain names at a community pool Part 2
An evaluation of domain names used by small businesses.
If you missed it, here’s part one in this series where I evaluate the domain names used by small businesses that are sponsoring a community center. In this second post, we’ll evaluate the last six banners.
CarolDochenRealtors.com
Surnames can be difficult to remember how to spell. But in some ways, I like this better than a generic Austin real estate domain names because selling real estate is often about your personal brand.
Nothing
I suspect the reason there’s only a phone number is that this is a sale person for a larger company. He probably can’t have his own website.
Worse than no domain
Not having a domain is one thing, but not having any contact details (not even an address) is baffling.
SpicewoodAnimalHospital.com
It’s long but memorable, and Spicewood Springs is a popular street in the area.
AplusAC.com
Great domain and great positioning on the banner.
AnthonySylvan.com
Another case of surnames being hard to spell but a notable brand.
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Verisign files name spinning patent application
Application for name spinning patent published today.
.Com domain name registry Verisign has filed a patent application (pdf) with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that covers various aspects of generating domain name alternatives, aka name spinning.
The application was filed in December 2015 and just published today.
Abstract: Provided are methods, devices, and computer-readable media for accessing a domain name; determining, via the processor, at least two words in the domain name; determining at least one alternative word for at least one word in the domain name; determining whether the at least one alternative word is contextually relevant; and generating at least one alternative domain name based on a determination that the at least one alternative word is contextually relevant.
While the application explains a couple different ways of finding the alternative domains, I’m sure many in the domain name business would argue that the crux of the idea has been in practice by multiple parties for over a decade.
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SnapChat loses dispute over “GeoFilters” term
Company claimed registrant of GeoFilters.com domain name was cybersquatting.
Example of a Geofilter, Image courtesy Snap.
Snap, Inc., maker of the SnapChat app, has failed to convince a World Intellectual Property Organization panel that the registrant of the GeoFilters.com domain is cybersquatting.Back in 2014, Snap introduced Geofilters that overlay time and location data on pictures. The current registrant, Primary Knowledge, Inc, registered the domain geofilters.com in late 2014 after the domain name expired.
The domain owner provided evidence of the term geofilter being used in a descriptive manner prior to Snap’s use.
The three-person panel determined:
It is the Complainant’s burden to demonstrate unregistered or common law trademark or service mark rights in GEOFILTER. The Panel concludes that the Complainant has failed to meet this burden. On the basis of the record, the Panel considers the Complainant’s applied-for GEOFILTER mark to be descriptive in relation to the Complainant’s product. The term “Geofilter” as used refers to software that adds a filter or picture to a photograph based on a geographic location. The Complainant has provided little or no evidence regarding the nature of extent of the use of “Geofilter” as a mark, sales or advertising using the mark, public recognition of “Geofilter” as an indicator of source, or consumer surveys evidencing secondary meaning. The examples of media recognition provided by the Complainant appear to focus primarily on the features of the product. Nor is the Complainant’s use of “Geofilter” exclusive; the record before the Panel reflects other descriptive third-party usages of “geofilter” as well. In the final analysis, the Complainant has failed to show that the consuming public has come to recognize “Geofilter” as an indicator of the source of the product rather than the product itself.
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Judging 13 domain names at a community pool
Some good, some bad.
The community pool and gym I go to in Austin has a number of supporters, and it displays banners for some of these supporters on the pool fence. I often reflect on the quality of domain names on the banners and thought I’d run through them with you. There are 13 in total, so I’m going to split this into two posts.
Let’s get started with the first seven banners…
ENTSAustin.com
This is a good geo domain that states exactly what the company does and the location. My concern with the domain is that people might remember it as the singular ENTAustin.com. That domain name is owned by someone else.
StDavids.com
People in Austin know about StDavids.com, a major hospital chain. A nice, short domain.
LakelineOaksRetirement.com
A Realtor owns LakelineOaks.com, which was registered well before the retirement community. This domain is long but emphasizes what type of community it is.
Ready to Run
They may be ready to run, but you can’t run directly to their website after seeing this ad. They have a domain name — ReadyToRunTexas.com — but it’s not on the banner.
ProsperityBankUSA.com
Oh, dear. Drop the USA and you go to a completely different bank.
Goldstein-Insurance.com
I’m sure you know what I think about this one. The hyphen would actually be OK to break up the two words if the company also owned the unhyphenated version. It does not.
Pro-Tape.com
I’m feeling nostalgic, so I’ll give them a pass for the hyphen.
See the remaining 6 banners in an upcoming post.
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Categories: Domains
Cryptocurrency domains were hot in May
People registered lots of domains related to cryptocurrencies in May.
As the price of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ethereum continue to surge in price, interest in relevant domain names also continues to spike.
The top trending word in new .com domain name registrations last month was “coin”, and “crypto” also made the top 5.
The popularity of fidget spinners is also spilling over to domains, with “fidget” and “spinner” landing in the top five as well.
Here are the top ten trending keywords in .com last month, meaning they had the biggest spike over the previous month.
1. Coin
2. Fidget
3. Crypto
4. Rate
5. Spinner
6. Yesterday
7. Rates
8. Dentists
9. Purchase
10. Smiles
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16 end user domain name sales
A coffee company, a domain name registrar and an adventure tour operator recently bought domain names in the aftermarket.
This week I found 16 end user sales among Sedo’s reported domain name sales of $2,000 or more. Keep in mind, as always, that many of the recent sales are still in escrow, have Whois privacy, or otherwise can’t be directly tied to an end user.
Here’s the list of end user sales I uncovered:
(You can view previous lists like this here.)
Nomeo.com €15,000 – The buyer runs Nomeo.be, a domain name registrar.
Padz.com $9,000 – The buyer is an individual connected to VillasDirect Limited, a real estate company. So Padz is a play on “pads”.
AdventureX.com $6,000 – Adventure tour operator Matt Prior. His website is MPadventureacademy.com.
CoffeeLand.com $5,000 – CoffeeLand is a coffee roaster in Taiwan that is moving into the U.S. market.
DailyGo.com $4,995 – FutureTV Group creates online video content. It is getting ready to develop DailyGo.com.
Ditaro.com $4,999 – This company appears to be an internet service and TV provider.
Dchat.com $4,000 – CuteSoft is a software developer. One of its products is CuteChat.
EnergyTrade.com $3,888 – The buyer is setting up a page for trading energy and energy spreadbetting.
RussianDiamonds.com $3,500 – Maxim Artsinovich in Russia. His name is tied to a jewelry company.
HundsonReed.ca $3,500 Hundson Reed is a bathroom fixtures brand.
Hayaa.com $3,499 – According to the buyer’s LinkedIn page, this FinTech startup is “currently developing a seamless lifestyle web and app platform for UAE residents”.
Edgly.com $3,375 – Transloadit has a CDN called Edgly. The domain forwards to a page on Transloadit’s website.
Bugg.com $3,000 – BUGG Products LLC sells bug spray.
MedMarine.com $3,000 – MedMarine is a marine shipping company in Turkey. The domain now forwards to MedMarine.com.tr.
WhatsHealth.com £2,000 – Optimum Solutions is a holistic health consultant in Lafayette, Louisiana.
FastLane.net $2,000 – Fast Lane Institute for Knowledge Transfer GmbH. The company’s website is at FLane.com.
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First take: Donuts to buy Rightside for $213 million
Deal saves Rightside from the public markets and challenged growth trajectory.
Top level domain name company Donuts has agreed to acquire competitor Rightside (NASDAQ: NAME) for $213 million, Rightside announced today.
The deal will give Donuts an additional 40 top level domain names, Rightside’s technical registry system (that currently powers Donuts’ domains), domain name registrar Name.com, and a portfolio of about 300,000 (mostly .com) domain names.
The $10.60-per-share offer is about 8% higher than the closing price yesterday, and a 12% premium over the average trading price of the past 30 days.
When looking at the valuation, it’s also important to think about Rightside’s cash component. It had $70 million in the bank at the end of March thanks to its sale of eNom to Tucows. However, it has spent some of that money on share buybacks since then.
Donuts offered to buy Rightside’s new TLD business for $70 million about a year ago.
It will be interesting to see if Donuts decides to retain the retail registrar Name.com and what it does with the portfolio of owned and operated domains. While Donuts has been a pure-play registry to date, it inserted a new CEO earlier this year.
Rightside will need 50% of shareholders to approve the deal. One that won’t be happy with the price is J. Carlo Cannell, but he owns less than 10% of shares.
I’ve been saying for a while that Rightside is too small to remain a public company after selling eNom. Additionally, the company has bet on new top level domain names but hasn’t been able to move the lever on registry revenue. These factors, combined with lumpy aftermarket revenue, put the company in an awkward spot. Going private through a buyout such as this is its best option.
The deal should close in Q3.
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