Kevin Ohashi - Entrepreneur I Love Learning New Things.

Take stock of your top Domains.

On Twitter yesterday, Shane Cultra said he didn’t know why so many people keep their domain portfolio private.

2nd thought. If you are ashamed to publish your top 50 names then essentially you already know that your names aren’t that good. Which is fine unless you operate as a domain investing expert

— Domain Shane Cultra (@DomainShane) August 22, 2019

I asked Shane what his current top 10 domains were, and he has a nice list. I also created my top ten list (all .com):

DNW
Astounding
Lakeway
Comptroller
Comatose
CandyCorn
BagCheck
ExecutivePay
RoyaltyCheck
Brainstorms

After coming up with this list within a few minutes, I decided to take stock of my overall portfolio.

I’ve said this before, but my main business is Domain Name Wire. Domain investing is secondary. I also run PodcastGuests.com, which has turned into a nice business.

I roll over my cash from domain sales into domain purchases. I don’t need to throw off excess cash from my portfolio because of my other businesses.

Looking at the market and what I’m buying lately, I’ve been focusing on domains that I can resell for $1k-$5k. I’ve added a couple of hundred domains to my portfolio over the year, but most have been acquired for under $200 on GoDaddy Auctions.

This is probably reflected in my top domain list. My domain investing isn’t focused on blockbuster sales. I’m impressed with people who do that but it’s not how I play the market. So I like my top ten list, but beyond 20 or so domains my portfolio drops off in a hurry.

Beyond my top 10 domains, here are some others I like:

DataMapping – becoming a big business
Leptospirosis – it’s long, but the other day at the vet I was told I need to get this vaccine for my dog
USMCA – I created a simple site on this domain and it gets hundreds of visits per day.
PatentLicensing and PatentMining – I spent time in this business. It’s big.
LeftofCenter – A three word domain that gets lots of purchase inquiries.
PodcastSearch – As you know, I’m big on podcasts.
Heists and CrimeSpree – They have negative connotations but I like them.
ShowMeState – Since I grew up in Missouri.
CivilForfeiture – I bought this because I was frustrated about civil forfeiture. Its days are probably coming to an end now.
HullSpeed – Great brand.

What are your top 10 domains.

© DomainNameWire.com 2019. This is copyrighted content. Domain Name Wire full-text RSS feeds are made available for personal use only, and may not be published on any site without permission. If you see this message on a website, contact copyright (at) domainnamewire.com. Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

Related posts:

1. New domain .domains comes out tomorrow
2. See who registered 1,659 .domains domain names in first hours
3. Domain name nostalgia

The namespace still has 380,000 domains.

.App registrations fell on the one year anniversary, but the namespace still has about 380,000 domains. Image from nTLDstats.

Google’s .app domain name entered general availability on May 8, 2018. It immediately took off with 100,000 domains registered almost immediately and 180,000 domains under management within a couple of days.

There are now 180,000 .app domain names and rising!

— Ben McIlwain (@CydeWeys) May 10, 2018

These early registrations came up for renewal in May this year. The first anniversary of a domain launch is often called “the junk drop”. People who got a bit too excited at launch drop their marginal domains.

In the case of .app, it took a while to see the impact of this. It takes up to 80 days for .app domains to work through the deletion process: up to 45 days of autorenew grace, then a 30 day redemption grace period followed by 5 days of pending delete.

The .app namespace continued to grow up until July 13, according to nTLDStats. Then the early domains started to drop and the zone shrunk, but it hasn’t been too bad.

nTLDstats shows that the namespace peaked at 446,730 domains on July 12. It is now 381,195. (There are fewer domains in the zone file, but nTLD stats estimates domains that don’t have nameservers.)

Based on these data, the namespace has lost over 65,000 domains. New domains have been registered during this period that offset some of the losses.

Ben McIlwain of Google Registry told Domain Name Wire:

We are happy with .app’s strong renewal rates. This validates our belief that customers are interested in new TLDs, and in the case of .app especially as meaningful, functional and more secure gateways to the internet. We look forward to seeing more developers building on .app.

© DomainNameWire.com 2019. This is copyrighted content. Domain Name Wire full-text RSS feeds are made available for personal use only, and may not be published on any site without permission. If you see this message on a website, contact copyright (at) domainnamewire.com. Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

Related posts:

1. .App domains are off to a strong start with brands
2. .App continues to explode, Coinbase registers nearly 100 .app domains
3. Over 100,000 .App domains already registered

A recession will eventually come. What will you do when it hits?

I have an iron-clad prediction to make: a recession is coming.

By not putting a date on this prediction, it’s 100% correct. A recession will come. Pundits will debate when it will happen, but we can be assured that it will happen at some point.

The last recession was particularly rough. Historians say it was the worst since the Great Depression, hence the term Great Recession. And with that as the most recent recession experience, people will be cautious when the downturn comes.

I consider my adult life to have started in the year 2000. I graduated college and went to work for a tech company. I did what a good, financially responsbile person was supposed to do: I maxed out my 401k from my first day on the job.

Then the dot.com bubble burst. My company and portfolio imploded. The best investment I made back then was in savings bonds. Yes, savings bonds. They’re still paying about 6% interest to this day.

The dot.com bust colored my experience. I kept a lot of cash on the sidelines and was very conservative in my investments. Then when the Great Recession hit, I piled into the markets. I invested all the way as the market dropped.

The market doubled in value in short order and I felt smart. But I realized that the market’s gyrations were tied in lock step to government decisions and pronouncements, not the reality of the underlying companies in the stock market. This gave me an uneasy feeling and I became a conservative investor again. I thought Dow 14,000 was way to high and pulled off my stock investments.

In hindsight, this was a stupid thing to do. I learned another lesson: the government will do all that it can to prop up the markets. Since then, the government has done more than just backstop against wild drops and recession; it has propped up the market with both fiscal and monetary stimulus.

So after nearly 20 years as an “adult”, I now realize that the government is more powerful than the markets.

As for domain investing, what can you do as a domain investor when recession hits?

I recently sat down with a financial advisor to look at how I should prudently invest my money. How I should look at the long term. We talked about investing in the stock and bond markets, but also alternative investments.

She cautioned against going to heavy into alts. It dawned on me that I’m actually very heavy in alts even when you exclude things like real estate investments. Domain names are an alternative investment.

We’ve seen a lot of good domain sales lately for premium, one-word domains. Startups are snapping these up. What happens when startup funding pulls back? Will this significantly impact these sales?

If they do, it might be a buying opportunity for domain investors. The ones who have cash available.

On the other hand, with recession comes layoffs. People who lose their jobs often start their own business and buy a domain name to do it. But these aren’t the people that will spend hundreds of thousands on domain names.

While you don’t want to hold onto cash forever, you should think about how you want to deploy it when times are frothy.

 

© DomainNameWire.com 2019. This is copyrighted content. Domain Name Wire full-text RSS feeds are made available for personal use only, and may not be published on any site without permission. If you see this message on a website, contact copyright (at) domainnamewire.com. Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

Related posts:

1. New domain .domains comes out tomorrow
2. See who registered 1,659 .domains domain names in first hours
3. Domain name nostalgia

A language instruction site, 3D printing company and Bosch bought domain names this past week.

This week was one of those in which GDPR made it hard to figure out who bought domain names. Many of the domains Sedo sold don’t resolve to a website yet and have blocked Whois information.

I’m curious who bought PharmEasy.com for €30,000 or DigitalBrain.com for €25,550. And who paid $25,000 for UI.dev? We’ll have to wait to see.

In the meantime, here are the sales I could connect to an end user.

(You can view previous lists like this here.)

Lingu.com $9,000 – Lingu Norge AS offers language courses at the domain name Lingu.no. It will use the .com site to teach English online.

CricketExchange.com $6,250 – This is an online cricket betting site.

AdaptiveManufacturing.com €4,999 – The domain forwards to Markforged.com, a metal and carbon fiber 3D printing company.

Klick-Tipp.de €4,500 – Klick Tipp is an online marketing company. It also owns Klick-Tipp.com.

Credisol.com $3,920 – CFG Partners operates financial companies including El Sol in Panama.

Zigns.com $3,500 – Intersign Corporation in Chattanooga, TN. The company makes signage for businesses, churches and more.

Leo.in $2,999 – The website has a coming soon notice and a cool logo.

Xlock.de $2,888 – Bosch makes an “angle grinder” called X-Lock.

CloudInsider.de EUR 2,500 – Vogel Communications Group forwards this domain to its cloud computing information site cloudcomputing-insider.de.

Sertom.com €2,200 – The domain forwards to the site for Seravesi 1960, a machinery company.

LIEngergy.com $2,000 – Li Energy in Great Britain.

© DomainNameWire.com 2019. This is copyrighted content. Domain Name Wire full-text RSS feeds are made available for personal use only, and may not be published on any site without permission. If you see this message on a website, contact copyright (at) domainnamewire.com. Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

Related posts:

1. List of end user domain name sales up to $50,000
2. 20 end user domain name sales
3. What domain names Goldman Sachs and others bought this week

National Hockey League wins cybersquatting dispute against the domain NHL.cc.

The National Hockey League has won a cybersquatting case it brought against the owner of NHL.cc. .CC is the country code for Cocos Islands but is generally used as a generic domain extension.

A Chinese man who registered the domain claimed he hadn’t heard of the NHL when he registered the domain. He noted that it’s too hot to play ice hockey in Zhengzhou, China and that most people in China didn’t become aware of the sport until 2015 when Beijing was selected to host the 2022 Olympic games.

Whether or not this is true, the domain owner didn’t help his case by explicitly calling out that NHL stands for National Hockey League on his website (see image above).

The text roughly translated to “The National Hockey League is a shorthand NHL (French: Ligue Nationale de Hockey), a shorthand LNH, a professional sports league composed of North American ice hockey teams.”

The NHL first tried to buy the domain name. It cleverly refers to its overture to buy the domain as being undertaken by an “investigator”. It did not identify itself when it tried to acquire the domain. The NHL raised its offer to $6,000 but the domain owner’s last offer was $18,000.

I’m not sure that the panel got this case right and the fact that the NHL first tried to buy the domain could have been used as a defense. But once the domain owner added the National Hockey League reference to the site, he put himself in the corner needing to defend himself.

I bet the domain owner is kicking himself now for not accepting the $6,000 offer.

© DomainNameWire.com 2019. This is copyrighted content. Domain Name Wire full-text RSS feeds are made available for personal use only, and may not be published on any site without permission. If you see this message on a website, contact copyright (at) domainnamewire.com. Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

Related posts:

1. BTSA.com: Cybersquatting or RDNH? You decide.
2. More cybersquatting cases but fewer domains at WIPO in 2018
3. Cayenne Sex: Porsche tries to take down escort’s website

Infocert S.p.a. files cybersquatting complaint in abuse of UDRP.

Infocert S.p.a., which bills itself as the largest certification authority in Europe, has been found to have engaged in reverse domain name hijacking over the domain name InfoCert.com.

The company appears to use the domain names Infocert.digital and Infocert.it for its websites.

It filed a cybersquatting complaint under UDRP with World Intellectual Property Organization. The case was dead on arrival; the owner of the domain registered it in 1998, which was six years before Infocert started its business.

In finding reverse domain name hijacking, panelist Nick Gardner also noted that the Complainant neglected to mention that it tried to buy the domain before filing the cybersquatting dispute. He also said Infocert’s case that “infocert” was a coined word that could only relate to itself was wrong. It is an “obvious conjoining of the abbreviations for ‘information’ and ‘certificate’,” he noted.

Studio Torta S.p.A. represented the Complainant. Greenberg & Lieberman represented the domain owner.

© DomainNameWire.com 2019. This is copyrighted content. Domain Name Wire full-text RSS feeds are made available for personal use only, and may not be published on any site without permission. If you see this message on a website, contact copyright (at) domainnamewire.com. Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

Related posts:

1. Another day that ends in Y, another reverse domain name hijacking
2. Tambour Ltd filed complaint that was “bound to fail”
3. Missouri dentist tries to reverse hijack domain name

Here’s who bought Uniregistry’s top sales from the past week.

A new company called Joyride paid $300,000 for the domain name Joyride.com.

Uniregistry’s top public sale this past week is Joyride.com. A startup that helps car dealers put unsold inventory to use plunked down the cash for the domain. It’s off to a great start with its domain name!

Here’s who bought the rest of the top public sales.

1. joyride.com $300,000 – Joyride.com helps car dealers monetize unused inventory through car sharing and sales.

2. throwpillows.com $18,000 – The domain is forwarding to TheCleanBedroom.com with a tracking link. However, it’s been pointing there since before this sale, so I’m not sure if it will now point elsewhere or if this was a payment plan deal.

3. activate.ca $15,882 – This place looks cool. From the website: Activate is a state of the art facility with a wide variety of gaming experiences. You and your group enter inside a video game experience and become the players to actively and mentally complete challenges.

4. thevic.com $15,000 – No idea on this one. It’s registered to SafeNames.

5. goldcap.com $15,000 – No public Whois and it doesn’t resolve.

6. alien.co $12,000 – The domain doesn’t resolve and Whois says the owner is in Hong Kong.

7. libertybell.com $10,000 – A California business called Reliable Media. I can’t find any more information about the company.

8. redpipe.com $10,000 – I’m not sure who bought it, but Red Pipe Cafe is a good candidate.

9. wavix.com $9,000 – The Whois is protected by DomainsByProxy.

10. cyberunit.com $8,000 – All Whois tells us is that the buyer is in Canada.

11. boooing.com $7,500 – If you’re wondering why someone would by this domain, consider how close it is to Booking.com

12. inflor.com $7,000 – INFOR is a Brazilian firm that makes forestry software. It forwards the domain to Inflor.com.br.

13. leasingautomobile.com $5,500 – Rombrac Automobile forwards the domain to leasingautomobile.ro.

14. firsthospitality.com $5,000 – First Hospitality, a company in the hotel and restaurant business, forwards the domain to its website at fhginc.com.

15. viaglo.com $5,000 – Fly Go Voyager operates travel websites.

16. soundbooth.com $5,000 – Soundbooth is a marketplace connecting music professionals to people who need audio edited. I think this is the best deal this week.

17. ecells.com $5,000 – The buyer is an eBike seller that operates E-Cells.net.

18. explorify.com $5,000 – This is a fun name for a travel site.

19. bibook.com $4,800 – Renance – Automated Financial Services Oy, a financial software company.

20. solarfuse.com $4,000 – Solar Fuse is a solar broker in Tempe, Arizona.

© DomainNameWire.com 2019. This is copyrighted content. Domain Name Wire full-text RSS feeds are made available for personal use only, and may not be published on any site without permission. If you see this message on a website, contact copyright (at) domainnamewire.com. Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

Related posts:

1. Vacation.rentals domain name sells for record $500,300
2. Uniregistry adds Seller Dashboard to market
3. Who bought the top 20 sales at Uniregistry this week

Company that bought domain name for $100,000 in 2013 says that it has been stolen.

Netherlands corporation Diginus BV has filed an in rem lawsuit (pdf) against the domain name 1001.com, which it alleges was stolen from it.

The company paid $100,000 to acquire the domain name on Sedo in 2013, according to NameBio.

Based on historical Whois records, it appears that the alleged theft occurred in May this year. That’s when the Whois record changed from Namecheap Whois privacy to GoDaddy’s DomainsByProxy.

DomainsByProxy was subsequently removed to reveal a registrant in China.

Diginus filed the lawsuit in U.S. Federal District Court in the Eastern District of Virginia, where .com registry Verisign is located.

David Weslow of Wiley Rein is representing Diginus.

© DomainNameWire.com 2019. This is copyrighted content. Domain Name Wire full-text RSS feeds are made available for personal use only, and may not be published on any site without permission. If you see this message on a website, contact copyright (at) domainnamewire.com. Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

Related posts:

1. Former SNN.com owner goes to court to recover domain name
2. ICANN files motion to dismiss Donuts’ .Web lawsuit
3. Nat Cohen’s Telepathy sues for reverse domain name hijacking

Panel finds in domain investor’s favor over AguaDulce.com domain.

Pakistani Domain name investor AbdulBasit Makrani has successfully defended his domain AguaDulce.com in a UDRP and the panel found reverse domain name hijacking.

Sociedad Puerto Industrial Aguadulce S.A. operates a marine terminal in Colombia. It uses the domain name PuertoaAguaDulce.com.

Agua Dolce translates to “Sweet Water” in Spanish.

The Complainant made a number of arguments in its case. One of these was a search engine printout showing its website in response to a search for aguadulce. But the result was way down the SERPs and there are lots of other sites that show up for the term. The panel wrote:

What both Parties’ searches do demonstrate, taken together, is that a range of alternative meanings and possible uses of the term “aguadulce” (or “agua dulce”) exist, the majority of which do not denote the Complainant or its mark. There is considerable emphasis to be found on these alternative meanings or uses in the Respondent’s search and this provides adequate support for his case that he was not aware of the Complainant when he came to register the disputed domain name and that he did so to take advantage of its dictionary meaning.

This reminds me of something John Berryhill said on DNW Podcast #244: Google is sometimes the best trademark database.

The Complainant also pointed out that the Respondent has been on the receiving end of three UDRP filings at WIPO, where the instant case was filed. It neglected to point out that the Respondent won two of the cases (and didn’t respond to the first).

The port owner also said the Respondent has been subject to proceedings at another UDRP administrator, but the panelists could not find any such cases.

Makrani said this was a case of a company trying to buy a domain and then resorting to UDRP after it didn’t like the price.

The majority found that the case constitutes reverse domain name hijacking.

Howard Neu represented AbdulBasit Makrani. Brigard & Castro represented the Complainant.

Writing about the case on his blog, Makrani stated that the Complainant’s law firm “are bunch of morons and Reverse Domain Name Hijackers who not only mislead the panelists by falsely mentioning that I was involved in other cases whereas they failed to provide any such reference but they also concealed the entire proceedings and the final outcome of my last two UDRP decisions which went completely in my favor.”

© DomainNameWire.com 2019. This is copyrighted content. Domain Name Wire full-text RSS feeds are made available for personal use only, and may not be published on any site without permission. If you see this message on a website, contact copyright (at) domainnamewire.com. Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

Related posts:

1. Owner of Corediagnostics.in Guilty of Reverse Domain Name Hijacking
2. Wow, how was this case not reverse domain name hijacking?
3. Tambour Ltd filed complaint that was “bound to fail”

Patent suggests ways a registrar can decide which domains to display to customers.

Part of a diagram from GoDaddy’s latest patent related to domain name suggestions.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office issued patent #10,387,959 to GoDaddy (NYSE: GDDY) today.

The patent (pdf) for “Portfolio-based domain name recommendations” provides ways a domain name registrar can select which domain name suggestions to make to a customer.

There are many examples covered in the patent. One is to limit the number of times a domain suggestion is shown to a customer. For example, after showing it five times, the registrar may decide the customer isn’t interested and remove it from future suggestions.

Another embodiment is to show domains that are related to other ones in the customer’s portfolio based on how long the domains have been in the portfolio. GoDaddy discloses that it has found customers are more likely to register domains related to “middle-aged” domains in their portfolio as opposed to domains that have been registered a short amount of time or a very long amount of time.

Although it does not disclose what constitutes middle-aged, it gives an example of marking domain registered more than five years as old and less than one year as new.

The application includes other embodiments related to domain and SEO value.

© DomainNameWire.com 2019. This is copyrighted content. Domain Name Wire full-text RSS feeds are made available for personal use only, and may not be published on any site without permission. If you see this message on a website, contact copyright (at) domainnamewire.com. Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

Related posts:

1. Go Daddy Wants to Patent Way to Monetize URL Shorteners
2. GoDaddy gets another Domain Appraisal patent
3. GoDaddy wants to patent domain suggestions based on geography, business type

Sedo finally allows domain owners to focus on sales instead of parking ads.

It’s a bit late to the game, but Sedo has finally created a landing page for domain names that focuses solely on the domain being for sale and doesn’t show ads.

As parking revenue dwindles and domain investors focus on sales, marketplaces have offered such landers so that buyers see a clear ‘for sale’ message that’s not cluttered by paid ads. Uniregistry and Afternic both offer for-sale landers. Domain sales platforms Efty and DAN.com only offer for-sale landers and not ones with pay-per-click ads.

To change a domain from PPC to the new landers, select the domain in your account and click on layout. Then select ‘selling’ and click save changes.

You can see an example at Laundromats.us.

© DomainNameWire.com 2019. This is copyrighted content. Domain Name Wire full-text RSS feeds are made available for personal use only, and may not be published on any site without permission. If you see this message on a website, contact copyright (at) domainnamewire.com. Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

Related posts:

1. Parked Pages Differ in Load Time
2. Google May Change Domain Parking Requirements
3. Sedo hacked over the weekend

The story behind one man’s expensive battle to keep his domain name.

Jeffrey Black registered IMI.com in 1994. Over two decades later he found himself in court spending hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to prove that he wasn’t cybersquatting on a concrete company’s brand by registering the domain. On today’s show, Black’s attorney Mike Rodenbaugh walks us through exactly what happened: why Black registered the domain, how this case proceeded all the way to a jury trial, and what happened next.

See also:Judge’s findings document.

This week’s sponsor: Name.com.

Subscribe via Apple Podcasts to listen to the Domain Name Wire podcast on your iPhone or iPad, view on Google Play Music, or click play above or download to begin listening. (Listen to previous podcasts here.)

© DomainNameWire.com 2019. This is copyrighted content. Domain Name Wire full-text RSS feeds are made available for personal use only, and may not be published on any site without permission. If you see this message on a website, contact copyright (at) domainnamewire.com. Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

Related posts:

1. The Future of Domains w/ Frank Schilling – DNW Podcast #119
2. NamesCon Recap Podcast – DNW Podcast #222
3. How to Sell with Brian Harbin – DNW Podcast #233

The brand Theorem is a crowded brand.

A company called Theorem is suing (pdf) another company called Theorem for trademark infringement, and it brings up an important point about choosing a popular dictionary term for your business name.

The first sign that this is a crowded brand is that the defendant uses the domain name Theorem.co while another company uses Theorem.com—and the company that uses Theorem.com isn’t the plaintiff. The plaintiff uses the domain TheoremInc.net.

So, right off the bat, three companies are using the name Theorem. They are all in the tech space, too.

The defendant is a web development company that recently rebranded from CitrusByte to Theorem. The plaintiff if a digital marketing company. The company that uses Theorem.com provides CAD and visualization technologies.

If you google “theorem,” the plaintiff is #2. Neither Theorem.com nor Theorem.co is on the first page, but two other companies that use the name Theorem are. One is a cannabis company and the other is a marketplace lending technology company.

That’s a pretty crowded brand space.

The plaintiff says that a Fortune 500 company made a presentation to it and used the logo from the defendant in its presentation. Ouch.

© DomainNameWire.com 2019. This is copyrighted content. Domain Name Wire full-text RSS feeds are made available for personal use only, and may not be published on any site without permission. If you see this message on a website, contact copyright (at) domainnamewire.com. Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

Related posts:

1. XYZ 2, Verisign 0

Company is latest to propose domain name technology connected to blockchains.

Chinese internet giant Alibaba has filed a U.S. patent application (pdf) for a domain name system connected to blockchain networks.

It’s a bit tricky to disect, but it seems that the idea is to give each blockchain instance a domain name. The abstract states:

Implementations of the present disclosure include obtaining, by a computing system, a unified blockchain domain name (a UBCDN) message of a blockchain instance, wherein the UBCDN message includes a UBCDN of the blockchain instance, a digital signature of an owner of the UBCDN of the blockchain instance (a UBCDN owner) on the UBCDN, and a domain certificate of the UBCDN; verifying whether the domain certificate of the UBCDN is issued by a trusted certificate authority (CA) using a public key of the CA; and verifying whether the UBCDN is issued by the UBCDN owner using a public key of the UBCDN owner. The UBCDN message includes a blockchain domain name and a chain identifier of the blockchain instance uniquely corresponding to the blockchain domain name.

Several companies are trying to marry blockchain technology with the concept of domain names. You can listen to one idea, run by Unstoppable Domains, on DNW Podcast #224.

Alibaba owns HiChina, a large domain name registrar.

© DomainNameWire.com 2019. This is copyrighted content. Domain Name Wire full-text RSS feeds are made available for personal use only, and may not be published on any site without permission. If you see this message on a website, contact copyright (at) domainnamewire.com. Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

Related posts:

1. Donuts invests in Blockchain technology company
2. Unstoppable Domains raises $4 million for blockchain domain names
3. Undeveloped rebrands to DAN.com, uses blockchain for transfers

An updated guide on UDRP.

Domain Name Arbitration, Second Edition by Gerald Levine

Domain name attorney Gerald Levine has published Domain Name Arbitration, Second Edition.

Levine published the first edition in 2015. That means thousands of additional UDRP cases have been decided in the interim that he was able to draw upon to update the book.

In the forward to the book, Levine notes that, in the second edition, “I have rewritten many of the sections; and where I have not added I have tweaked and refined my thoughts about the jurisprudence to make the principles, factors and concepts of the law more accessible.”

He has also included an expansive index.

The book is not light reading. It is designed for lawyers and intellectual property professionals to understand the nitty-gritty of UDRP. Many panelists would benefit from reading it, too.

Levine is perhaps the best writer on the topic of UDRP and anyone needing an in-depth understanding of UDRP should read it.

The book is available on Amazon.com.

© DomainNameWire.com 2019. This is copyrighted content. Domain Name Wire full-text RSS feeds are made available for personal use only, and may not be published on any site without permission. If you see this message on a website, contact copyright (at) domainnamewire.com. Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

Related posts:

1. Refreshing Discourse from a Domain Name Arbitrator
2. Jay Leno Tries to Tackle Cybersquatting Problem
3. Book Review: Domain Name Arbitration by Gerald Levine

An event venue in Montreal, a Milwaukee apartments company, and ClassPass bought domain names this past week.

The creators of the PY1 venue in Montreal bought PY1.com. They use PY1.co for their website. Photo from PY1.co.

This week’s list of end user domain sales at Sedo doesn’t have any big-ticket domains, but it makes up for it in volume. Some companies bought matching ccTLDs while the creator of a pyramid-shaped venue in Montreal bought a .com to match its .co domain.

Here’s the list, and you can view previous lists like this here.

JGarrison.com $13,500 – It appears the buyer’s first and middle names are James Garrison. Seems like a lot for this domain, doesn’t it?

Horeka.com €9,910 – PT Kifa Citra Sejati is a company in Jakarta that sells food products. I’m not sure what this domain is for but it could be a brand.

PY1.com $9,899 – PY1 is a new venue in Canada developed by Lune Rouge. It uses the domain name PY1.co.

Adcada.com $9,500 – ADCADA, a trading, real estate, finance and marketing company, bought the .com to match its .de domain name.

TheGrandResort.com $5,799 – Avalon Holdings operates waste management services, golf courses and resorts.

Fluit.com €5,500 – German company DABEI GmbH. Fluit is Dutch for whistle, but I can’t figure this one out.

MetropolitanAssociates.com $5,250 – Metropolitan Associates is an apartment company in Milwaukee. It uses the domain name MetApts.com.

Relax.net €4,488 – Logictree, Inc is a software company. This might be for one of its new projects.

MABAG.com £4,500 – The domain forwards to OMSAG, a digital marketing company. Given that this domain ends in AG, it might be a related company name.

ABLbank.com $4,000 – The buyer operates ABL Aviation, an aircraft leasing company.

TwinSight.com $4,000 – Software company Bentley. The company filed a trademark application last week for the term.

Skinspire.com $3,750 – Philosophy Brands GmbH is a marketing company in Germany. This might be for a client.

Proximify.com $3,500 – Proximify provides web solutions to government and academic organizations.

BetonFabrik.de €3,080 – Suding makes precast concrete. The domain translates to “concrete factory” in German.

ClassPass.ch $2,888 – ClassPass, a popular program to visit exercise classes, forwards this domain to ClassPass.com.

NewEnglandTrader.com $2,500 – The buyer is setting up a financial template on Wix.

LighthouseWealth.com €2,150 – Lighthouse Wealth Management.

GreenAngels.co.uk €2,150 – Green Angels has a coming soon page and states that it’s “on a mission to fight global waste and environmental crisis by empowering people with innovative tools, knowledge and connections to help make positive lifestyle changes.”

HubGarage.com $2,060 – HubGarage is a site about automotive gear.

CharlotteTilbury.hk £2,000 – Makeup seller CharlotteTilbury forwards this domain to its .com.

PieperAutomation.com $2,000 – Pieper Electric is an electrical contractor in Wisconsin.

© DomainNameWire.com 2019. This is copyrighted content. Domain Name Wire full-text RSS feeds are made available for personal use only, and may not be published on any site without permission. If you see this message on a website, contact copyright (at) domainnamewire.com. Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

Related posts:

1. .Club domain tops last week’s end user domain name sales
2. End users buy matching domains and domain hacks
3. End user domain name sales up to $27,000

A Costa Rican e-commerce company, wound care certification organization, and smart home company bought domains at Uniregistry.

Uniregistry recently published its top 20 sales of July, and now it’s going to start publishing its top 20 weekly sales (well, those that it can make public).

It’s great to have this additional data available for the market. I’m not sure if it warrants a weekly end user report on Domain Name Wire because of the size of the list. It might need to be monthly. Or a combination with the Sedo report. But for now, let’s give it a shot.

Here’s what I dug up on the top 20 sales at Uniregistry this past week.

1. wearly.com $25,000 – It’s an end user price but it’s unclear who bought it. Whois shows it’s someone in Japan. Wear.ly is for sale at BrandBucket.

2. createme.com $18,000 – It’s under Whois privacy at GoDaddy but there are a lot of companies that would want to upgrade to this name.

3. unimart.com $13,000 – Unimart selling at Uniregistry? Yep. The buyer is Barulu S.A., an e-commerce company in Costa Rica.

4. vaha.com $12,000 – Just a coming soon page on this domain.

5. iapts.com $11,500 – iApts is short for iApartments. This company helps apartments become smart apartments with connected devices. It does not own iApartments, which is an apartment locator.

6. wcei.com $10,000 – Relias LLC runs the Wound Care Education Institute, or WCEI for short. The .com is an upgrade to its current WCEI.net domain.

7. linesheets.com $10,000 – A line sheet is like a mini catalog, and this site helps you create them easily.

8. etar.com $10,000 – All I can tell at this point is that the buyer is in Saudi Arabia.

9. winnerwinner.com $10,000 – The domain has GoDaddy Whois privacy and still resolves to a Uni lander.

10. satelle.com $7,600 – A buyer in the Netherlands.

11. psilocybinmushrooms.com $7,600 – Still under privacy at Uniregistry.

12. suvmarket.com $7,000 – Doesn’t resolve and no Whois info.

13. coolx.com $7,000 – The buyer is setting up a WordPress site.

14. bouts.com $5,580 – A company called Trichterheide nv bought the domain.

15. planetaryburger.com $5,175 – I don’t know who bought it but I can guess what they’ll do with it.

16. funguy.com $5,000 – Whois shows a buyer in Washington state.

17. walkerconstruction.com $5,000 – Walker Construction is a construction company in Kentucky, building bridges, highways and more.

18. plutocrat.com $5,000 – What do you think – end user or investor? A plutocrat is someone whose power derives from their wealth.

19. abcroofing.com $4,000 – There are a lot of ABC Roofing companies out there, and this one is in Georgia.

20. dealin.com $3,700 – ZeroBase is a web developer in Japan. It’s probably for a project or client.

© DomainNameWire.com 2019. This is copyrighted content. Domain Name Wire full-text RSS feeds are made available for personal use only, and may not be published on any site without permission. If you see this message on a website, contact copyright (at) domainnamewire.com. Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

Related posts:

1. Missed connections: another smart domain sales idea
2. Who bought Uniregistry’s top 20 public domain sales last month
3. New TLD auction prices hitting highs: Minds + Machines, Uniregistry, Donuts all win some domains

A big revenue generator is quickly declining.

Google’s campaign in recent years to push websites to use an SSL certificate has been a boon to everyone in the SSL marketplace, including certificate issuers and hosting companies.

But what Google giveth, Google can taketh away. And this is wreaking havoc on the business of selling SSL certificates.

Google is continually downgrading positive indicators of SSL certificates in Google Chrome. Other browser makers are, too.

Of course, Google also backs Let’s Encrypt, which lets the technically-minded get free SSL certificates.

It seems that companies profiting from SSL certificates have found two ways to stretch out this cash cow in the face of downgraded browser benefits and free SSL providers.

As far as the browser benefits are concerned, SSL sellers have promoted Extended Validation (EV) Certificates. These are the ones that show the company name in the address bar next to the URL.

Or rather, did show the company name. Even that’s coming to an end. Troy Hunt explains why EV is dead thanks to their own downgrades by browser makers.

On the hosting side, some companies force users to use their own SSL rather than a free certificate. For example, GoDaddy’s Managed WordPress only works with GoDaddy certificates. And they are pricey.

The GoDaddy managed WordPress starter plan is $9.99 per month. SSL is $79.99 per year, so $6.66 per month. This makes the cheapest WordPress package 66% more expensive than it appears.

To show how silly this is, consider that GoDaddy’s Website Builder plans all come with an SSL certificate and the cheapest plan is $5.99 per month. So you can get a website builder with SSL for less than GoDaddy charges for an SSL certificate. Only you can’t apply this SSL certificate to your WordPress site.

SSL is still a cash cow for many companies. But it’s dwindling.

© DomainNameWire.com 2019. This is copyrighted content. Domain Name Wire full-text RSS feeds are made available for personal use only, and may not be published on any site without permission. If you see this message on a website, contact copyright (at) domainnamewire.com. Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

No related posts.

A dispute over IMI.com led to a jury trial with what many would see as an obvious verdict.

Old school: an image of IMI.com in 1997 from the Wayback Machine. The original registrant has defended the domain name from cybersquatting claims brought by a concrete company.

In 2017, concrete company Irving Materials, Inc. filed a cybersquatting claim under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) to get the domain name IMI.com. The domain owner didn’t respond, but it was still surprising that Irving won the case given that it was easy to determine the domain owner had rights or legitimate interests in the domain.

Jeffery Black, the owner of IMI.com, subsequently sued Irving to block the transfer of the domain name. The court challenge went all the way to a jury trial, and the jury determined that Black did not violate the AntiCybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA).

The judge just issued a report affirming the jury’s verdict and outlining what happened in the case. It gives an overview of the story from when Black registered the domain in 1994, to Irving Material’s attempts to get the domain name.

Early Days

Black registered IMI.com in March of 1994. One month later, he incorporated an entity named Internet Marketing Inc (IMI).

He created a business as IMI that was quite successful. He tried collaborating with Yahoo founder Jerry Yang. Yang wrote an email to Black stating:

To summarize, we are impressed by the resource and talent pool that IMI has pulled together. We share much of the vision that IMI does, and see a good potential fit. Of concern to us is the relative worth of Yahoo, the amount of resources Yahoo will receive from IMI in the short run and long run, the autonomy of Yahoo (both short and long term), and the pace at which things will be accomplished.

Black later took venture capital money for IMI and rolled it into another entity. He sold that company to AltaVista for $25M, but was allowed to keep the IMI.com domain.

IMI.com was not the only great domain Black registered back then. According to the transcript, he also registered “hiking, biking, scuba, tennis, recreation, hotels.com, [and] resorts.com.”

For hotels.com, Black built a booking reservation system complete with maps, and hand coded over 40,000 hotels into the database. Black ultimately sold resorts.com in 1999 for $950,000 and
hotels.com in 2001 for $11 million. He gave many of the other domains away for free.

Irving Material’s Overture

Irving Materials tried to acquired the IMI.com domain name in 1998. Here, the two sides disagree about the course of discussions.

According to Black, Irving offered to buy the domain for $500. He responded:

I said, I’m sorry. Hold on. Let me explain something here. My business is called Internet Marketing, Inc. It’s still running. I’m the biggest spider in the world for what I do. I track more
data than anybody else in the world as a data aggregator. $500 isn’t going to cut it.

Black says he calculated what it would cost to change over everything on the website, and it was $126,800. He said he wouldn’t consider anything les than $135,000 for thedomain.

Jerry Howard, Irving’s VP of IT, testified that he never offered to purchase the domain for $500, but instead offered $5,000 and then $10,000, and that black told him he’d turned down offers of $100k.

Black said that Irving refused the $135,000 offer price, repeated the $500 offer and threatened to sue for trademark infringement. It even sent him a draft complaint of a lawsuit it intended to file. Black hired lawyers and Irving never filed the lawsuit.

Because Black was able to keep the IMI.com domain name after the sale to AltaVista, he receive inbound offers for the domain. He said that between 2000-2002 he received offers of $2-$4 million for the domain.

Getting With the Times

Black didn’t hear from Irving Materials again for about two decades.

In 2014, Irving developed a new marketing and branding strategy under VP of Sales and Marketing, Jeffrey McPherson. It also hired an an ad firm called Heavyweights.

A lot had changed online since the late 90s, and Irving Materials wanted to get with the times. It wanted to upgrade its domain name to IMI.com again.

According to the judge’s report, when asked “between 1998 and 2017, why did Irving not say a word to Black about his registration and use of the [imi.com] domain name?,” McPherson responded:

…different strategy we have right now after going through the research and things of that nature that we’ve gone through. And also the way the website, social media apps and everything interact[s] with one another, it’s my job to make sure our brand is consistent throughout our footprint, consistent throughout the country, consistent everywhere we operate.

The dialogue continued:

Q. So you’re saying because the internet got bigger, it made it more important for you to have Mr. Black’s property as your own?

A. I’m not saying the internet. I’m saying marketing and branding in general to begin with. Branding is what people remember when the marketing stops.

Q. I’m asking you to explain all reasons that Irving Materials did not reassert its cybersquatting claim from 1998 for 19 years.

A. I would say the biggest reason would be the research that I did when I first got the Vice-President of Sales and Marketing role. And also the other thing is, when did the
UDRP start? We didn’t have any way of doing anything.

Q. Are you aware the UDRP went into effect in the year 2000, Mr. McPherson?

A. I am now.

McPherson said that Heavyweights told him he could hire an attorney and file a UDRP against IMI.com. Irving did.

Black didn’t respond to the UDRP, perhaps because he wasn’t aware of it until it was too late. Panelist Neil Anthony Brown, who often finds reverse domain name hijacking on behalf of Respondents, surprisingly found in Irving Material’s favor. That led to the lawsuit and verdict.

A verdict that is in line with what anyone who studies ACPA and UDRP could have told you a long time ago: It’s clear that Black didn’t register the domain name in bad faith to target Irving Materials.

 

© DomainNameWire.com 2019. This is copyrighted content. Domain Name Wire full-text RSS feeds are made available for personal use only, and may not be published on any site without permission. If you see this message on a website, contact copyright (at) domainnamewire.com. Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

Related posts:

1. Jury overturns horrible cybersquatting decision for IMI.com
2. Valuable IMI.com domain name lost in UDRP
3. Berkens’ company sues musician Bryan Adams over bizarre trademark claims

Analytics firm wants to recover two domain names that are similar to its trademark.

Fractal Analytics has filed an in rem cybersquatting lawsuit (pdf) against the domain names FractalAnalyticsInc.com and Fractal-Analytics.com.

The analytics company uses the domain names FractalAnalytics.com and Fractal.ai. It’s a private company that has raised over $300 million from investors.

The two domain names at issue were registered within days of each other in June at Namecheap and Domain.com, respectively.

Fractal Analytics previously turned to the courts in 2018 for a cybersquatting claim. It got a default judgment against the domain name FractalAnalyticsPro.com.

Wiley Rein is representing Fractal Analytics. It filed the lawsuit in the Eastern District of Virginia, where .com registry Verisign is located.

 

© DomainNameWire.com 2019. This is copyrighted content. Domain Name Wire full-text RSS feeds are made available for personal use only, and may not be published on any site without permission. If you see this message on a website, contact copyright (at) domainnamewire.com. Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.

Related posts:

1. Hells Angels Sue Alleged Cybersquatter for $2 Million
2. Janna Bullock Plays Whack-a-Mole with Domain Names
3. Fight over APE.com lands in court