Monthly Archives: January 2009

Wed 21st January 2009
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Moniker To Make Listing Domains on SnapNames a Snap - Moniker customers will be able to list domains for sale on SnapNames from within their accounts. Domain Name Wire has learned that Moniker and SnapNames will introduce a new feature next week that makes listing domains on SnapNames easier. The feature will allow customers to list domains on SnapNames from within their Moniker accounts. This is a marked improvement over the current process, which requires filling out a lengthy spreadsheet. SnapNames is a good venue ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
What Domainers Should (and Shouldn’t) Do Post Kentucky - Here are some things for domainers to consider now that the Kentucky case has been overturned. The Kentucky Court of Appeals has overturned a trial court’s ruling that the state could seize domain names associated with online gambling. The Court of Appeals ruled that domain names weren’t “gambling devices”, which was part of the statute used to justify seizing the domains. As Michael Berkens pointed out, this is a narrow victory. Electronic Frontier Foundation ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Larry Seltzer Struggles with “Whois Identity Theft” - eWeek writer can’t get copycat whois record changed. I’ve heard people complain about “whois identity theft” before. Essentially, this is when someone uses your name on their whois record. You can imagine how this could potentially be troubling for you, depending on the domain name. But in the case of eWeek writer Larry Seltzer, the “identity thief” went several steps further. First, the domain that is being spoofed is LarrySeltzer.net. Second, the ... read more ...
Tue 20th January 2009
Written by The Domains in EN
KENTUCKY APPEALS COURT OVERTURNS THE DOMAIN SEIZURE ORDER - The Kentucky appeals court has overturned the Domain Seizure order of 141 “gambling” domain names. You can read the decision here. In a 2-1 decision the Kentucky Appeals court found the trial court, did not have subject matter jurisdiction over the case because domains are not “gambling devices” as prohibited by the Kentucky statute: “Regardless of our view as the advisability of regulating or crimininalizing Internet gambling sites, the General Assembly has not seen fit to amend KRS 528.010(4) ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
How Bad Is The Economy? “Joe The Webmaster” Can’t Get A $25 Renewal Fee Approved - So a good friend of mine, who operates one of the largest adult websites in the world, let’s call him Joe the website owner, tells me that starting just about 30 days ago, he is seeing about 10% of his attempted re-bills declined by the credit card company.  This mean about 10% of his customers, which number in the millions, and would be a good sample of the general economy, don’t have $25 available on their credit card for a charge to go through.  This is not even a monthly charge but an one ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Ashley Furniture Gets Cocky, Loses Case for Ashley.com - Furniture company tries its luck at UDRP but loses. I’ve seen it happen many times: a company starts filing UDRP arbitrations for a number of obvious trademarks. After winning a handful, it gets bold and goes after a generic domain. That’s exactly what happened with Ashley Furniture Industries, Inc. The company has won over a dozen UDRP cases over the past year for domains such as AshleyFurnitureStore.com, AshleyBeds.com, and FurnitureAshley.com. So it set ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Seasonal Domain Names: Another Look during CedarFever.com - Traffic to cedar allergy domains spikes from December to February. A nice Austin view, if it weren’t for the cedar trees. Most domain names get relatively even traffic throughout the year. Some are more seasonal in nature, such as holiday domains (some even spike for just one day). Last year I wrote about another type of seasonal domain name, those related to seasonal allergies. It’s cedar allergy time in Austin. Locals call it “Cedar Fever”, and it afflicts ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
360.org Sells for $25,500 - 360.org domain was purchased for only $2,000 a year ago. Sedo has completed the sale of 360.org for $25,500. The seller is likely to be familiar to people on DNForum, as active member “Acro” (Theo Develegas) flipped this domain for about a dozen times what he paid for it. On his blog Acro.net, he details the negotiation process and how he’s thankful he didn’t sell the domain earlier. He listed the domain with a $6,000 reserve at a TRAFFIC auction, but the ... read more ...
Mon 19th January 2009
Written by The Domains in EN
WSJ: Search Advertising Falls For a First Time in 4th Q. - The Wall Street Journal, citing a new report by search marketing firm Efficient Frontier (EF), is reporting U.S. search advertising spending fell an unprecedented 8% year-over-year in the 4th quarter. It was the first time search advertising spending declined in a quarter year-over-year since Efficient Frontier began keeping track. EF said Google maintained its 76% market share of search ads, Yahoo increased it share 1/2% to 20%, and Microsoft live search took the biggest hit, down from 4.9%  to ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN
There’s A Lot Of Money Being Wasted In a Domain Channel - There is a lot of money that flows into the domain channel, mostly unnoticed. I’m not talking about the big name, big dollar sales you often read about. I’m talking about the money spent on the day to day small, unheard of mostly crappy domains, people buy  on NameJet.com, SnapNames.com and TDNAM.com. On NameJet.com you will find somewhere between 150-175 domains backordered every day at $69 per minimum. With those numbers your looking (using the 150 per day figure) at over $10,000 a day, $300,000 ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN
Erotica.com Sold For $850,000 - Monte Cahn from Moniker.com, informed me that the domain name Erotica.com was sold for $850,000 before the Internext Adult Auction started last week. This domain was scheduled for the live auction with a reserve price range between $750K-$1M. Adult domains continue to prove strong performers, capturing many of each year’s top selling domains spots. We congratulate both the seller and the buyer. Google+Michael Berkens ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Use Amazon Turk to Develop Web Content - Amazon Mechanical Turk is an affordable way to create content for your web site. If you’re trying to jumpstart a review web site, moderate a forum, or get the contact information for potential web site advertisers, Amazon Mechanical Turk can help you do it cheap and fast. Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) Turk has been around for a while, but I finally had a chance to use it today. Amazon Turk is a “marketplace for work”, and enables a community of users to complete tasks ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Circuit City, Linens ‘n Things, and a Domain Name Industry - Will we see domain name companies go bust in 2009? It’s capitalism at its best. Circuit City is being liquidated after failing to find a buyer. Linens ‘n Things is finishing up the liquidation process (I wonder when they’ll sell the LNT.com domain?). And that’s how it’s supposed to be. Weak companies fail, strong ones thrive. Thank goodness the government didn’t step in to bailout Circuit City. Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) offers a superior shopping experience. ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
Government Should Demand Land Be Developed or Surrendered - A bit of domain name satire to get you going this Monday morning. $4.25 million? That’s extortion! [This past weekend I came across one of those web sites blaming parked domain names for all that ills the internet. The site used the typical logic: parked domains are unused, and it’s not fair that someone who will develop the domains can’t get access to them for a reasonable price. Here’s my satirical response.] I’m fed up. Outraged. And it’s time for ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Go Daddy Thwarts Cyber Criminal, 1,000 Accounts Locked - Go Daddy’s security team stops perpetrator; about 1,000 accounts affected. GoDaddy.com, the world’s largest domain name registrar, has thwarted an attack by a person who gained access to customer information. The company discovered that someone gained access to certain customer information through a vulnerability in its systems. The information accessed included names, physical addresses, and customer IDs. Passwords and other sensitive information was not ... read more ...
Sun 18th January 2009
Written by The Domains in EN
NameJet and SnapName Sales - Here are some of the more notable sales from NameJet.com and SnapNames.com for this past week: flag.net  $8,900 bikepath.com  $7,100 buckley.com  $6,889 safetyalerts.com  $5,100 visitlaketahoe.com  $5,050 flipping.com  $4,405 papercups.com  $4,340 telefona.com  $4,099 luxurycarrentals.com  $3,434 amphibious.com  $2,719 discountluxury.com  $2,544 7o.net  $2,550 premiumgifts.com  $2,100 spreadsheet.net  $2,000 shed.net  $1,682 sailinglessons.com  $1,551 fastlogo.com  $1,533 detoxication.com  ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
DNFame.com Updated/Improved - We wrote a post back in October,  citing this free cool tool we found, DNFAME.com, which uses a lot of data to determine how “famous” a particular site or domain is. Since then, the site was purchase, and now totally reconfigured and relaunched. According to the designer DNFAME.com is “the most comprehensive aggregator of site and domain data”. “With 64 metrics, we feel we are quite close but will continue to work and improve.” “” I’m proud to offer it up for comment, requests, ... read more ...
Fri 16th January 2009
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Why Don’t You Care About ICANN? - My new buddy from domaining.com, tells me that any post dealing with ICANN issues is DOA. Domaining.com tells me that any post dealing with ICANN is largely ignored by the domain community. Not read, no interest, done and over. Posts having Jokes get more response. Posts having cartoons get more response. Really? You guys realize that ICANN is the body which regulates domains and like the FCC which regulates television, is in control to a large degree of your destiny, don’t you? I actually didn’t ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN
Deadly, Silent, Virus Maybe Stealing Your Financial Data - Experts warn that 8 Million Pc’s are now effected with a new sleeper virus that allows hackers to steal financial and personal information The Downadup or Conficker worm exploits a bug in Microsoft Windows to infect mainly corporate networks, where, it potentially exposes infected PCs to hijack. Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at anti-virus firm F-Secure, says while the purpose of the worm is unclear, its unique “phone home” design, linking back to its point of origin, means it can receive ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN
MSNBC Covers The Importance of A Good Domain - In a new article by MSNBC, they point out what all of us know already, “”””choosing a domain name is an extremely important part of designing your web site”” The article author talks about using register.com and godaddy.com for domain registration and about buying a domain name rich in keywords as long as they are on point and make sense. We always try to point out any coverage in the mainstream media about domains, especially positive coverage. You can read the whole article here. Google+Michael ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN
The $300 Million Button - A must read for any of your doing, or thinking about site development appeared today in User Interface Engineering blog, concerning how changing one button on an e-commerce site resulted in increased sales of $300 Million dollars a year. Of course this happened to a major, unnamed online retailer which already had customers, traffic and business. But by changing one button on the site’s layout, they found the number of customers purchasing went up by 45%. The extra purchases resulted in an extra ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN
New Yahoo CEO Is Getting Paid - The new Chief Executive Officer of Yahoo, Carol Bartz, will receive a compensation package of about $19 million in 2009, in addition to a bonus and stock options, according to a regulatory filing on Thursday. Yahoo will pay Bartz an annual base salary of $1 million, as well as a $10 million equity-and-cash payment. She will also receive an annual equity grant, which in 2009 will be around $8 million. Bartz will also receive stock options for 5 million Yahoo shares, with a strike price to be determined ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
GoDaddy Takes on eBay, Amazon.com, and Yahoo - GoDaddy plans to open online selling site. In direct competition with eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY), Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN), and Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO), domain registrar Go Daddy is launching a marketplace dubbed “Go Daddy Marketplace” for people to buy and sell goods online. Users can set up stores and upload products. GoDaddy will handle all payments and notify sellers whenever a product is sold. Marketplace will integrate with other GoDaddy products, such as allowing ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Outliers: What Makes Domain Investors Successful? - Hard work — and good fortune — propelled successful domain investors. In Malcolm Gladwell’s new book Outliers, he argues that successful people got to where they are through hard work and good fortune. Whether it’s their cultural background or just plain being in the right place at the right time, successful people don’t do it on their own. Consider Bill Gates. Yes, he was smart and worked hard to create Microsoft. But he was also born at just the right ... read more ...
Thu 15th January 2009
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
PcWorld.com Article on New Domain Extensions: Should ICANN Be Spilt in Two? - In an article published yesterday by PCWorld.com on the new gTLD domain extensions, widely quoting ICA’s Philip Corwin, talks about the push back of many businesses to the new gTLD’s and raises the question of whether a fundamental change in policy should take place, now that ICANN contract with the US government is up for renewal. The Idea is floated around the article, that ICANN’s duties should be split into two organizations, with ICANN handling the administration of top level domains, ... read more ...