Monthly Archives: April 2009

Wed 8th April 2009
Written by The Domains in EN
UPDATE: Answerable Is Not Terminating Their Relationship With SnapNames.com - I have been contacted by representative of both Answerable.com and SnapNames.com on our post yesterday concerning SnapNames sending out e-mails to customers notifying them about certain registrars being terminated by SnapNames.com According to Viram Lodhia of Answerable the e-mails sent out notifying customers that SnapNames.com was terminating the relationship with Answerable,  were sent in error. Answerable’s representative sent us this statement this morning: “””””Answerable has been ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Amazon.com Mistypes the Own Domain Name - Endless.com has two s’s. This morning I received an e-mail from Amazon.com with the following subject line: Free Overnight Shipping on crocs from Endles.com Endles? What are those? They meant to type Endless.com, which is the web site for Amazon’s shoe store. But somehow the subject line made it through review with a typo. Hopefully no more than a few million people received the email. If one of Amazon’s own employees made this mistake, imagine how many ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Sedo 2008 Revenue Falls to EUR 54.7 Million - Despite downturn, Sedo revenue drops only 12.6%. [Editor: Earlier today I wrote about the acquisition price for RevenueDirect. Here is some more data about Sedo gleamed from its parent company annual report.] Most people in the domain business would be happy to have their 2008 revenue be only 12.6% lower than 2007. Sedo has done just that. According to its parent company AdLINK’s annual report, Sedo’s revenues fell from €62.6 in 2007 to €54.7 ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Sedo Paid $825,000 for RevenueDirect - Acquisition was small in monetary terms, but important in its signal. According to public company financial reports, Sedo paid $825,000 for its acquisition of RevenueDirect in February. The purchase price included the customer base, RevenueDirect brand and all respective software. The transaction price was not announced when the company was purchased in February, leading to speculation about the value of the deal. Many considered it small, and this is true from ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Edible Arrangements Should Stick to Edibles - Would you like a UDRP with that arrangement? Poor Edible Arrangements. All it wanted to do was swipe the domain name EdibleBrands.com. But it didn’t count on the respondent calling John Berryhill to pick apart the case. Now that food-instead-of-flowers company Edible Arrangements, LLC is getting big, it’s apparently creating a new brand or umbrella company called Edible Brands. It filed for a trademark for “Edible Brands” in January 2009 using a “first ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Domain Name News Bytes for Apr 8 - Brief notes about what’s going on in the domain world. There are a lot of stories I haven’t gotten to lately. Here they are in brief. Don’t want your WordPress site to get hacked? Richard Douglas, who helped me yesterday when it happened to me, put together a great post of WordPress security tips. Since many of you have asked about my conference schedule for the next few months, my current plans are to attend GeoDomain Expo in San Diego and Domain Roundtable ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
How to Get Press for Your Domain Name Business - How to get press on domain name news sites and blogs. I’ve been meaning to write this article for a long time. The question is “how can I get press for my domain industry product/conference/auction/sale?” I get a handful of press releases and pitches every day from people wanting me to mention or review their product, promote an upcoming auction, or do a profile. I can’t do them all, but here are my suggestions for increasing the likelihood of getting through. 1. ... read more ...
Tue 7th April 2009
Written by The Domains in EN
SnapNames.com “Terminates Its Relationship” With At Least 18 Registrars - I have, over the last couple of days, received over 18 e-mails from Snapnames.com, each announcing that they are terminating their relationship with one of their partner registrars. As I write this post, notices are still coming in, so the number of terminated registrars, might grow about So far, the notices include the following registrars: Answerable.com Names Real Names Bond Naming Associate Primal Store Specific Name Retail Studio The Names Registration, Inc. Name Churner Hosting Fort Global ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Court Finds You Have No Privacy To Your MySpace.com, FaceBook.com Postings: A Cautionary Tale - A California appellate court ruled that a person does not have a right to privacy for any material they post on their social networking page.  This exact case should also act as a cautionary tale to all parents and their children to understand the possible ramification of a seemingly innocent post on their Facebook.com, Myspace.com, or other social networking pages. Here are the facts:  Following a visit to her hometown of Coalinga, California, Cynthia Moreno, wrote An ode to Coalinga (“The Ode”) ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
ShoeMoney Sues Google Employee, Alleging Insider Advantages - Popular internet marketer alleges Google employee stole his keywords. Making money from Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) advertising traffic is a million dollar business to some people. Consider “ShoeMoney”, famous for his $130,000 Google Adsense check. Like many other internet marketers, ShoeMoney has invested lots of money into perfecting his online advertising strategy, including the keywords he bids on. But in a lawsuit reported on TechCrunch, ShoeMoney alleges a ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Domain Madness Scores $150,000 - Domain Madness auction sells 25 domain names. Shortly after last week’s Domain Madness auction in Las Vegas ended, the Domain Consultant team disappeared for several hours while the rest of us drank whiskey and bowled. Where did they go? Apparently they weren’t done selling names. They worked the remaining domain names and struck deals (none for less than the auction reserves). All told, they increased the total sales from 16 to 25 out of 48 over the past ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
My ICANN New gTLD Applicant Guidebook Version 2 Feedback - Here’s what I had to say to ICANN. The deadline to submit comments to ICANN about its New gTLD Applicant Guidebook Version 2 is April 13. Yesterday I formally submitted my comments to ICANN. These comments generally summarize articles on Domain Name Wire, including ICANN Shouldn’t Regulate Morality and Community and Geo Rules Should be Nixed from New TLDs. I provided my views and included a short paragraph that sums up my concern: In general, I am very concerned ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
A Long Morning Thanks to WordPress Hack - WordPress hack leads to site problems. I shouldn’t have picked up the voicemail. My day was going so well until then. After dropping my daughter off at school around 8, I noticed a voicemail left about 15 minutes earlier. I picked it up to hear Elliot. Why was he calling so early? It couldn’t be good. And it wasn’t. Elliot said he visited DNW and got a warning that the site had malicious code. I hurried home and logged in to my email to find several messages ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Let’s Increase a Size of “For Sale” Signs - Parked pages need to evolve into domain sales machines. It’s common wisdom that putting a notice on your parked domain name that it’s for sale likely decreases your pay-per-click click through rate. That’s part of the reason any “for sale” notices on parked pages are inconspicuous. With pay-per-click revenue down sharply, perhaps the equation is flipping so that it makes sense to make the sale notice bigger. If you have a domain that attracts 10 people ... read more ...
Mon 6th April 2009
Written by The Domains in EN
401.com Sells for $65K On NameJet.com - The domain, 401.com sold today at NameJet.com for $65,100  in a private auction which was opened to just 115 people at Namejet.com and lasted over 3 hours of extended bidding 401.com of course could be used in connection with 401kplans and appears to generate several thousands visitors a month according to compete.com It is also the area code for Rhode Island. According to DnJournal.com other number domains that sold this year include: 92.com     $72,900 34.com     $45,000 288.com   $43,222 360.org    ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN
Why You Should Be Against a New CyberSecurity Act - As we posted a couple of days ago, Senators John Rockefeller (D-W. Va.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) introduced a bill to establish the Office of the National Cybersecurity Advisor—an arm of the executive branch that would have vast power to monitor and control Internet traffic to protect against threats to “critical cyber infrastructure”: You can read the bill here. (PDF) The law among other things, gives the president the ability to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” and shut down or ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN
Sedo Partners With Trademark Protection Company - Sedo, announced today that is has entered into  a strategic partnership with Intellectual Property Management (IPM) Company, a highly recognized provider of domain management services to corporations. “”””The partnership is designed to help businesses manage existing domain portfolios with IPM, while acquiring the domains they need to meet their business goals through Sedo’s industry leading marketplace and brokerage services. “Sedo’s partnership with IPM, combined with our industry-first ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Rick Latona Auctions Extended Auction Ends Sunday - Extended auction from Phoenix Forum ends Sunday. Yesterday Domain Name Wire published an interview with Rick Latona about his live adult domain name auction at the Phoenix Forum. Although the auction failed to meet expectations, the silent online auction may pick up some of the slack. The auction, hosted at Proxibid, includes over 600 adult domain names. At the high ends are category killer domains such as XXX.com and WebCam.com, but there are also many names ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Amazon Disses Paid Search Affiliates - Amazon to forbid affiliates linking from paid search ads. In an email to Amazon Associates today, the company announced it will no longer allow affiliates to send traffic directly to its site from pay-per-click ads on Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Affiliates may still bid on search engines to send traffic to their own web sites, which in turn link to Amazon.com through its affiliate program. I used to be active at affiliate arbitrage. In a nutshell, that means buying ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Book Review: The Sex.com Chronicles - Lawyer’s inside look at Sex.com legal battle gets off to slow start, but redeems itself in the end. It’s a shame for Charles Carreon that his book about the Sex.com legal battle came out after Kieren McCarthy’s book Sex.com (review). As much as I tried to disassociate the two books, they require comparison. And while Kieren’s book was a riveting, objective tale by a professional author, Carreon’s book is a poorly written, subjective book written by a ... read more ...
 
Written by The MediaWizard's Blog in EN
Free Domain Name Appraisals - Everyone tries to help newcomers with understanding what makes a domain valuable to start with. But after a while, it gets on your nerves, specially the two or three persistent guys who insist on using you as a their personal ‘free domain name appraisal‘ system. I’m happy to help once in a while but please don’t make it a habit. I’d rather use my time to sell my domains instead of helping you buy from other people, its nothing personal, just business. And we all have only 24 hours ... read more ...
Sun 5th April 2009
Written by The Domains in EN
Google Loses PPC Ad Case - The 2nd Circuit Federal Court of Appeals ruled against Google in a trademark lawsuit stemming from AdWords ads, saying that allowing a trademark term to trigger a search ad is a “use in commerce”, within the meaning of federal trademark laws. Google was sued by computer repair shop, Rescuecom,  for allowing rivals to appear as sponsored listings when consumers typed “rescuecom” into the query box. A district court judge dismissed the case before trial on the theory that allowing a word to ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN
Our SnapNames.com Picks: Mar 5 Edition - The first SnapNames.com Showcase auction starts right Now. The first showcase features a lot of no reserve, low reserve domains. The auction closes on Monday,  July 21st at 3:15pm EST, 12:15pm PST, subject to Snapnames.com normal bidding rules. You should back order the domain for the special auction by clicking on the link for each domain your interested in joining the auction: Google+Michael Berkens ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN
As Baseball Season Opens, It’s Nice to Know A Family Of 4 Can Still See A Game For Just $10,000 - The national pastime, Professional Baseball, returns to action tomorrow. Even in these very difficult economic times is refreshing to see that a family of 4 can still get out to the ball park for $10,000. As both the New York Yankees and the Mets, open their sparkling new stadiums, in the worst economy in at least 25 years, the prices at the new parks are out of this world. I know that you can easily dismiss these prime tickets as being owned only by large corporations which can “afford it.” However, ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Rick Latona Speaks His Mind About Domain Auction - Latona explains what went wrong in live domain auction. Rick Latona’s adult domain name auction at The Phoenix Forum didn’t go as well as expected. In an e-mail interview with Domain Name Wire, Latona says what went wrong and his take on live domain auctions at non-domainer events. 1. How do you think the results were? What were you shooting for? Latona: We think the results were terrible and completely unacceptable. I take full responsibility and know that ... read more ...