Monthly Archives: July 2010

Mon 26th July 2010
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
How A Group Buying Site With A Valuation Over $1 Billion, Bought Its Domain for Just $250K: Groupon.com - If your not familiar with Groupon.com, its a group buying site that sends “you coupons, discount and deals” from merchants. Its one of the group buying sites that the domain blog Fusible.com often writes about. TechCrunch.com,  back in April of this year declared the company had a valuation of $1.35 Billion dollars. Today a blog, Mixergy.com, published an interview with Andrew Mason of Groupon.com who told the story of how it acquired the domain name Groupon.com for just $250,000, long after ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN
WebVisible.com: Average Small Business Spent $2,231 On PPC in Q2 2010 - According to a new report by the internet firm WebVisible (www.webvisible.com), says that the average small business advertiser spent $2,231 on search advertising in Q2 2010, up 1.4% from Q1 2010 and 159% over over Q2 2009. The most popular advertiser categories in Q2 2010 were attorneys, general contractors and dentists.  Air conditioning contractors, landscapers, and businesses offering irrigation services, fencing and awnings increased seasonal spending from Q1 to Q2 2010. The WebVisible ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Google’s Global Search Share Declines - According to research firm Strategy Analytics, Google’s share of the global online search market fell to 69.7% in the second quarter from 71.1% in the first quarter. Baidu the largest search engine in China, now has a global share nearly as large as that of Microsoft  and Yahoo .  The report shows that Baidu’s global market share is 4.5% compared to 4.8% for Microsoft and 5.4% for Yahoo. The total global advertising search market was $6.2 billion, up 2.2% from the first quarter. The Microsoft ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Think a Domain Renewal Scam is Bad? Check out MediaNetCom. - Company will help me protect my trademark by listing it on its low traffic web site for $1,117.00. One of the more frustrating and misleading domain name shenanigans is the fake renewal notice. This notice, often sent via postal mail and disguised as an invoice, gets unsuspecting businesses to pay to renew their domain name. At the same time, they are unknowingly consenting to transferring their domain to a new registrar. It’s bad. It’s misleading. It’s ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
After 3,000 Emails, No Consensus on Registry-Registrar Separation - Still no general consensus on registry-registrar separation for new TLDs. With names such as RACK+, “Free Trade”, and CAM3, you can be excused for confusing proposals for registry-registrar separation on new TLDs with exotic subprime mortgage bonds or off-balance sheet Enron subsidiaries. But these are names of three of the six proposals for integrating the traditionally separate roles of registrars (e.g. Go Daddy, eNom) and registries (e.g. VeriSign, Neustar) ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Fairwinds Reduces Assumption of CPC on TypoSquatting Sites, But Still $2.03 - Fairwinds updates faulty report, but it’s still laughable. Last month FairWinds Partners, the group behind CADNA, released a report suggesting that typosquatting costs the 250 most visited web sites $327 million a year. I immediately smelled something fishy about the biggest underlying assumption in the report: the average cost-per-click on ads on typosquatted domains was pegged at a lofty $2.74 per click. The report referenced a VeriSign report for its CPC value. ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
.Biz Was a Most Popular Billboard Domain on a Recent Car Trip - Stretch of I-70 is a big promo for .biz domain name. This past weekend I took my daughter to St. Louis to visit her great-grandfather. We flew into St. Louis, and then drove 75 minutes along I-70 to his house. You may be surprised by the domain name I saw most often on billboards on I-70: .biz.* Why the asterisk? Well, it was mostly one company with a .biz domain name. Porlier Outdoor Advertising has a ton of billboards along I-70 between St. Louis and Kansas ... read more ...
Sun 25th July 2010
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Shouldn’t Registrars At Least Mention That .Co Is The Country Code For Colombia? - I know .CO has done a great job of branding itself as something other than a country code, along the lines of .Me. Nothing wrong with that at all. Brilliant effective marketing. But I couldn’t help but notice that the major registrars promoting .CO domains don’t even mention that .Co is a ccTLD, or more precisely the country code for Colombia. Here is what Godaddy.com, has to say about .CO: “Co Is the first truly global, recognizable domain to come along in years” “Understood around the ... read more ...
Sat 24th July 2010
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
.Co Is Now #2 On GoDaddy.com Drop Down Registration Menu Right Behind .Com: Who Is The Big Loser? - If you ever registered a domain name over at Godaddy.com you know that they have a drop down menu for extensions. So if you wanted to register a domain, you type the domain without the extension into the first box and then select the extension that you want in the second drop down box. Since Godaddy.com at last report was the registrar of choice for 50% of all new domain registrations, where an extension falls on the drop down menu is pretty important. At the moment Godaddy.com of course puts .com ... read more ...
Fri 23rd July 2010
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
OnlineCasino.Dk Sold For $580K - According to BusinessWire.com the domain name www.onlinecasino.dk just sold for $580,000 to a Gaming company based in Malta. .dk is the country code of Denmark. You can also read more about this sale here. Google+Michael Berkens ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
HollywoodVideo.com. Reel.com, MovieGallery.com, GameCrazy.com All Hitting The Bankruptcy Auction Block - Variety.com is reporting that the domain names HollywoodVideo.com, MovieGallery.com GameCrazy.com and Reel.com, are all hitting the auction block. “”A bankruptcy court judge has approved hiring Streambank, a firm specializing in the sale of intellectual property, to find new owners for the trademarks, domain names and databases for Hollywood Video, Movie Gallery, Game Crazy and Reel.com. The parent company, Movie Gallery, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in February and is selling ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Huddle.com Sells For Whopping $131,400 On NameJet.com - Wow. The domain name Huddle.com just sold for $131,400 on NameJet.com today. The Winning bidders Id is simply “bnd” who outbid “newyorker” to get the domain. Huddle.net is a huge site which gets over 100,000 visitors a month according to Compete.com and has a 21K ranking on Alexa. Huddle.net is registered under privacy at Tucows. Here is what Huddle.net site says: Huddle Enterprise enables secure collaboration between organizations. It helps all people involved in the success of your business ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
E.Co Back Up For Sale But Now The Price Is $500K - I just got a note from Sedo.com that the domain name E.Co, which was just purchased for $81K in June, is back up for sale with a new price tag of $500K. After the successful launch of the .CO registry and the sale of O.CO to Overstock.com for $350K, the owners are looking for what might be the quickest, most profitable domain flip in history. Ryan Colby is handling the sale for Sedo. Google+Michael Berkens ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Cloud.com Floats Higher with Good Domain Name - Cloud computing company gets more marketing punch with good domain name. Cloud.com VP of Business Development Shannon Williams admits that he wasn’t a huge believer in the power of a generic domain name for marketing. But when the opportunity for his company to purchase Cloud.com was discussed internally, he finally came around. Now he is a believer. I caught up with Williams during HostingCon this week in Austin. He explained some of the benefits of having the ... read more ...
Thu 22nd July 2010
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Quick Poll: Which Domain(s) Priced From $250K-$500K Will Sell At DomainFest? - I just ended the week long poll I was running on which domain you thought would sell at the The live domain name auction at Domainfest which will be held in New York on August 18th of those domain names with a reserve price range $100K-$250K . “None will Sell” got the most votes, about 31% of the voters, with the most voted on domain name being dating.net. We’ll see how you did in a few weeks. This weeks poll is for the 16 domain names with a reserve range of $250K-$500K. As always place ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Congratulations, .Co. Now a Real Work Begins. - Relaunch was successful, but hard work remains. It comes as little surprise to me, but it’s now apparent that the .co launch has been successful. As of now, 279,000 .co domain names have been registered. I calculate gross sales of about $19 million to date. There are a number of reasons I’m not surprised by the initial success of .co. I outlined many of these in my last newsletter. But regardless of how or why it has charged out of the gate, and regardless ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Court Ruling on Baidu v. Register.com Has Implications for Domain Registrars - Court says registrars can’t get away with gross negligence just because it’s in their TOS. Domain name registrars, take note: you can’t just claim no responsibility for your actions in your terms of service and expect a court to uphold it. That’s exactly what Register.com tried to do in a lawsuit brought by Baidu. If all the allegations are true, Register.com really screwed up on this one. Yet it claimed Baidu couldn’t hold it accountable because it agreed ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Google to Treat .Co as International Domain - Domain won’t be pigeon-holed to just Colombia in search engine’s eyes. [Update: since some people asked, I successfully confirmed this with Google.] One of the concerns registrants of .co domain names have voiced is if Google will treat the domain as specific to Colombia instead of a generic, international domain name. This is a valid concern given that country code domain names are the top factor Google considers when figuring out who content is created for. ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
GrubHub Gets It All Backwards in Domain Dispute - A battle for foodies. Online food delivery portal GrubHub.com has lost a domain name dispute against the owner of HubGrub.com, with a National Arbitration Forum panelist finding against GrubHub.com on all counts. It’s an interesting case for a few reasons. First, it points out there might be confusion of word order when you use a two word domain name. This is something for entrepreneurs to think about; they might want to get both versions of their domain name. Second, ... read more ...
Wed 21st July 2010
Written by The Domains in EN
Facebook Hits 500 Million Users - According to USA Today, Facebook.com signed up its 500,000,000 member this week. I know its a lot of zeros but Facebook.com now has 500 Million members. For those keeping track that is up from about 100 million members just two years ago. Facebook added 100 million new members since just February 2010. On an average day 115 million “friendships” are confirmed, members post about 400,000 events. About 70% of Facebook’s users now live outside of the United States, with the Middle East, Indonesia, ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN
Why Is Oversee.net Parking Some of Its Own Domains On Hitfarm? - Its been pointed out to me that Oversee.net, which owns its own parking platform at DomainSponsor.com,  is parking at least some of its company owned domains at HitFarm.com. If you check out the following domains for example you will see they are all owned by  “OS Portfolio Holdings, LLC Care of Oversee Domain Management, LLC”, listing as admin contact of admin@overseedomainmanagement.com, with an address matching that of Oversee.net yet they are all going to a HitFarm parked page, and even ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
And So a .CO Aftermarket Begins, Already Over 100 Domains on Sale - Well just a few hours after the registrations for the .CO extension opened up there are already over 100 .co domains for sale on the aftermarket Over at Godaddy.com there are around 100 .co domains for sale. The prices range from Feline.co which has a “buy it now” price of $250 all the way up to Thegambing.co which has a buy it now of $50K. Of course as you would expect there are some three letter .co and three number .co for sale along with some trademark terms. The one that sums it up best ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Domain Roundtable Goes to a Bahamas in March - Conference makes its return in a very nice location. After taking a year off, Thought Convergence’s Domain Roundtable is making a return in 2011 in a big way: a trip to the Bahamas. The event will take place March 1-4, 2011 at Atlantis in the Bahamas. Other details are not yet available. Last month I asked readers to participate in a poll asking where you’d prefer to see a domain conference: Hawaii or Bahamas. The response was fairly evenly split between the ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Glass Company Files Trademark for Company Name as TLD .Schott - Company wants trademark for .Schott. German glass and component company Schott AG has filed a trademark application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for “.schott” for “Registration of domain names (legal services); management of domain names; renting or leasing of domain names; allocation of domain names; trading in domain names.” This is an interesting move that means one of two things: 1. The company plans to acquire its own top level domain name ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
JPNIC Argues Companies Shouldn’t Be Able to Get Corporate Top Level Domain Names - Group says new TLDs aren’t meant for single brands that don’t offer second level domains to the public. One of the understood use cases for new top level domain names is a company creating .brand. Canon has already expressed its intentions to apply for .canon. But in comments by Japan Network Information Center, which provides allocation and registration services of IP addresses and AS numbers in Japan, says this clearly isn’t the purpose of new TLDs: The ... read more ...