Monthly Archives: June 2011

Fri 10th June 2011
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Go Daddy To Sell .XXX Domain Names - .XXX domain names coming soon to Go Daddy. In a major win for ICM Registry, Go Daddy announced today that it will offer .xxx domain names to its customers. From the press release: “We’ve said from the beginning … when it comes to dotXXX, we are going to listen to our customers,” said Go Daddy CEO and Founder Bob Parsons. “A large number of our customers have spoken … and there is a demand for the controversial new domain name extension – for both brand ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Did Google Buy Wallet.com? - Domain name changes hands; Google is a possible buyer. Did Google buy the domain name Wallet.com for its new Google Wallet service? [Update: yes, it did.] World Media Group, LLC owned the domain name until the end of March. Then on April 1 the domain name was registered under privacy protection but at CSC, a corporate brand management firm and domain name registrar. Yesterday the whois information for the domain name changed to DNStinations, a group that frequently ... read more ...
Thu 9th June 2011
Written by The Domains in EN
Coupons.com Raises $200 Million - According to Reuters.com, Coupons.com has just raised “$200 million from institutional investors, underscoring the tremendous investor appetite for businesses that help consumers find bargains using the Internet.” “That amount of cash places Coupons.com among a fairly elite group of privately held companies, including Groupon, the deal-a-day service aiming to go public later this year.” “A person familiar with the situation said on Monday that the new investment round valued the ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN
On The Day Data.com Sells For Millions Latona Declares “Domains As Not Worth Much”: Let’s Call This A Market Bottom - Well RickLatona.com wrote on his site the other day that he was switching gears once again and moving into a new direction saying: “We feel that domains just aren’t worth that much anymore” “The domain bubble burst in late 2008.” “Various sites and reports will show you that sales are still strong on the low end of the market, $x,xxx and $xx,xxx sized deals. Occasionally, we’ll even see some 6 and 7 digit deals hit the news.” “However, those are rare and far between. ” “There ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
California Ecommerce Company Agrees to Stop Using UK Domain Names - FTC said company tried to dupe UK consumers into thinking it was a UK company. California online retailer “Balls of Kryptonite” has agreed to stop using .uk domain names as part of a deal with the Federal Trade Commission, according to a story in MediaPost. The FTC said the company used domain names like bestpricedbrands.co.uk and bitesizedeals.co.uk, listed prices in pounds, and said orders shipped via Royal Mail. Why the ruse? Apparently to make customers ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
Why Movie Studios Won’t Pay For Domain Names - Movie studios aren’t willing to pay for great domain names. In an interview with NPR a few weeks ago I noted that movie studios rarely part with their cash for the “ideal” domain name for a movie release. I think one big reason for this is that most people gravitate to review sites and movie listing sites rather than the official site for a movie. They want to hear what other people are saying about the movie and when it is playing rather than the studio’s ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
11 Questions to Ask Before Buying a Developed Web Site - Answer these questions before you buy a web site. The debate about how much a developed web site is worth has been rekindled in the domain name community with Rick Latona’s entrance into the web site brokering business. I interviewed web site broker David Fairley last year to get an idea of how much developed sites are selling for. Anyone considering buying or selling a site should read that article and the linked presentation for an idea of what the market is ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Company Files Cybersquatting Claim Against Twitter Username - Can a Twitter username be cybersquatting? One insurance company thinks so. Here’s an interesting lawsuit I just discovered that attempts to stretch the bounds of the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection act. Insurance company Conventry First has filed a federal lawsuit (pdf) against whomever is using the CoventryFirst username on Twitter, i.e. twitter.com/coventryfirst. But in addition to complaining about plain old trademark infringement, the company has thrown ... read more ...
Wed 8th June 2011
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Official Announcement On Domainfest Live Auction, Now A Online Auction Which Will End Jun 15th - We just received this notice from Oversee regarding the Live auction from DomainFest which was cancelled today due to technical difficulties. The auction will now be held online only and has already started. The online auction will end on a week from today on June 15th at 3:15pm EST. The extended auction will close on June 22nd at 3:15Pm EST. We wish all sellers and buyers best of luck. Here is the official announcement: “”This morning, several of Oversee.net’s web-based services experienced ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
hongwang.com Sells For $16,400 On NameJet.com - The Domain name hongwang.com sold for $16,400 on NameJet.com today. There are 983,000 direct reference on Google to the name Hong Wang which seem to be a popular name in the Asian culture but $16K? In all 112 people were in the auction with 13 people bidding $1K or more and 4 bidding $7,500 or more. In other recent NameJet.com sales: Glutamine.com sold for $9,400 Glutamine is a amino acid ChimneyCap.com Sold for $4,700 BathTowels.Net sold for $4,600 Pov.net sold for $2,100       Google+Michael ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Mike Mann Sells Women.co For $25,000 & Another .Com He Bought A Month Ago For $69 For $13K - According to Mike Mann Facebook page his company just sold Women.co for $25K Also according to his Facebook page Mike sold the domain name ChinaDiscovery.com for $13,000, a domain he just acquired on May 2, of this year; yes just about a month ago for $69. In what other business can you turn $69 into $13K in a month? Congrats to Mike and his team     Google+Michael Berkens ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN
Marc Ostrofsky To Appear On The View On Jun 9th (Tomorrow) - Just announced that Marc Ostrofsky,  will appear tomorrow (June 9th) episode of ABC’s “The View” at 11A.M. EST to “discuss how everyday people, sometimes working from home, are making a good living often using popular social media tools”. “Ostrofsky’s new book, Get Rich Click! The Ultimate Guide to Making Money on the Internet, is a comprehensive how-to guide for those interested in utilizing today’s new Internet tools to become financially ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
QuinStreet Takes a Huge Tumble Down Over 20% Today - Shares of Quinstreet the company that bought insurance.com and Carinsurance.com and Insure.com have tumbled over the last few days and is down over 20% today. Shares of Quinstreet are at 1pm EST sitting at around $11.50 down over $3 on the day. Quinstreet is now off over 50% off its high of $24 this year. The cause of the selling? Revised guidance from the company which now forecasts a weaker-than-expected fiscal 2012 revenue and said growth in its current 4th quarter and 1st Q of next fiscal year ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
UPDATED: DomainFest Live Auction Cancelled & Moved To Next Week - I just received notice from someone attending the Live DomainFest auction in Barcelona that the auction for today has been cancelled due to technical issues and rescheduled for next week. We wrote earlier that SnapNames.com the remote bidding system has been down for hours and Moniker.com is also down. While we await some official word I’m told the domain name auction will be held next Wednesday at the same time 10am EST. Unfortunately for me, I will be traveling to Singapore and will miss the ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN
Moniker.com Is Down Too - We wrote earlier about Snapnames.com being down for the big DomainFest Live domain name auction. It appears that Moniker.com is also inaccessible. Google+Michael Berkens ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Is SnapNames.com Down For DomainFest? - Is SnapNames.com down for DomainFest? I have been trying to connect to Snapnames.com and the direct link to the auction for the past 15 minutes and now at 10:05 Am which is 5 minutes after the auction was suppose to start from Barcelona the site is not coming up. I’ve been told by at least one other reader that the site has been “down for hours” About an Hour ago SnapNames tweeted:  “We are experiencing some unexpected issues. We are working to fix them as soon as possible” If this continues ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
ICANN Responds to U.S. Government Questions About New Top Level Domains - Kurt Pritz responds to Congress. ICANN Senior Vice President Kurt Pritz has responded (pdf) to a written question and expanded on his answers to questioning from U.S. representatives during a hearing about new TLDs on May 4. Representative Howard Coble submitted a written question asking if ICANN was going to make special arrangements for “brand” top level domain names should a brand owner decide to wind down operation of the new top level domain name. At the ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Atlas Shrugged Movie Producers Win 1, Lose 1 - Same panelist. Similar domains. Different result, even on confusing similarity. The producers of the new Atlas Shrugged Movie filed two UDRP cases with World Intellectual Property Forum for essentially the same domains: AtlasShruggedMovie.com and AtlasShruggedMovies.com. They lost the first one and won the second one. Oh, and the same panelist (Richard G. Lyon) heard both cases. And decided them within a day of each other. The facts in the cases differed slightly ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Technical Problems Postpone Moniker Auction - Auction postponed after web sites go down. If you tried to reach most of Oversee.net’s web sites this morning — Oversee.net, SnapNames, or Moniker — you probably ran into difficulty. The timing couldn’t have been worse for the company, which was scheduled to run a live domain name auction from Barcelona this morning U.S. time. The company has officially announced that the auction will be postponed, but the new date hasn’t been set. This isn’t the first ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
ICANN “Hedge” In Singapore Will Kick off New gTLD Communications Plan - I predict new TLD marketing will start after ICANN’s Singapore meeting this month. Just about everyone — including me — is horrible at predicting what ICANN will do and when it will do it regarding new top level domain names. The only people who’ve been right are those that said “it’s not going to happen at this meeting”. That said, I’m going to take another crack at it. Here’s what I predict for this month’s ICANN meeting in Singapore: ICANN ... read more ...
Tue 7th June 2011
Written by The Domains in EN
Afternic.com Sells $525k In Domains Led By APSU.com For $15k - Afternic.com just released its sales for the week ending Sunday June 5th. All reportable domain sales $1k and over totalled $525,766. The top seller of the week was APSU.com followed by PromDresses.org at $11,500. Here is the full list:     Google+Michael Berkens ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Data.com Sold For An Amount “Significantly In Excess Of The $1.5 Million Reserve” - I just got an email from Oversee saying that the domain name Data.com, which was scheduled to be in tomorrow’s DomainFest live auction sold privately today. The domain name Data.com was one of our picks to sell at the auction. The domain had a reserve range of $1M-$5M but according to the announcement the actual reserve was $1.5 Million. The actual selling price was not disclosed. The domain was purchase by SalesForce.com a publicly traded company (NYSE: CRM) with a market cap of almost $19 Billion ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Seomoz.org: 2011 SEO Ranking Factors: Exact Match Domains Less Important; Long Domains Suck; eHow Still In Top 10 - Seomoz.org has just released  data showing the most important ranking factors in for SEO, 2011 edition “”Since 2005, SEOmoz has released a new version of the Search Ranking Factors survey every two years, a piece of content that many in the SEO world have used and referenced. This year, we’ve continued that tradition and added a whole new element of research, comparing the aggregated opinions of 132 SEOs around the world with correlation data from over 10,000 results in Google.” It’s ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
The Biggest Loser Wins Big In A UDRP For TheBiggestLoser.com - The producer of the hit television show, The Biggest Loser won a UDRP against Theodore Lazier on the domain name thebiggestloser.com, finding that the show gained a Common Law Trademark the day the show was announced. While the producer registered US Trademarks in various classes, they were all done so well after the date of the domain registration.” Here are the relevant facts and findings of the one person panel: “Complainant publicly announced the launch of a television program named “The ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Sedo Asks Court to Dismiss Women.com Lawsuit on Jurisdiction Claims - Domain broker says lawsuit should not be heard in California. Done! Ventures has fought and won a jurisdiction battle in its lawsuit over Women.com already. Now it has to gear up for another fight. Sedo, which was recently added to the lawsuit originally filed against GE/NBC Universal for a failed transaction to purchase Women.com and Women.net, has asked the court to dismiss the case on jurisdiction grounds (pdf). According to Sedo’s court filing, Done! Ventures ... read more ...