Author Archives: DomainNameWire

About DomainNameWire

Domain Name Wire is a blog that deals with the domain name sector. The blog covers a range of domain related topics ranging from issues concerning expiring domains, monetization, domain registries and registrars, ICANN, policy, law etc. The blog began in March, 2005, after Mr. Allemann had dropped out of meetings to become involved in domain portfolio company, iREIT. The project began as a hobby to keep him involved in the domaining business, and then became his full-time business.

Tue 14th May 2013
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Now we know because Levi’s purebred track names as it inks understanding with 49ers’ stadium - Company registered domains for new stadium in April. Back in March Domain Name Wire’s crystal ball picked up on Levi Strauss’ plans to buy naming rights to a stadium. But which stadium? Domain Name Wire’s crystal ball couldn’t figure that out, but reader Page Howe did. Howe suggested that the San Francisco company would buy naming rights to the 49ers new stadium in Santa Clara, and recently the naming announcement was made. The crystal ball has been hard at ... read more ...
Mon 13th May 2013
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
HP (sort of) protects domains for new TwoSmiles.com site - Company buys 2Smiles.com domain, but leaves some other obvious ones unregistered. Earlier this month HP launched Two Smiles, a service that combines custom greeting cards with gift cards. In advance of the launch HP bought two key domain names for the venture: TwoSmiles.com, the actual web address for the service, and 2Smiles.com, a domain that likely receives visits from visitors who remember the site name as the digit 2 instead of ‘two’ written out. Based on ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
While we were induction Boston Bombings domains, intelligent people were induction internet taxation domains - Current trends can make for good domain registrations. Just not all of them. I’m always baffled by the number of people that rush to register domains related to current (and horrific) events such as the Boston marathon bombings. First, it’s tasteless. Second, it’s not like they’re ever going to sell these domains, which presumably is their reason for registering them. Yet there are current events that make it worth registering domains… Soon U.S. online retailers ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Armani loses domain brawl for EA7.com - Respondent argued EA was short for Education Assistance. Fashion brand Giorgio Armani has lost a domain name dispute with a South Korean group over the domain name EA7.com. Armani sells a line of sports clothing under the EA7 name. It appears that the EA7 brand was around prior to the domain registrant acquiring the domain name in 2010. However, the domain owner argued that it registered the domain because it stands for its business name “Education Assistance”, ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Angry Birds builder files the initial UDRP - Company goes after site selling Angry Birds merchandise. Rovio Entertainment, the company behind the wildly popular Angry Birds franchise, has filed its first ever domain dispute under the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP). The company is targeting the owner of AngryBirdSite.com and AngryBirdsmart.com. As of right now, AngryBirdSite.com resolves to a web site with an AngryBirdsMart logo that sells products emblazoned with Angry Birds designs. It ... read more ...
Fri 10th May 2013
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
A demeanour during micro TLDs - The world’s smallest active top level domain has seven second level domains. In the world of micro TLDs, .coop looks like a giant. As of January there were 14,990 registered .coop domains.ICANN recently published the latest batch of monthly registry reports, which include data on how many domains are registered in each (non-ccTLD) top level domain. The latest data was for the end of January. There’s a lot of interesting data in these reports. What I find particularly ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
WaterNight becomes central TRAFFIC party - Party moved back one night and becomes official sponsored event. The WaterNight event to take place in Las Vegas during this month’s TRAFFIC show is now the conference’s official Thursday night party. The event was going to be held on Wednesday night and open to everyone. The event was pushed back one evening and is now open to TRAFFIC attendees and non-domain industry supporters. TRAFFIC organizers are donating $50 for each conference goer to attend the event ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
An reason of Demand Media’s understanding with Donuts - SEC filing sheds (some) light on relationship for new top level domains. A lot of fuss has been made about the connection between Demand Media and Donuts and the new TLD program. What exactly is the relationship between the two companies? Demand Media’s latest 10-Q, filed today, explains the terms of the agreement: As part of its initiative to pursue the acquisition of gTLD operator rights, the Company has entered into a gTLD acquisition agreement (“gTLD Agreement”) ... read more ...
Thu 9th May 2013
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Domain name change leads to 20% dump during HomeAdvisor - Switch from ServiceMagic.com to HomeAdvisor.com leads to organic search traffic drop. IAC’s HomeAdvisor business saw a 20% drop in leads after switching domain names.IAC underestimated the challenge from switching its ServiceMagic business to a new domain name, the company disclosed with its first quarter results. The company renamed the business HomeAdvisor, and switched from ServiceMagic.com to HomeAdvisor.com. It was forewarned that the move would be difficult, ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
887,000 .vn IDN domains registered - Vietnam sees rapid IDN registration growth. There were 887,000 .vn internationalized domain names registered as of the end of March, Dot VN, Inc. disclosed this month. Dot VN, Inc. markets Vietnam’s .vn namespace in an agreement with Vietnamese Internet Network Information Center. Some (or perhaps most) of the success with IDNs is because Dot VN convinced VNNIC not to charge registration fees for IDN domains. Dot VN provides free web site creation tools to owners ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Stupid, incompetent, or both? - A Generally Atrocious Communiqué. I’ve learned a lot over the years while writing about the domain industry. In the past three years I’ve learned that if there’s a laborious article I need to research and write that has to do with new TLDs, I can just wait a little while and Kevin Murphy will do it instead. That’s what he’s done with “This is how stupid the GAC’s new gTLDs advice is“. The GAC’s “advice” about new top level domains coming out ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
Want to pattern Domain Name Wire’s new logo? - Submit a design at 99Designs. I’m working on a redesign of Domain Name Wire, and part of that is a refreshed logo. The logo is essentially unchanged since I started this site in 2005. I designed the original logo with a $50 do-it-yourself logo creator software package. What, you can’t tell? A lot has happened since 2005, including the creation of crowd design sites like 99Designs. So I decided to ask lots of people for help designing the new logo by starting ... read more ...
Wed 8th May 2013
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Electronic Arts buys BF4.com for Battlefield 4 (and other finish user sales) - Electronic Arts among the big name buyers at Sedo last week. Sedo had some big sales last week, including Moms.com for $252,000. The whois record for Moms.com still shows Sedo, so we don’t yet know how bought the domain. Here are some of Sedo’s other end user sales last week. Electronic Arts bought BF4.com for $9,000, which is short for its Battlefield 4 game. Australian wedding site EasyWeddings.com.au bought EasyWeddings.co.uk for $1,250. Spy equipment site ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Very active Moniker Spring Auction ends tomorrow - Domain name auction that ends tomorrow has lots of activity. The Moniker Spring Auction on SnapNames doesn’t end until tomorrow, but bidding is already very active. The auction features 199 domain names and 33 of them already have bids. 22 have met their reserve price. The leader so far is StumpRemoval.com, which has an $11,770 bid and has met its reserve. I’ve paid for tree stump removal so I know it’s not a cheap service. That said, an individual tree company ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Frank Schilling: could be 20,000 or 30,000 TLDs in 20 years - Says “these are not pie-in-the-sky” numbers and second level domains could be seen as “antiquated”. Domain name investor Frank Schilling applied for 54 top level domains via his new TLD company Uniregistry. I remember asking him before the new TLD reveal day about what his plans were, and he characterized them as “not big”. 54 doesn’t seem like a big number to me, but when you consider Schilling’s perspective on how the naming system will change in ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
ICANN sends crack notice to vast Argentinian domain registrar - Dattatec late on fees, slow to respond to whois inaccuracy claims. ICANN has sent a breach notice to a relatively large domain name registrar based in Argentina. ICANN claims (pdf) that Dattatec.com, SRL is in breach of a number of provisions of the registrar accreditation agreement. According to the breach notice, Dattatec is not taking reasonable steps to investigate whois inaccuracy complaints, isn’t properly maintaining registration records, and isn’t making ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
22 finish user sales final week - A pharmacy chain, cybersecurity company, and a baseball glove company made domain purchases last week. Afternic sold just over $1 million worth of domains last week. Here are 22 of the purchases that were clearly to end users. Glimmerglass, which offers big data product Cybersweep to extract actionable information for cybercrime, bought CyberSweep.com for $19,000. Examp prep and tutoring company Huntington bought iPrep.com for $7,995. Amplify, a News Corp company, ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Scott Wagner takes COO and CFO positions during Go Daddy - Scott Wagner goes from interim to permanent at GoDaddy. Domain name registrar GoDaddy today announced that Scott Wagner is its new COO and CFO. Wagner took over as interim CEO of the company last summer when Warren Adelman stepped down from the CEO position. He then vacated that position earlier this year to make way for new CEO Blake Irving. Wagner worked for KKR for 13 years, recently as a member of KKR’s portfolio operations team. He became involved with GoDaddy ... read more ...
Tue 7th May 2013
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
My initial domain sale by DomainNameSales.com - I sold my first domain through DNS. What have your experiences been? Last week I completed my first domain sale using the Internet Traffic/DomainNameSales.com platform. One thing that is a bit confusing at first is how the communications work inside the DomainNameSales.com platform. The platform is “open”, meaning you can handle domain inquiries yourself or use a number of third party brokers (including DNS itself, like what I chose). By using an outside broker ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Escrow.com tops $1.5 billion in transactions - Milestone shows that Escrow.com is growing very fast. I seems like just last year that I was writing about Escrow.com topping the $1 billion mark. And that’s because it was just last year that the company announced it had crossed the $1 billion transaction milestone. Now, about 16 months later, Escrow.com says it has already hit $1.5 billion in transactions. It took the company 11 years to hit the first $1 billion and just over a year to hit $1.5 billion, so the ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Demand Media touts new TLDs in latest earnings, domains boost to 14 million - Demand Media puts new TLDs front and center in earnings release. Demand Media just released its first quarter earnings. It reported a slight profit of $0.7M before adjustments. But more interesting to the domain world is the focus the company’s earnings release places on new TLDs. The first paragraph proudly announces that the company has signed up 400 resellers for its new TLDs (though eNom) and has received 2 millions “expressions of interest” from people ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
How Demand Media sees the domain name business - Domain business positioned as end-to-end domain provider, spin-out on track. Demand Media just concluded its first quarter earnings conference call, and much of the talk centered on new TLDs. The company is working to spin out its domain name business into a separate business and expects that to happen by the end of the year or in early 2014. CEO Richard Rosenblatt explained that the company wants to be an end-to-end provider of domain services. The group will continue ... read more ...
Mon 6th May 2013
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
iPad box builder withdraws boneheaded domain complaint - Makers of The Snugg are a bit slow, but I guess they finally got some good advice. Last week I wrote about how Charon International Trading Limited, maker of The Snugg iPad cases, was about to lose its second UDRP domain dispute. Technically, I was wrong. Perhaps realizing the error of its ways, Charon has now withdrawn the UDRP it filed for Snug.com. The Snug.com case would have been its second UDRP loss in two tries. Charon lost its first UDRP when it tried to hijack ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
WaterNight earnings during TRAFFIC Vegas - Fundraising event in Las Vegas this month will benefit Water School. Water School, a non-profit that helps bring clean water to those in developing countries, will host its second WaterNight during TRAFFIC in Las Vegas this month. The group hosted the first WaterNight during WebFest in Santa Monica in February. It was more crowded than the conference itself and it helped raise $40,000 for Water School. Water School executive director Richard Lau had his head shaved ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
.GD is another arise adult call to tech firms about ccTLDs - Does the term “shadow registry” concern you? It should if you own a .gd domain name. Over the past few years startups and tech darlings have increasingly embraced “cute” ccTLDs and domain hacks that include ccTLDs. A key example is bitly. Bitly, which created millions of shortened URLs at Bit.ly, found out that using a ccTLD is not necessarily the safest thing to do. .Ly is the country code for Libya. With everything that happened in Libya over the past couple ... read more ...