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.

Wed 28th September 2011
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Shorter .Org Domain Names May Be On The Way - Public Interest Registry asks for permission to allocate one and two character .org domain names. .Org domain name registry Public Interest Registry is asking (pdf) ICANN to allow it to allocate certain one and two character .org domain names. PIR’s contract with ICANN currently prohibits registering these short .org domain names. PIR wants to allocate any such domains excluding ones that correspond to a country code. There’s a model for releasing these domains ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Sex.co Gets Close to 11k Visits Per Month - Domain up for auction gets solid traffic. About a year ago the owners of Sex.co put the domain up for sale on Sedo and started parking it there, too. Now that the domain name is up for sale in next month’s TRAFFIC auction, I figured I’d check in on the domain to see what sort of traffic it gets. According to the Sedo listing page, the site got about 10,800 visits over the past 31 days. Given the number of visits to the Sedo listing page you have to wonder if some ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
DOMAINfest Announces Party Venues for Next Year’s L.A. Conference - A trip to an automotive museum and House of Blues. Social events for next year’s DOMAINfest Global event in Los Angeles will be held at differenct locations than years’ past. The Wednesday dinner networking event will be at the Petersen Automotive Museum. The museum has a large collections of race cars, classic cars, hot rods, motorcycles, and celebrity cars. After three years at the Playboy Mansion, the farewell party will move to the House of Blues. This is ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Amazon’s New Products and Its Domain Name Scorecard - Company gets key domains but misses some others. Amazon.com released a slew of new products today: a new basic Kindle, the Kindle Touch, Kindle Touch 3G, Kindle Fire, and Amazon Silk. The company is known for aggressively registering variations and typos of its brand names. Let’s see how they did for this product launch: Kindle Fire – as I wrote about yesterday, Amazon bought this domain name. However, it appears someone else may have registered the typo wwwKindleFire.com. Kindle ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
What Domain KPMG, Clemson University, and Others Bought This Past WE - A weekly round up of end user domain name purchases. Here’s a look at domain names end users bought through Afternic last week. Entrepreneur.com bought ClubEntrepreneur.com for $5,000 one week after picking up EntrepreneurAwards.com for $2,088. KPMG Meijburg Co bought TaxControl.com for $2,388. You know how cute spellings of your name create confusion? It looks like Xpert Auto Repair Inc., which owns xpertauto.net, figured that out. It bought ExpertAuto.net for ... read more ...
Tue 27th September 2011
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
.Mobi Turns Five - Mobile domain reaches five year anniversary. Five years ago yesterday .Mobi launched its landrush period, officially opening the doors to what would become a wild roller coaster for domain investors. Remember Flowers.mobi? I quickly came full circle on .mobi. I remember meeting the .mobi team at DomainRoundtable in Seattle and thinking “Wow, this is a new domain extension that actually makes sense.” But technology quickly caught up. Mobile web access became less ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
You Must Read This Before Developing Your Domains - Why developing your domain names might be a bad idea. From time to time I read excellent blog posts that explain aspects of domaining much better than I can. Nat Cohen delivered yesterday with a post titled “The Dangers of Optimism -or- Don’t Develop“. His point in a nutshell: just because you’re a good domainer or have good domains doesn’t mean you can build a web business. It’s very true. They require very different skills. I’ve seen countless web ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
The Return of WWW. - www. will make a comeback with new top level domain names. Type in any correctly configured domain name and you don’t need to include www. Technically www is merely a subdomain. That’s why you usually see ads that just promote something like DNW.com instead of www.DNW.com. People know it’s a web address because of the .com. I started thinking about this today when I was dropping my daughter off at school. I was behind a truck that had a URL with www on it: www.somename.us. Was ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Go Daddy’s Real Number: 225 Million - Registrar has 50 million domains on the books. But how about over time? This past weekend Go Daddy topped the 50 million domain name mark. This number is kind of like a balance sheet: it means the company has 50 million domain names currently registered with it. But what about the longer view? I asked Go Daddy for some indication of how many domains it has registered over time. Since it became a registrar, Go Daddy has registered more than 225 million years worth ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Moniker Accepting Submissions for Premium Year-End Auction - Company to hold month long auction with just 50 domains. Moniker is holding a premium domain name auction starting next month that will be limited to 50 top domains. The auction will run for a full month beginning October 1820. Domain submissions are due by October 13. The company is looking for good 1-2 word generic domain names or 1-4 character domains. If Moniker does this right I think it could be a good opportunity for sellers. The company has had a solid year ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Amazon.com Buys KindleFire.com Domain Name - Yes, Amazon.com owns KindleFire.com. Amazon is rumored to be launching the Kindle Fire tablet and eReader on Wednesday. But a lot of people have asked, “what about the domain name?” After all, the company owns a lot of other nature Kindle domains, such as KindleWave.com. Domain Name Wire has confirmed with the previous owner of the domain name that he sold it to Amazon.com. The New York resident who sold the domain name didn’t divulge any details, but the domain ... read more ...
Mon 26th September 2011
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Domain Registrar HiChina May Go Public in U.S. - Parent company considers spinning off registrar it bought two years ago. Alibaba’s domain name registrar HiChina may be spun off into a public offering in the United States according to a filing with the Hong Kong stock exchange. Alibaba paid $79 million for a controlling stake in HiChina in 2009. HiChina could be considered the “Go Daddy of China”. This begs the question if Go Daddy should buy the company. As it turns out, one of Go Daddy’s new owners Silver ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Oversee.net Blasts Monte Cahn’s Amended Lawsuit - Oversee.net continues to say lawsuit with Monte Cahn is merely about contract claims. Oversee.net has filed a motion to dismiss (pdf) numerous claims in Monte Cahn’s second amended lawsuit. The motion to dismiss starts out with this telling line: “Apparently, the third time is not the charm.” The second amended lawsuit was the third complaint brought by Cahn. Oversee.net claims Cahn’s latest complaint is “fundamentally flawed”. It asks the court to dismiss ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Exit Strategy for Domainers: How to Sell Your Portfolio in a Hurry - How to sell your portfolio in a hurry. A reader emailed me the other day asking if I’ve ever written about exit strategies for domainers. I don’t think I have, but it’s a good idea. So here it goes. The problem with exiting the domain industry. Most domain names aren’t very liquid. They can be sold quickly but not at full market value. A good portfolio of non-traffic generics turns over about 2% to 3% a year without pushing the sales out. You can achieve ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Go Daddy Hit 50 Million Domain Milestone Over Weekend - Big milestone for world’s largest domain name registrar. Last week I said Go Daddy was going to hit 50 million domains sometime this week. Turns out the world’s insatiable appetite for domain names made it happen a bit faster than predicted: Go Daddy says it hit the milestone over the weekend. The lucky registrant who will now get added exposure for his domain name? Kranthi Kumar Kukkala of India. Kukkala registered DBAkit.com. Fortunately for him the site about ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
Group Wants to Commercialize .NA But Is Getting Ahead of Itself - Premature press release discusses re-launch of .na. Could the African country of Namibia be the next to capitalize on a commercialized TLD, a la .tv or .co? A consortium within the country would like to, but it may be getting ahead of itself. I received a press release from Groot Group this morning that announces: In an effort to help businesses and marketers around the world specifically target their online customers, the .NA domain extension is due to launch this ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Sedo Introduces CNAME Parking - Parking company touts benefits over DNS. Domain parkers have only a few days left before the end of URL forwarding for Google parking. For most people that means switching to DNS parking. But there’s another option at some parking companies, including CNAME. CNAME parking basically lets you point the web traffic for a domain to the parking servers. It’s how Google’s own Adsense for Domains self-serve product originally worked. It’s a bit more work the first ... read more ...
Sun 25th September 2011
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Facebook Registers FBPAC Domains Previously Owned by American Farm Bureau - Facebook makes intriguing domain registrations. Facebook has yet to settle an ongoing trademark dispute with American Farm Bureau despite paying millions to buy the FB.com domain name from it. Now Facebook may have upped the ante, registering FBPAC.org and FBPAC.us. The two domain names were previously registered to American Farm Bureau until they expired in 2009. American Farm Bureau owns FBPAC.com and FBPAC.net. Although the farmer lobbying group doesn’t operate ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Roche Loses Control of 454.com, Fights to Get It Back - Pharma company loses key domain name. [Update: Roche has won the domain arbitration.] Roche subsidiary 454 Life Sciences has lost control of its 454.com domain name and is asking a UDRP panel to help it get it back. The history on 454.com is intriguing. Piecing it together with the help of DomainTools’ historical whois, there are several times over the past two years when this domain name may have been compromised. But earlier this month it suddenly was under a ... read more ...
Sat 24th September 2011
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Is this Trademark Lawsuit Unethical or Something Worse? - Trying to get a domain name that existed before your trademark. I’m a big supporter of intellectual property rights. Unfortunately I’m stuck writing more often about lawyers and companies that overstep their bounds. The latest case: Smart Tax Holdings, LLC. The company filed a federal lawsuit (pdf) against Marchex for the domain name SmartTax.com. The plaintiff started using the name “Smart Tax” in 2006 and filed a trademark on it. The trademark was granted ... read more ...
Fri 23rd September 2011
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Google AdSense to Start Displaying Gambling Ads - AdSense to show gambling ads, but with a number of caveats. Google Adsense will start showing gambling ads on its publishers web sites starting September 27, but many people will never see them. The ads will only show up for people visiting the site from a country where online gambling is legal. In other words, don’t expect to see them any time soon in the United States. Also, ads won’t show up on a site unless the AdSense publisher has opted in to showing gambling ... read more ...
Thu 22nd September 2011
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Etsy Upset About “Sucks” Domains - Company files complaint over EtsySucks.com and four other domains. [Update: Etsy won the case.] Arts marketplace Etsy.com has filed a complaint with National Arbitration Forum over EtsySucks.com, .net, .org, .biz, and .info. The domain names appear to be owned by the former editor of the now defunct “Unofficial Etsy News Blog”. Etsy has received its fair share of criticism from current and former users, so it’s no surprise that these domain names exist. Freedom ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
Are Fewer People “Playing Around” With Domains? - Number of people part-timing with domain names seems to have fallen. Many sectors of the domainer industry have experienced a steep fall since about 2007. Has the number of people dabbling in domain names also dropped? I suspect so. Over the past year or two I’ve noticed a drop in the number of hangers on. I think we’ve seen this at domain industry shows, on domain forums, and perhaps even on blogs. People that used to comment all the time have simply disappeared. ... read more ...
 
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Cricket Communications Dismisses Case Against Cricket.com Owners - Cricket.com to remain with current owners. Wireless company Cricket Communications has dismissed with prejudice a lawsuit it brought against the owners of Cricket.com. Cricket Communications sued Global Cricket Ventures alleging that the site about the cricket sport was merely a coverup to show ads related to wireless phones. The mobile phone company said that Global Cricket Ventures had hardcoded a Cricket Wireless logo onto its site to look like it was merely part ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Go Daddy Poised to Hit 50 Million Domain Milestone Next Week - A big milestone for the biggest domain name registrar. The Go Daddy Group, which includes domain name registrar GoDaddy.com, is likely to cross the 50 million domain milestone next week. The company hit 45 million domains registered just nine months ago in December. The 50 million domains number represents the total number registered at a point in time. If you add up all the domains registered over time the number would be much higher. As of the end of May GoDaddy.com ... read more ...