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 13th August 2014
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Verisign: 3% of new TLD registrations enclose business websites - Parked domains make up the bulk of new TLD registrations. Verisign analyzed registrations of new top level domain names to determine how second level registrations under these new domain names are being used. The analysis determined that just 3% of domains registered so far are being used for a “business website” and the majority of domains are parked: The breakdown is much more nuanced than what the company presents about its own TLDs, .net and .com. When it ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Amazon launches Square competitor, snaps adult 100 domain names - Company registered 100 related domain names ahead of latest product launch. Today Amazon.com launched Amazon Local Register, a mobile credit card merchant solution similar to Square. Yesterday the company registered close to 100 new domain names for the new service, by my count. Of the companies I track, Amazon does the most defensive domain name registrations when it releases new products. The company has over 35,000 registered domain names. These domains will ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
What domain names Shell and other finish users bought final week - Shell buys a .IN, liquor company buys a .club. Shell Oil is among the big companies that bought domain names last week at Sedo. You can view previous lists like this here. If you’d like to learn how to sell your domain names like these on Sedo, download this report. Chat.fr and Chat.de 99,999 EUR and 65,000 EUR – I’m not sure if I should clasify these as under user purchases because the buyer is domain investor Xedoc. However, I imagine the domains were purchased ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
Internet marketer goes to prison, registers his invalid series as domain name - Well known online marketer starts a blog that uses his inmate number. You might not know Shawn Hogan by name, but it’s possible you’ve heard about him. He runs the Digital Point marketing forum. He also made a mint from affiliate marketing. How he made much of that money in affiliate marketing ended up landing him in prison. He made tens of millions of dollars from eBay’s affiliate program, but eBay later said that he did it by cookie stuffing. Hogan alleged ... read more ...
Tue 12th August 2014
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
ICANN publishes updated new TLD Auction schedule - Delays now require all-party consent, so contention set resolution should accelerate. ICANN has published an updated “auction of last resort” schedule for new top level domain names. It’s harder for individual applicants to postpone these auctions now that the framework for handling name collisions is finalized. Postponements are now only possible if all parties in the contention set agree to the postponement. In that case, auctions can be postponed up to two ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Tucows reports clever gain growth…from phone service - Ting powers Tucows to growth in Q2. Tucows released earnings for Q2 2014 after the bell today. It was a strong quarter for the company, which owns domain name reseller service OpenSRS. Revenue was up 14% compared to Q2 2013 and net earnings per share doubled. Don’t thank the domain name business for that growth. Although the domain business did OK, the growth driver was Tucows’ mobile phone service Ting. Ting revenue was up 121% compared to the same quarter last ... read more ...
Mon 11th August 2014
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
This week in new TLDs: medical and financial domain names - Medical Donuts exit EAP, financial Donuts enter. A slow week for new top level domain names is on tap. Donuts is the only company with new releases hitting general availability this week. That means all of the action takes place on Wednesday. .Care, .Clinic, .Surgery and .Dental come out of the Early Access Program and revert to regular pricing. .Care is in Donuts’ middle price tier and the other three are at the highest price level. That’s not surprising for ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Biggest new TLD surprises (upside and downside) - We’re closing in on 200 top level domain names being released in general availability, and there have been quite a few surprises. Some domains have done better than I expected and others have done much worse. I’ll list a few here, and I’m curious what you think. Let’s start with three that have done better than I expected: 1. .Guru 67,322 registrations (zone file) Would .guru have this much momentum if it wasn’t released at the beginning of the program? ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Verisign: Internet grew by 5 million domain names in Q1 - Domain Name Industry Brief shows continued growth of registered domain names. Verisign released its Domain Name Industry Brief (pdf) today , estimating that the total base of registered domain names grew by 5 million to 276 million in Q1 this year. (Yes, that’s Q1 — not the most recently concluded quarter.) That’s 1.7% more than at the end of Q4, and 7.5% growth year-over-year. The base of country code domain names grew at a faster clip than gTLDs, with a 2.9% ... read more ...
Sun 10th August 2014
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
A good snyopsis of Verisign’s corner contract - Investor does a pretty good job explaining how Verisign has a license to print money. Verisign has a wonderful license to print money. Its contract with ICANN to run .com allows it to charge $7.85 per .com domain name registered. The company enjoys fat 55% operating margins as a result. Stephen Pomeroy of Pomeroy Capital Partners, L.P. recently sent a letter to his limited partners about Verisign (of which his fund is a stockholder) and published it on SeekingAlpha. The ... read more ...
Sat 9th August 2014
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Oh, great: someone is SMS spamming Whois -

sms-spam-2

I theory those emails a spammers send we after we register a domain name aren’t effective enough.

Don’t click a link, even out of curiosity. Your mobile phone series is appended to a URL, so they’ll know we got a message.

Via: domainnamewire.com

Fri 8th August 2014
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
End user domain name purchases including State Street and Live Person - State Street and LivePerson among domain name buyers. Sedo sold 632 domain names last week for a total of $1.7 million. Their highest reported sale was just $25,100, which means there were one or more big ticket sales that were confidential. Here are some of the domain names that were purchased by end users. You can view previous lists like this here. If you’d like to learn how to sell your domain names like these on Sedo, download this report. EasyBook.com 13,500 ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
This week’s lapsed domain name sales - NameJet kicks off our list of last week’s expired domain auctions with a category-defining domain that blends Employment, Travel, and Leisure — the $15k sale of HospitalityJobs.com. Thereafter, we’ve got 2 “soft” domains in a row, roughly totaling $10k between them. And it turns out 4 of the domains I pointed to in last week’s article finished in the $2.1k to $2.6k range: InternetGaming.com, MobileDating.com, AdultOnline.com, and DistanceLearning.org. iBud.com ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
A demeanour inside Google’s new domain name registrar - Google Domains offers a simple way for businesses to establish a web presence, but not much more. It’s been a little over a month since Google announced its domain name registration service, and I got access to the beta today. Google Domains is what I expected it to be: a no-frills experience designed to make it dead simple to get online. I started by searching for available domain names. I read an article yesterday about cocktails being dispensed by tap, so I ... read more ...
Thu 7th August 2014
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Use HTTPS? Google will give we a strike in hunt rankings. - Search ranking change should be good news for domain name registrars. Google announced this morning that it’s starting to give extra credit in search results to companies offering websites secured by SSL. That means sites where you see httpS:// might show up higher in search results than those without added encryption. Google explains the added ranking factor in a post on its blog: …over the past few months we’ve been running tests taking into account whether ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Picking a baby name formed on domain name availability - Site generates list of available domain names for naming a baby. A lot of domain name registrars have pushed out PR in recent years about parents snapping up a domain name for their newborn babies. I have one matching my daughter’s name, and even registered them up for my nieces and nephews should they ever want to use them. A new site aims to help parents name their baby by telling them what domain names are available. Call it crazy, but it’s kind of fun. Just ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
GoDaddy owner Bob Parsons spends $1M on Christine Jones’ run for governor - Parsons paying for attack ads against former employee’s competition for Governor. GoDaddy founder Bob Parsons is lending a helping hand to his former employee Christine Jones. Jones, who was GoDaddy’s general counsel, is now running for governor of Arizona. Parsons said he has already spent $1M funding Better Leaders for Arizona, which is running attack ads against competitor Doug Ducey. He might spend more. Parsons’ role in the ads was suspected after one of ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
This week .Rocks, really not a .Fail week - .Rocks is the top TLD of the week. On Tuesday I questioned if this week would be a big .fail for new TLDs, or if it would .Rock. We now have a (relative) answer. Rightside’s .Rocks was the top domain name launch of the week. So, by that definition, it .rocks. Here’s a look at the total registration numbers as of the overnight zone files for domains that launched this week: .rocks 5191 .网址 1,565 .limited 1098 .wtf 977 .reise 892 .financial 758 .fail 634 .actor 572 .网址 ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
ICANN 51 site shows humorous twitter from satire Chehade account - Unfiltered tweet feed on ICANN website pokes fun at .xyz giveways. Like many meetings/conferences, ICANN publishes a tweetstream on its page for each meeting. That includes the site for the upcoming ICANN 51 meeting in Los Angeles, which pulls in all tweets with the hashtag #icann51. The conference is still a couple months away, so you won’t find many relevant tweets about the event. It’s also an unfiltered feed. Which is what makes it funny. There are a bunch ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Rightside only expelled the initial gain report - Revenue and earnings slip year-over-year, but that was expected. Rightside today released its first quarterly earnings report after being spun off from Demand Media. The company, which started trading as NAME on the NASDAQ this Monday, posted total revenue of $46.7 million and a net loss of ($3.5) million. Both revenue and earnings were lower than what the group grossed in the second quarter of 2013, due to a sharp drop in its “Aftermarket” revenue. Aftermarket ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
My takeaways from Rightside’s initial financier call - Naidu makes his pitch to analysts; company discloses some numbers on parking and domain sales. Rightside just concluded its first ever investor conference call as a standalone company. CEO Taryn Naidu and CFO Tracy Knox spent much of the time explaining Rightside’s market position to help frame the conversation with analysts. That market position is largely betting on the success of new top level domain names. The company explained how its margins as a registry ... read more ...
Wed 6th August 2014
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
4 subscription domain name services we use - Here are four subscription-based domain name services I use regularly. There are a lot of great subscription-based services for the domain name industry. Here are four that I use on a regular basis. FreshDrop $19.95 per month FreshDrop is my go-to source for finding the best expiring domain names. A recent redesign might take long-time users a bit to get used to, but Freshdrop has a number of powerful filtering tools under the hood. I’ve used FreshDrop to find a ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
One of my favorite 3 minute domain names, pleasantness of Coke - Coke makes you say Ahh. I took a mini-vacation to San Antonio with my family this week, including a trip to Six Flags. It was there that I was reminded of one of my favorite uses of a three letter domain name: Ahh.com. It’s not the usual use of a three letter domain name (acronyms). It’s not a word. Heck, it probably even fails the radio test. Yet the promotional site for Coke is a great use of a three letter domain name. They actually use a bunch of similar ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
2 really peculiar UDRP cases explain “technological confusion” - Part of brand is in domain names, but you have to look closely for it. I was rather confused a couple months ago when I saw fashion designer Philipp Plein filed UDRPs against peopleincasinos.com and supportpeopleinneed.org. Both sites featured clothing that the sites claimed was authentic Philipp Plein clothing. But what did these domain names have to do with Philipp Plein? Well, take a look at the domain names again: PeoPLEINcasinos.com SupportPeoPLEINneed.org The ... read more ...
Tue 5th August 2014
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
.WTF, will this week’s new domains .fail? Or maybe this week .rocks! - A couple gripe domains launch along with a Chinese IDN and German domain name. This week’s new TLD launches include an IDN, a German travel domain almost identical to one that launched last week, the usual handful of Donuts domains, plus a few new from Rightside. On Tuesday, August 5, Hu Yi Global releases the IDN .网址. The Chinese domain name translates to “website”. On Wednesday, dotreise GmbH will release .reise, which is German for travel. If that sounds ... read more ...