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.

Mon 9th June 2014
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
GoDaddy files to go open (again) - GoDaddy says “It’s Go Time” for IPO. GoDaddy has filed its S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission. This will be the company’s second attempt at an initial public offering. It originally filed to go public in 2006, but later shelved its plans. The company found another way to exit in 2011 when it found an investor in KKR, Silver Lake, and Technology Crossover Ventures. Parsons remained the individual single shareholder in the company after the investment. ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
8 Things We Learned from GoDaddy’s IPO filing - GoDaddy filed its S-1 today to go public. I’ve skimmed the 250 pages to compile these seven data points that weren’t previously known. 1. GoDaddy has a lot of customers: 11.548M, to be exact. 2. The company had 2013 revenue of $1.13B. It breaks down like this: $672M from domains (and add-ons like privacy), $381M from hosting and $77M from business apps. Oh, and 24% of the revenue comes from its Customer Service reps selling to customers. 3. Its GAAP loss was $199.9M ... read more ...
Fri 6th June 2014
Written by DomainNameWire in EN
Top 5 Domain Name Wire Stories from May - Sex sells. For millions. Here’s a look back at the top five stories on Domain Name Wire last month: 1. Sex.xxx domain name sells as part of $5 million deal – ICM Registry sold Sex.com for $3 million as part of a $5 million package of domain names. 2. DropCatch.com enters the expired domain business with a bang – new expired domain name service is a strong competitor. 3. Is Shutterstock worried about a boycott? – the stock photo site bought domain names related ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
By a Numbers: .XYZ, .Reviews lead this week’s new TLD launches - .XYZ clocks in at over 10,000 registrations and results from eight other new TLD launches. I count nine new top level domain names that launched this week, as I previewed on Monday. The top domain in terms of registrations was .xyz, although I’m not sure what the actual number of true registrations is. Technically there are 67,504 in the zone file…but most of these were given away free to Network Solutions customers who didn’t ask for them. Still, I believe ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Malaysian association guilty of Reverse Domain Name Hijacking for Spritzer.com - Bottled water company guilty of reverse domain name hijacking. Chuan Sin Sdn. Bhd of Taiping, Perak, Malaysia has been found guilty of reverse domain name hijacking in its attempt to get the domain name Spritzer.com through a UDRP. The complainant operates a bottled water company and uses the domain name Spritzer.com.my. (A “spritzer” in most parts of the world is a drink made of wine and carbonated water.) It tried to get a trademark for “spritzer” in the ... read more ...
Thu 5th June 2014
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
EDR: A demeanour during 150 lapsed domain name auctions from a past week - This week’s Expired Domain Report from Joseph Peterson has close to 150 expired domain name auctions from last week. As always, some of the prices paid are head-scratchers. One thing organizations are good at … is dropping the ball.  Take this week’s top-selling expired domain auction, for instance. MobiLoans.com seems to have purchased MobileLoans.com in December, 2011.  Last April, the domain expired; and now NameJet has sold it for a whopping $30k.  Although ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Company pays $600,000 in auction to run .信息 tip turn domain name - Rights to IDN domain name sell for $600,000. Beijing Tele-info Network Technology Co. has won the first ICANN “auction of last resort” to resolve a new top level domain name contention set. It paid $600,000 in an auction for .信息, which roughly translates to “info”. The losing party was Afilias, which operates the .info domain name. This is the first of many planned auctions to resolve contention sets. ICANN published an auction report that includes the ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Frank Schilling is a biggest registrant of new TLDs - New registrant report reveals who has the most registrations in new top level domain names. nTLDStats.com published a new “Registrant Breakdown” today [see update below]. It shows the top registrants of new top level domain names. Coming in at number one on the list is Frank Schilling’s North Sound Names, which registered tens of thousands of names in his own TLDs in order to sell them at higher prices. According to nTLDStats, North Sound Names has registered ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Del Monte appeals new tip turn domain name lawsuit - Battle over .delmonte continues. Del Monte International is taking a dispute over new top level domain names to the U.S. Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit. Del Monte International (DMI) applied for the .delmonte domain name. Del Monte Corporation (DMC), which did not apply for .delmonte, filed a Legal Rights Objection against the application and won. (Both companies were once part of the same company, RJR Nabisco.) DMI subsequently filed a lawsuit against DMC to overturn ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Moniker CEO Bonnie Wittenburg discusses botched transition - Wittenburg discusses what went wrong and what the company is doing to fix it. It’s been a long week for Moniker and its customers. The company transitioned its entire platform over to Key-Systems’ reseller platform over the weekend and it didn’t go as planned. Domains not set to renew were renewed, domains were missing from accounts, pricing was erroneous and other features didn’t work correctly. Moniker took the entire site down for 24 hours starting Tuesday ... read more ...
Wed 4th June 2014
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
What domain names Fujitsu and 18 others bought final week - 19 end user domain name sales from GoDaddy/Afternic. Fujitsu finally got around to buying a domain to match a brand it launched last year. Here are details on that sale and 18 other end user sales that took place at GoDaddy/Afternic last week. (See previous end user lists here.) Compounding.com $25,000 – Pharmacy compounding company Medisca. Quina.org $3,688 – Lottoland in Gibraltar Quina is the name of a lottery in Brazil. RenovatingForProfit.com $4,000 – The ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
New Top Level Domain registration numbers are increasingly misleading - Reporting aggregate numbers for new TLD registrations is misleading. Some day this month one or more companies will proclaim that new top level domain name registrations have topped one million domain names. It will be very misleading when they announce this. If you look at the top 10 domains by zone files, at least three of them include a lot of free or registry-owned domain names. The biggest example is .xyz. Network Solutions gave away tens of thousands of domains ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Apple’s HealthKit causing problems for association called HealthKit - This company is based in Australia, not California.Apple introduced HealthKit, a sort of framework for health data on iOs devices, earlier this week. As with many other Apple product announcements, the name choice ran smack into an existing one. In this case an Australian firm has already been offering healthcare data services under the company name HealthKit. It also uses the domain HealthKit.com. While the confusion might seems like a huge blessing, it’s also ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Try Uniregistry’s sharp bulk domain name search - A simple, yet powerful, bulk searching tool. “Bulk search” for domain names is very useful when you’re scavenging for domain names to hand register. I recently used Uniregistry’s search to look up both individual keywords across multiple TLDs and multiple keywords across a single TLD. Type in any keyword and Uniregistry quickly checks its availability against multiple TLDs. You don’t even have to press a button before the results are returned: 6 results ... read more ...
Tue 3rd June 2014
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
.XYZ section record nears 15,000, 30k after 24 hours - Nearly 15,000 domains in zone file and over half of them are at NetworkSolutions. 30,000+ domains registered after 24 hours. The latest batch of zone files has been published, and .xyz had what looks to be a good first day. The zone file includes nearly 15,000 domain names after the initial hours of launch. Zone files only include registered domains that have nameservers, so it usually undercounts domains by a bit. .XYZ’s Daniel Negari told Domain Name Wire that ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Oh, crap: Moniker is down - Moniker has taken its website offline to fix numerous problems with its new system. [Read this update with responses from Moniker CEO Bonnie Wittenburg] Domain name registrar Moniker switched its interface to a reseller platform over the weekend. It didn’t go so well, as evidenced by the 100+ comments on my post about the change. Issues include being billed for renewals on domains set to cancel, incorrect pricing, inability to execute order, domains disappearing ... read more ...
Mon 2nd June 2014
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Famous Four wins row sets for .Cricket and .Racing - Company now has 15 uncontested new top level domain name applications. Famous Four Media announced today that it won two private auctions to resolve contention sets for new top level domain names. The company beat Donuts and Uniregistry in an auction for .racing. It beat Minds + Machines and Donuts in an auction for .cricket. Apparently is also lost the contention set auction for .diet. This latest round of private auctions marks the first time Famous Four has participated ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
The new Moniker: Love it or Hate it? - One thing is for sure: it’s going to take a while to get used to this new account interface. [Read this update with responses from Moniker CEO Bonnie Wittenburg] Moniker released its upgraded interface over the weekend. The interface is based on the RRPproxy reseller platform. This isn’t just a modification to Moniker’s interface. It’s a completely new one. That means a learning curve. Most people hate change, which means the grumbling will begin. Is it warranted? ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
New TLDs on daub this week: .XYZ, .Futbol, .Dating and more - .XYZ joins the fray this week. A bunch of new top level domain names hit the market this week, especially on Wednesday. Monday It all starts today with the launch of .xyz. Daniel Negari is launching this generic domain and has set aggressive goals: 1 million registrations in the first year and five million in three years. You might think he’s crazy. Maybe he is. Yet I admire the passion and energy he’s putting in to it, and that’s a good thing for the domain’s ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
An critical doctrine in pre-ordering new tip turn domain names - Hint: don’t count on just one registrar. Registering domain names under new TLDs when they hit the market is similar to dropcatching expired domain names. From the registrar’s perspective, it involves prioritizing domains and hitting pinging the registry as quickly as possible. Some registrars are better than others at this. There’s some general know-how involved, plus a lot of technology. Registrars will also perform differently with different registries based ... read more ...
Sun 1st June 2014
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
GoDaddy Auctions sells 45,852 domains in May - SteamEngine.com leads the way at $38,000. GoDaddy Auctions sold 45,852 domain names in May, according to preliminary numbers posted on the company’s Domain Market Report. Some of the top ten sales have been reported previously while others haven’t. Check out the $20,000 sale of michaelpitts.com. The buyer’s name isn’t Michael Pitts, although the buyer appears to have a connection to someone by that name. steamengine.com $38,000 filmesonline.com $28,000 sepg.com $23,000 ... read more ...
Sat 31st May 2014
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
OpenDNS kills the typosquatting operation - Company to shut down NXD error redirect service. OpenDNS announced this week that it is shutting down a service that was, in effect, a giant typosquatting operation. Millions of people use OpenDNS as an alternative to their ISP’s DNS. The useful service needed a way to make money, and it found a very lucrative one: whenever someone would type in a non-existent domain name (NXD), OpenDNS would show them a search results page that also included Yahoo! ads. Other ISPs ... read more ...
Fri 30th May 2014
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Funniest UDRP. Ever. - This respondent is funny, and it has nothing to do with his response. Sometimes you have to go back to dig up gems, like this UDRP case from 2002. It was recently spotted by domain lawyer John Berryhill. The case involved the domain name wwwsportauthority.com, a typo of the sports retailer’s site. The respondent didn’t bother to respond to the case but still managed to make this case hilarious. Here are the parties in the case: Complainant is The Sports Authority ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
First ICANN “Auction of Last Resort” to take place subsequent week - First of many planned new top level domain name auctions to take place next week. It’s a last resort, and it kicks of next week. ICANN will hold its first new top level domain name auction next week to settle the contention set for .信息, which roughly translates to “information”. Afilias, the registry behind .info, will bid against Beijing Tele-info Network Technology Co., Ltd. for the name. At least seven auctions were originally scheduled to take place ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Kevin Ham successfully defends UDRP opposite SNF.com - SNF.com saved in UDRP decision. Kevin Ham’s company Vertical Axis has successfully defended a UDRP filed against its domain name SNF.com. S.P.C.M. SA filed the complaint. It appears to be affiliated with a company that owns SNF.fr. The complainant tried to argue that Vertical Axis was “willfully blind” to its trademark when it registered its domain. Of course, there are lots of companies and organizations that use three letter acronyms. Three letter domains ... read more ...