Author Archives: The Domains

About The Domains

Michael Berkens, Esq. is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of TheDomains.com. Michael is also the co-founder of Worldwide Media Inc. which sold around 70K domain to Godaddy.com in December 2015 and now owns around 5K domain names . Michael is also a Director of RightoftheDot.com which is a consultant in the new gTLD space and a broker of super premium domains. Michael was also one of the 5 Judges selected for the the Verisign 30th Anniversary .Com contest this year.

Mon 20th April 2015
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FairWinds Partners: " Top-Level Domains Owned by Brands Gaining Momentum" - Jennifer Schoelwer wrote an article on the FairWinds Partners blog that delves into gaining momentum for branded top level domains. The article is focused on .brands, not generic strings open to everyone. The article takes a look at French bank BNP Paribas and the steps they have taken to explain their upcoming .bnpparibas to their customers. Jennifer ends the article, “It is clear is that brands will – and have – set a new standard for online trust and consumer experience.” From the article: While ... read more ...
 
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WDD.2015.Delhi SnapNames Domain Auction Gets $100K Bid On Computer.de - The domain name auction being run in conjunction with The World Domain Day conference on Snapnames.com has drawn over $400,000 in bids. All bidding is led by Computer.debut there is also a $75K bid on enetwork.com and LatinoTimes.com as well as a $50K bid on Bodyguards.com and GTR.com but none of the reserve have been met on any of those domain names yet. The WDD.2015.Delhi domain auction closes on Thursday at 3:15 PM EST according to SnapNames.com normal closing procedures. Here are all of the ... read more ...
 
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Domain Movers: Chong.com, Voice.com and More - Welcome to Domain Movers! Get ready to read some interesting and detailed digging on some recent domain activity which involves newly registered domains by companies, domain name acquisitions by companies and simply domain movers for one reason or another. Enjoy these often early discoveries and the reasons that I found why the domains are moving. JPMorgan Chase Co. with the help of brand protection service MarkMonitor has acquired the domain name SoYouCan.com, which was actually acquired on March ... read more ...
Sun 19th April 2015
Written by The Domains in EN
Sorry Kids There Will Be No .Unicorn In The Domain Space But There Will Be A .Unicom - .Unicorn will remain a mythical creature when its comes to new domain names. You will not be able to register a .Unicorn domain as two domain name extension that were put into the same contention group by ICANN .Unicorn and .UNICOM have resolved with unicorn.eu withdrawing their application for .Unicorn Instead of .Unicorn we now have the less sexy .Unicom which was applied for by China United Network Communications Corporation Limited whose website is chinaunicom.com To be fair both .Unicorn and ... read more ...
 
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Google Apr Fool's Prank Actually Backfires - ArsTechnica.com published an article that a Google April Fools prank actually pranked their own security. The error allowed a click – jacking exploit that tricks users into changing things they don’t want changed. Apparently hackers would be able to incorporate Google into their own site and embed code that would change functionality. From the article: An April Fool’s prank Google pulled two weeks ago inadvertently broke some of the site’s security, an error that briefly allowed so-called ... read more ...
 
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The Continuing Uptrend in .io - Park.io published an article on the continued growing usage of .io. The article titled, “The explosive growth of .io domains” takes a look at the growing percentage of websites using .io and the fact that Hillary Clinton has got her own .io domain. From the article: The percentage of websites using .io domains has more than doubled in the last year alone, according to w3techs.com. This makes it the fastest growing TLD by far, of all TLDs that make up roughly 0.01% or more of websites on the internet. .io ... read more ...
 
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.Science Still Getting Over 3K registrations A Day: Is This a Revolution or Another .TK - .Science which launched at the end of February is still adding more domain registrations a day than any other new gTLD extension by far on a daily basis Yesterday .Science added another 3K+ domain registrations as it did the day before and the day before that. Around 85% of all registrations are coming from Alpnames.com which gave away about 50K domain names for free and are currently selling .Science domain for $.49. I’ve seen other registrars selling .Science domains for a dollar. Of course ... read more ...
Sat 18th April 2015
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Having Some .Fun? Oriental.com Beats Google & .Buzz to The New gTLD .Fun - .Fun which was scheduled to go to an ICANN Last Resort Auction later this month has been resolved with Oriental Trading Company, Inc who owns the domain Oriental.com prevailing in a private auction beating Google and the company that owns and operates .Buzz .Fun will be the only new gTLD that Oriental Trading Company, Inc. will operate.  The company applied for .Party but did not prevail (Famous Four Media won) According to its application, the Oriental Trading Company, Inc. (OTC) plans to operate ... read more ...
 
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Owned For At Least 14 Years Nat Cohen's Telepathy, Inc Hit With UDRP on Boon.com - Domain Investor Nat Cohen’s company Telepathy, Inc, has been hit with a UDRP on the domain name Boon.com which according to DomainTools.com it has owned since at least 2001. The UDRP was filed by Wirecard AG, a “global financial services and technology company headquartered in Aschheim, Munich, Germany. Its internet payment service competes with PayPal and Western Union. Wirecard AG is listed on the Frankfurt Securities Exchange WDI and ranks among the 30 largest German technology companies below ... read more ...
 
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NF.com Bought In 2014 Hit With UDRP By Association Française de Normalisation (AFNOR) -   The two letter domain name NF.com has been hit with a UDRP just a year after it was acquired from Anything.com. The domain name was owned by Anything.com back in June 2014 and since then has changed hands several times. 4.cn a Chinese based domain broker, owned the domain (possibly under escrow) until August went it was sold to VINCENT CHENG of CRAZY TOP ONE LTD of Auckland.  In January 2015 the domain was registered to another person in Hong Kong. The domain was then sold to 62.com in January ... read more ...
Fri 17th April 2015
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1st Day New gTLD Totals .Fashion 2,182; .Garden 388: Science Passes .XXX & .Pro - Two new gTLD’s were released this week by Minds + Machines After domain name registrations made in Sunrise by Trademark Holders .Fashion has 2,182 registrations. .Garden on the other hand only grew to 388 domain registrations. On another note .Science which was released about a month ago by Famous Four Media, now has skyrocketed to the 6th most registered new gTLD’s (actually number 5 if you disregard the IDN of 网址 (xn--ses554g) which has about 350,000 registry owned domains) with over 118,000 ... read more ...
 
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Rightside Looking To Cash in With .News - Jacob Demmitt wrote a post on the Upstart section of BizJournals.com. The article led with the launch of the .news extension and how Rightside plans to cash in. Taryn Naidu the CEO of Rightside is interviewed and gives some commentary. In the article which I quoted below, Naidu says we are seeing five and six figure sales. I would imagine he is talking about the Coffee.club and Wine.Club sales, I have not heard of a Rightside string selling for six figures. From the article: The company wouldn’t ... read more ...
Thu 16th April 2015
Written by The Domains in EN
Afnic Report: "The Domain Market in 2014" - Aftnic.fr the manager of the .fr (France) extension, published a pretty extensive report today. The report “The Domain Market in 2014” takes a look back at 2014 and provides some interesting stats and graphs. I will highlight one topic in this post and read the full report here Legacy TLDs: highly contrasting performance in 2014 The Afnic Market Research Team has developed a methodology for measuring the performance of TLDs that the Council of European National Top Level Domain Registries (CENTR) ... read more ...
 
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Free .REALTOR Domains Expanded To Local & State Realtor® Associations & Brokerages On May 7 - “The National Association of Realtors® top-level domain .REALTOR will be available to local and state Realtor® associations as well as brokerages in the U.S. and Canada starting May 7. State and Local REALTOR® Member Boards, and REALTOR® owned and operated MLSs have the opportunity to receive a FREE .REALTOR domain for up to 5 years” Since the .REALTOR top-level domain became available to NAR members in October 2014, more than 95,000 domains have been claimed on a free basis. .Realtor has ... read more ...
 
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Donuts Wins The New gTLD .Theater - Donuts has won another private auction for a new gTLD, this time the right to operate the new domain extension . The only other applicant for .Theater, KBE gTLD Holding Inc. of Brooklyn New York, whose web address is broadwayacrossamerica.com, withdrew its application Some of the new gTLD’s in that vertical include .broadway, .tickets and .show .Theater was scheduled to go to an ICANN auction later this month There are now only 4 ICANN Contention Last Resort auctions scheduled for April; .Living, ... read more ...
 
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Domain Movers: Chalk.com, Much.com and More - Welcome to Domain Movers. In this series I do the heavy digging and discover domain names that are on the move! The vast majority of the domain names in the following list have been either registered, acquired or simply moving for one reason or another, mostly by large companies. These are often early discoveries and may lead to insight into new brands, services, products, companies and new websites. Here we go with the latest domain movers. Battlecast.com has been acquired on behalf of a currently ... read more ...
Wed 15th April 2015
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UDRP Panel Finds Reverse Domain Name Hijacking on Fair Criticism Site & Its Not a .Sucks - Loney John Hutchins (“Complainant”), of Tennessee, has just been found guilty of Reverse Domain Name Hijacking (RDNH) on his matching domain name LoneyHutchins.com The panel of Fernando Triana, Esq, found that the domain was being used as a fair criticism site of conduct of the person’s name in the .com address So the domain holder was able to express his first amendment rights to free speech without having to use a .sucks address Imagine that Here are the highlights Complainant is the owner ... read more ...
 
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Tom Delonge, Ex Lead Singer/Guitarist of Blink 182 Launches New Site On ToTheStars.Media -         Tom Delonge best known as the former guitarist and co-lead vocalist of the American rock band Blink-182 has launched a new site on the new gTLD ToTheStars.Media Mr. Delonge is already running a Twitter account under ToTheStars in which it says: “The Official Twitter for To The Stars.. Alternative Media Entertainment.” Although the Twitter account lists the URL of the site as tothestarsinc.com, that domain name is re-directing to the .Media domain and the logo makes it clear that ... read more ...
 
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16 Yr Old SexyJapanese.com Saved In UDRP But No Reverse Domain Name Hijacking - Grigorius Holdings, SIA (“Complainant”), just lost it bid to grab the generic domain name sexyjapanese.com which was registered on January 2, 1998. The one member panel John J. Upchurch found that Complainant failed to establish rights in a trademark that predate the registration of the domain name. However Mr. Upchurch failed to even discuss Reverse Domain Name Hijacking despite finding the Complainant didn’t meet any of the three requirements of a UDRP and really had no claim to a right ... read more ...
 
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Verisign Announces First Round of #InternetOfficial Contest First Prize Winners - Verisign announced its first group of winners in its #InternetOfficial Contest. Our own Michael Berkens is one of the judges in this contest. Our illustrious panel of top industry experts and celebrity judges has determined the five best .COM domain names entered into the #InternetOfficial contest during the first monthly entry period. (Drum roll please)…And the winners are: 1. chooseyourtattoo.com: Registered by Tom H. of Niles, Mich. 2. electricmotorcycleclub.com: Registered by Adam Y. H. of ... read more ...
 
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Chat Center ditches a .me and moves to a .Center - John Biggs wrote an article on Tech Crunch yesterday with regards to Chat Center, according to its description Chat Center is the best way to help customers or friends connect with you for Chat. Once you install the app you can claim a Chat Name. This name can be expressed as a URL. From the article: When we last left ChatCenter it was running on the URL chatcenter.me and was aimed at creating a one-stop spot for chatting. Now, a few months later, it has moved from a freemium product and gone full ... read more ...
 
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China Dominates 7 Out of Top 10 Trending Keyword Registrations For .Com Domains In March - Verisign’s has posted the top 10 trending keywords registered in .COM and .NET for the month of March The word “China” was the top trending keyword for both .com and .net registrations in March. The next three most trending terms in .Com were also Chinese words. So the top 4 keywords registered in .Com were Chinese and 7 of the top 10. Only appliance, Guys and Rehab were non-Chinese words (including China) Certainly further proof buyers from China are moving the domain market and aftermarket Here ... read more ...
 
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France Wants Google to Show Them What's In Their Secret Sauce - The tension between Google and the E.U. continues to persist, now there is talk of a new law in France that would force Google to reveal its secret sauce, in other words show us how your algorithm works. If you think of Google as being dominant in the U.S. it is far greater when it comes to search in Europe. While making up 68% of search volume is the U.S. according to one report, it handles 90 percent in Europe. From Foss Bytes: Google’s secret search algorithm, the heart of Google, may not be ... read more ...
Tue 14th April 2015
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Sedo Sales Total $1.2 million for a week, led by HSE.com during $34,000 - Over the past week, 593 transactions took place on Sedo’s marketplace and via SedoMLS, totaling $1.2m. 57% of total sales were the result of Buy Now listings.   Highlights of public sales are: Top .com: hse.com at 34,000 USD Top ccTLD: czescisamochodowe.pl at 9,000 EUR Top “other” TLD: yit.net at 4,800 USD Congrats to Michael as his philadelphiabailbonds.com sold for $4,888. ... read more ...
 
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eMarketer Report: The Domain Name Explosion: Hundreds of New Choices Beyond .com Mean New Marketing Considerations" - eMarketer.com has put out a research paper on the new gtlds titled, “The Domain Name Explosion: Hundreds of New Choices Beyond .com Mean New Marketing Considerations” This report was a paid report, as I called the company about referencing it they also included it in the newsletter section which is available to everyone.(thank you Priscilla) The report draws on data from the Domain Name Association and ntldstats as well as a few others. From the report: ... read more ...