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 8th December 2014
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Despite Fanfare In New York, Shares of Rightside Get No Pop In Price or in Volume -                                           The domain name industry blogs covered Rightside (NAME) exposure in New York last week, which included presenting to the street and ringing the closing bell at the NASDAQ which was covered here, here, here, and here just to name a few and in press releases and financial publications like TheStreet.com. There were some great pictures of Rightside appearing in the Times Square billboards as well like the one above However today none of ... read more ...
 
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If You Want One Of The Best .Auction Domains You Better Bring A Big Check; Up To $60k A Year - .Auction which goes into general availability on Wednesday is coming with some pretty stiff premium registration and renewal pricing. The new extension is being sold by Rightside. A regular registration will cost around $42. Here are some of the more interesting domain names I found that are available as of publication (pricing based at rack rate at Enom.com): $60,012 Registration fee and Annual renewal fee: Ceramics.Auction Charity.Auction Coin.Auction Coins.Auction Condo.Auction Condos.Auction Estate.Auction FineArt.Auction FineWine.Auction Foreclosure.Auction Furniture.Auction i.Auction ... read more ...
 
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Nissan Files 12 Separate URS Cases On New gTLD’s Spending Over 50% The Cost Of What A Block Would Have Cost - Nissan which sold Z.com for $6.8 million dollars a few weeks ago filed 12 separate Uniform Rapid Suspension (URS) cases with the National Arbitration Forum over the weekend. For about 3K per brand, or $9K Nissan could have bought a block with Donuts which would have blocked any of new gTLD domain name in these three brands from being registered over all Donuts extensions, which I believe all of these were. Nissan also won a URS on the domain name Nissan.repair today making it a total of 13 URS cases At ... read more ...
 
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US Dept of Commerce Strickling: No Firm Deadline To Give Up Control Over ICANN - The WallStreetJournal.com, according to a letter in the Journal today , Commerce Department official Lawrence Strickling dismissed the importance of U.S. oversight of ICANN and said that there is no firm deadline for the U.S. to give up oversight of ICANN. “In March the U.S. announced it would not renew its contract with ICANN next September. Mr. Strickling now says that’s not a firm deadline: “We will not complete the transition absent an accountability plan that has the support of the community.” In ... read more ...
 
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CentralNic Sells $2.5 Million in Premium Domains: Sounds Like Non-New gTLD Related - CentralNic (LON:CNIC)  announced on Monday it has sold premium domain names for  US$2.5mln. Sounds like those domain names were not of the gTLD variety. On the gTLD front CentralNic said they to be the exclusive registry service provider to at least 35 new TLD’s over the next 2-3 years. The group has also been confirmed as the exclusive global distributor and billing agent for the following new TLDs to be launched from 2015: .site, .design, .tickets. Other CentralNic new TLDs still to be launched ... read more ...
Sun 7th December 2014
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Godaddy Has Blowout Holiday Party Featuring Pitbull -     Godaddy held its annual holiday party in Cedar Rapids Convention Center last night December 6th. The party featured one of the hottest performers in music, none other than Pitbull a/k/a Mr Worldwide a/k/a Mr. 305. Pitbull who is from Miami puts on a great show.  We were lucky enough to see him in Miami perform last new years eve but we were not lucky enough to have been invited to the Godaddy party which is generally for employees. The CEO of Godaddy posted this picture of himself and Mr. ... read more ...
 
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Following The Adwords Money Trail - Eric Van Buskirk wrote an article on Search Engine Journal which detailed his data analysis of where advertisers spend their money on Google Adwords. A pretty interesting look at sectors and prices paid in certain niches. From the article: There is an abundance of pieces written about uber expensive Google AdWords phrases: the top 10 or 100 most expensive, for example. However, little to no data analysis looks at a more significant sample size where an advertiser spends a bit more than a Friday ... read more ...
Sat 6th December 2014
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How Will new gTLD’s Rank? Coffee.Club is on 1st Page of Google 1 A Week After Launch -   Ever since the roll out of the new gTLD program was announced one of the big questions everyone asked is how domain names using new gTLD’s would rank in the search engines against more established extensions like .com, .net and .org? Coffee.club, which just launched a week ago has landed on the 1st page of  Google organically. Yes they are also advertising under the key term, but they also are ranking on the 1st page of Google organically beating out domain names like coffeeclub.com and thecoffeeclub.com ... read more ...
 
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Uniregistry Wins gTLD .Cars Beating Donuts, DERcars - Uniregistry which has lost a bunch of recent new gTLD auctions, won a private auction for .Cars beating Donuts and DERcars which is Dominion Enterprises which applied for several new gTLD’s. If your wondering why .car and .cars is in the contention set, well its a long and in typical ICANN fashion pretty confusing. The short story  is that Google had filed a string confusion objection with ICANN against the three applicants for .Cars losing two and winning one and then there was an reconsideration ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN
Domain Name Hosting Piece of Digital Multimedia Art Sold For $5K At Art Basel in Miami - According to Fastcompany.com, a piece of art work hosted on a domain name has been sold for $5,000 at the Art Basel show in Miami. The digital piece of multimedia is hosted on a URL, smokeinmirrors.net and was create by an artist named Alexandra Gorczynski According to Fast Company the sale of a piece of art hosted on a domain name is purportedly the first of its kind at a major international art festival. Of course a domain to sell for $5,000 in a common occurrence, but this is really a piece of ... read more ...
 
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ICANN Returns To Buenos Aires For Jun 2015 Meeting - ICANN has just announced they have selected Buenos Aires, Argentina for ICANN 53 which will be held in June 2015. ICANN 53 will be the  second Public Meeting ICANN meeting of 2015 and is to be held in Latin America/Caribbean region. Whereas, staff has completed a thorough review of all proposed and available venues in Latin America/Caribbean and finds the one in Buenos Aires, Argentina to be the most suitable. Resolved (2014.12.03.02), the Board authorizes the President and CEO, or his designee(s), ... read more ...
Fri 5th December 2014
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Rightside CEO Taryn Naidu talks to TheStreet.com -

Taryn Naidu sat down with TheStreet.com and discussed what was going on with Rightside and a new gtlds. One of a initial things a interviewer asks if there is any status around .com ? Naidu replies that .com has no definition and it takes 6 to 8 searches to find an accessible .com right now.

Watch a video below

Via: thedomains.com

 
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NameJet.com Updates Its Term Of Use - Namejet.com updated its Terms of Use today. If you haven’t seen it already you will be required to accept the terms of use before you will be allowed to access your NameJet.com account. We have highlighted some language which you should particular note “Before you may become a user of any NameJet service, you must read, agree with, and accept all of the terms and conditions contained in these Terms of Use, the NameJet Privacy Policy [located at http://www.namejet.com/Pages/Privacy.aspx], and ... read more ...
 
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QNB.com Sells For $1 Million Dollars To Qatar National Bank - Another $1 million domain name transaction discovered by George Kirikos http://t.co/yoRgLR9Qnj domain name sold for $1 million by QNB Corp $QNB to Qatar National Bank http://t.co/hgrJ70T79W — George Kirikos (@GeorgeKirikos) December 5, 2014   QNB Corp., parent company of QNB Bank, filed a Current Report on Form 8-K regarding a change to its website domain to qnbbank.com and the planned sale of its prior domain name to a third party for a purchase price of $1,000,000. The transfer of the prior ... read more ...
 
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Second Auction Of Bitcoins Seized from Silk Road Completed - John Biggs just posted on Tech Crunch that the second auciton of Silk Road Bitcoins. There were 50,000 BTC in this auction. Current Bitcoin pricing courtesy of CoinDesk.com From Tech Crunch: The US Marshals Service has completed the second auction of Bitcoin seized from the original Silk Road. The auction, consisting of 50,000 BTC, is the latest in a seized BTC sell-off that began in June. The USMC reported that 11 registered bidders placed 27 bids for the bitcoin, down from 45 bidders in June. ... read more ...
 
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Mauritian Government Not Paying The Bills on Gov.mu and domain is going to be auctioned off - In what looks to be a really odd situation, the website islandcrisis.net is reporting that the government of Mauritius did not pay their bill for the domain name gov.mu. So now it is going to be auctioned off. The domain supposedly gets 500,000 to 1,100,000 queries a day. The government moved on to govmu.org. Read the full story here The Internet Direct Limited (IDL), the company that is behind the deactivation of gov.mu, stated that the Mauritian government did not pay its bills, and as a consequence, ... read more ...
Thu 4th December 2014
Written by The Domains in EN
Shopzilla Acquires Become.com Which Was Sold 10 Years By BuyDomains For $20K - Connexity, the online price comparison and shopping company formerly known as Shopzilla, has agreed to acquire e-commerce aggregator Become.com. TechCrunch reported the deal Thursday Financial terms of the acquisition of Sunnyvale-based Become-com were not disclosed. Become.com, founded by Michael Yang in 2004, had raised $37.2 million in funding from investors who include SV Angel, TPG and the European Founders Fund. Its CEO is Alex Terry and Yang is on the board. Shopzilla, before it became Connexity, ... read more ...
 
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Domaining 2015 In Valencia Spain: 1st 10 Readers That Signup Get 50% Off - The 7th Domain Conference will be hold again in Valencia, Spain from the 23rd to the 25th of April 2015. The first 10 readers of thedomains.com will get a 50% off the price using this code VIPTheDomains Some of the discussions that will be covered include: Geo Tld’s How to avoid your Domain being stolen How is .com doing News on the newGTLD scene Startups and Domains Domain Tools and APPS Domains and SEO The new WHOIS and how it will affect the Registrant News on the Development side for Domains The ... read more ...
 
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Fake Bitcoin Foundation sites scamming cryptocurrency users - We read about phishing emails targeted at domain name owners all the time, things from verification scams to update your payment details and so on. The world of crypto currency is seeing the same thing, with the latest scam detailed on Monday by Liam Tung on ZDnet. It seems people are getting duped into believing they are receiving emails from the Bitcoin Foundation when these are spoofed versions of the foundation website. From the article: The latest ruse to scam Bitcoin owners out of their holdings ... read more ...
 
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Domain Holdings Joins The ICA As A Silver Member - Domain Holdings, has become the latest member of The Internet Commerce Association (the ICA) which is a trade group that represents and protect  domain name holders and those with interests in the domain business. Domainholdings.com has entered the ICA as a silver member which requires a annual contribution of $5,000-$9,999 I reached out to Alan Dunn of DomainHoldings to ask him why the company thought it was important to become  a member of the ICA. Here is their statement: “”Joining the ICA ... read more ...
 
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The New gTLD, .LGBT Goes Into Sunrise on Jan 5th - Afilias announced the first phase of the introduction the new gTLD .LGBT  which is  dedicated to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community and those who serve it: will be launching early next year The first phase is the “sunrise” period, which is limited to eligible trademark holders and is open from January 5, 2015 through February 4, 2015. During sunrise, domains will be awarded in a first come, first-served manner; however, eligibility during this period is limited strictly to ... read more ...
 
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Rightside (Nasdaq: NAME) to Ring Closing Bell At Nasdaq Tomorrow - In honor of the occasion, Taryn Naidu, Chief Executive Officer, will ring the Closing Bell. Nasdaq MarketSite – 4 Times Square – 43rd Broadway – Broadcast Studio When: Friday, December 5, 2014 – 3:45 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. ET For multimedia features such as exclusive content, photo postings, status updates and video of bell ceremonies please visit our Facebook page at: http://www.facebook.com/NASDAQ. For photos from ceremonies and events visit our Instagram Page: http://instagram.com/nasdaq For ... read more ...
 
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Yahoo Share grows from 9.6 percent to 29.4 percent in dual weeks - Search Engine Land reported that Yahoo has seen a big jump in its share of the search market. The deal made in November to replace Google as the default search engine in Firefox 34 has led to a big jump in percentage points. From the article: Last month Yahoo announced that it was replacing Google as the default search engine in the next/latest version of Firefox: Firefox 34. That position is now paying dividends for Yahoo according to new data from StatCounter released earlier today. The analytics ... read more ...
 
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Verisign Asks: Are Domain Name Registrations An Indication Of The Value of Bitcoin? - Can the value of Bitcoin be predicted by looking at the number of  domain names registrations containing the term “Bitcoin”? In its blog post entitled  “Domain Registrations: Is Bitcoin Going Mainstream” Verisign says: “Earlier this year we used Bitcoin as an example of how domain registrations could be an effective gauge of interest in a particular subject. Our analysis demonstrated a clear rise in the number of registered .com and .net domain names containing the term “Bitcoin” ... read more ...
Wed 3rd December 2014
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Donuts Hits The Jackpot & Wins .Casino Beating Famous Four, Afilias & dotBeauty LLC - Donuts has won another contested new gTLD string beating Famous Four, Afilias, and dotBeauty LLC for the new domain extension .Casino For Donuts this marks 5 out of 6 strings won this week for those keeping score. As we previously reported Donuts has won .News, .School, .Golf, .Football. and now .Casino Donuts application for .Casino is here but doesn’t have much information as to what they plan to do in particular with the extension. dotBeauty LLC is affiliated with the applicant who won .Realtor ... read more ...