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.

Fri 1st August 2014
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
The Google Penguin has turn a Punisher - Has the Google Penguin become the punisher ? Eric Enge wrote a very good article on Search Engine Land that took a look at how punitive the Google Penguin really is. Enge expressed that he had a heavy heart with relation to the unforgiving nature of the Penguin. Enge gives those webmasters new to the game a primer on how the Penguin came to be: History Of Penguin The first release of Penguin took place on April 24, 2012, and it landed on the industry like a ton of bricks. From my perspective, everything ... read more ...
Thu 31st July 2014
Written by The Domains in EN
Sedo Publishes 2014 First Half Domain Market Study: 35.9 Million In Sales - Sedo today announced the results of its First Half 2014 Domain Market Study, revealing domain industry trends and changes based on transactions in its marketplace. An infographic depicting findings from the study is available at http://bit.ly/1rMCO82. During the first six months of 2014, Sedo powered 16,216 transactions worth a total of $35.9 million in sales. Domain values increased year-over-year, with the mean average sales price up 17 percent to $2,214 and the median price rising 7% to $616. The ... read more ...
 
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1st Day Totals For New gTLD’s: .Reisen 2,262; .University 1,340; .Toys 1,320; .Town 590 - Several new gTLD’s went into its first day of general availability GA) yesterday and according to ntldstats.com,here are the number of registrations after the first day of GA which include all Sunrise applications and those domains registered in the Early Access Program (EAP) Once again the total for this weeks new gTLD are less than impressive: .Reisen 2,262; .University 1,340 .Toys 1,320 .Town 590 Reisen is the German word for Travel. There are now over 1.75 million new gTLD’s registered with ... read more ...
Wed 30th July 2014
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Owner Of UGN.com Forced to Defend UDRP Against Someone With No Trademark & No Proof - Talk about a waste of money. The owner of the domain name UGN.com just successfully defended a UDRP against UGN, Inc which was represented by Laura Petrolino of Arment Dietrich, Inc., Illinois The owner of the domain has owned it since at least 2001. Complainant had a trademark for the term UGN SOUND SOLUTIONS FOR THE AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY but not for one for UGN. The one member panelist Sandra J. Franklin, made short work of the decision, throwing the case out since the Complainant failed to “submitted ... read more ...
 
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Stephen Colbert Grabs Sarah Palin Domain Name - Stephen Colbert scoops up Sarah Palin Domain Time magazine wrote about Stephen Colbert from Comedy Central registering TheSarahPalinChannel.com, the channel will parody the new SarahPalinChannel.com. The Sarah Palin channel will cost you $9.95/month or $99.95 for a one year subscription, the parody site of course will be free. Dan Kemey of Time Magazine wrote: Two competing Sarah Palin websites have launched in recent days. The first is called “Sarah Palin Channel,” and it offers subscribers ... read more ...
 
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Interlink Co., Ltd. Wins Community Priority Evaluation For The New gTLD .Osaka - Interlink Co., Ltd. Application for The New gTLD .Osaka just won its Community Priority Evaluation .Osaka has prevailed with its Community Priority Evaluation application getting 15 of the maximum 16 points. This means that GMO’s application for .Osaka will not move forward. Here is part of the decision: “Thank you for your participation in the New gTLD Program. After careful consideration and extensive review of the information provided in your application, including documents of support, the ... read more ...
 
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How Much Would You Spend For a 30M Meeting WIth Eric Schmidt of Google? Bidding Is At $8K - Bidding is now opened for a what is described as having “Coffee with Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google, at Google in New York City.” “Sit down to coffee with Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google, for 30 minutes at Google in New York City.” Bidding is underway at CharityBuzz.com, where there are currently 4 bidders with a high bid of $8,000. There are 15 days left in the auction closes on Thursday, August 14th,  2014 at 3 PM EDT.  The auction listing has an “Estimated Value” ... read more ...
 
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More from ICANN Court Filing: Not Only Are ccTLD’s Not Property But They Don’t Belong To The Country -                 Earlier we wrote about ICANN filing several motions to quash a federal court ruling that ccTLD registries could be seized to satisfy judgements against the underling country saying ccTLD’s are not considered property and therefore it can’t be attached by plaintiffs. We read through some more of the 289 page memorandum ICANN filed  in support of the motions and ICANN is position is only are not the ccTLD registries not property but the ccTLD’s don’t even belong to ... read more ...
 
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ICANN Responds To Seizure Order of The .IR Registry, observant ccTLD’s Are Not Property -                   A couple of weeks ago we told you that the attorney for the victims of a terrorist attack got a federal court to order the seizure of the .IR domain registry which is the ccTLD for Iran to help satisfy a judgement the victims  held  against the republic of Iran. As first reported by webpronews.com,  (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) told a U.S. federal court in the District of Columbia, that ccTLD (country code Top-Level Domains ) can’t be ... read more ...
 
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HardRock; BMW; Starbucks; BretMichaels & God All .Rocks; Here are a initial .Rocks Registrations - .Rocks which goes live into general availability on August 6th,  has a little over 200 domains which were registered in Sunrise  (Trademark holders) and in the Early Access Program (EAP) for those who were willing to pay a higher fee for early access to domain registrations The cost of a non-premium .Rocks registration is at $14.99 at Godaddy A lot of the registrations are company.rocks or product.Rocks types of domains Some people took .Rocks literally, registering domain names like Moon.Rocks, ... read more ...
 
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Flipkart Raises $1billion in appropriation – Largest ever for an Indian Internet Company - You may recall a little while back there were all those Flipkart domain purchases in various cctlds, well the company certainly could afford it as they have just completed the largest funding ever by an Indian Internet company. Total price amount in this set of 8 domain name sales is 41,875.00 USD; average price is 5,234.38 USD. The Hindu reported: India’s leading e-commerce retailer Flipkart announced on Tuesday that it has raised funds worth $1 billion (over Rs.6,000 crore), the largest-ever ... read more ...
 
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ICM Registry Operator of .XXX Wins Rights to The New gTLD .Sex - ICM Registry the operator of the .XXX registry has won the right to operate the .Sex new gTLD. The other applicant for .Sex, Internet Marketing Solutions Limited has withdrawn their application, leaving ICM’s the lone applicant for .Sex. ICM also is the only applicant for the new gTLD’s .adult and .porn The only caveat on the new gTLD’s .Sex, .Adult and .Porn is that just a few weeks ago, seemingly out of nowhere, the New gTLD Committee of ICANN commented that they might be sensitive strings ... read more ...
Tue 29th July 2014
Written by The Domains in EN
Founder of Diapers.com Buys Jet.com From Chernoff, Backed By $55 Million To Take On Amazon -             Recode.net, just published a post entitled “The CEO Who Sold Diapers.com to Amazon Raises $55 Million to Challenge Amazon Again” Marc Lore, the former CEO and founder of Diapers.com, which the parent company Quidsi, was sold to Amazon in 2011 for $550 million, has raised $55 million to build out a new e-commerce company called Jet.com “The deal values Jet at well more than $100 million” according to the story Jet plans to operate out of Hoboken, N.J., and is expected to ... read more ...
 
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Sedo Transactions Total $1.9M But Only 5 .Com’s Sell For 5 Figures -

 

Over a past week, 569 exchange took place on Sedo’s marketplace and around SedoMLS, totaling $1.9 Million

52% of sum sales were a outcome of Buy Now listings.

Highlights of open sales are:

· Top .coms: lurk.com during 18,000 GBP
· Top ccTLD: liberty.ch during 21,000 EUR
· Top “other” TLD: europe.org during 23,000 USD

Here are a reportable sales:

 

Via: thedomains.com

 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
.Toys Launches Wed: O.Toys; Educational.Toys; Pool.Toys, Christmas.Toys Already Registered - .Toys which goes into general availability tomorrow Wednesday July 30th A .Toys non-premium domain registration is priced at $39.95 at Godaddy. We went through the zone file for .Toys and found the more interesting domain names taken in Sunrise (for trademark holders) and during the Early Access Program (EAP) where people can get early access to domain names for a one time fee which can range from $150-$12,500 depending on the registrar and the day. We missed out on educational.toys which we had ... read more ...
 
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DomainHoldings.com Reports Amost $10M in Domain Name Sales In Q2 - Domain Holdings issued its domain sales report for the second quarter of 2014 reporting  almost $10,000,000 USD in sales and a average sale throwing out the 5 highest and lowest sales, the average sales price was $29,019 However if those top 5 domain sales and the bottom 5 sales were included the average price would have been a mind boggling 98,372.00 Some of the main highlights from Q2 were: $9,935,618 in Total Q2 Sales $764,278 Average Weekly Sales 79.21% of ALL Sales End Users 28% Increase in ... read more ...
 
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The Village Voice Covers .NYC: Landrush Auctions Will Be in 5 & 6 Figures - The Village Voice just covered the new .NYC domain names and quotes Gerardo Aristizabal who runs the domain registrar Hello NYC who predicts that Landrush auctions will produce bids at least to the tens of thousands of dollars,” “Two or three might reach six figures.” The blog post is entitled:”Lost Out on Sex.com? Sex.NYC Will Soon Be Available at a Domain Auction Near You” What isn’t clear in the .NYC roll ou, at least t to me is how the most valuable domain names, usually referred ... read more ...
 
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Key-Systems To Donate 30 Euro For 1st 1,000 .Hiv Domain Registrations - Key-Systems GmbH announced today that it will support the dotHIV initiative with a fundraising for the start of .hiv. The domain registrar will donate 30 Euro to the dotHIV association for each of the first 1,000 .hiv domains that is registered in the first six months after the Sunrise starts via the in-house retail portal domaindiscount24. dotHIV is the initiative behind the charitable top level domain .hiv. The Berlin-based social enterprise will establish the domain extension .hiv as the Red ... read more ...
 
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Spain Passes The “Google” Tax – How it will work no one is unequivocally sure - Spain Passes The Google Tax Spain passed a law that will give Spanish newspaper publishers the right to get paid from any site that links to them with what they deem a ” meaningful ” description of the content. It is important to note that this law does not apply to all publishers in Spain, only daily newspapers. From QZ.com On July 22 Spain passed a law (link in Spanish) called the canon AEDE, after the acronym for Spain’s daily newspapers’ association. The law has been dubbed the tasa ... read more ...
 
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Captain Kirk is not high on a new Celebrity usually Facebook App - William Shatner of Star Trek and Priceline fame, is a big social media user, Shatner runs a popular blog on Tumblr and is active in a lot of places. He recently put together a review of the new Facebook Mentions app, our readers probably have not been able to use this app because it is reserved for celebrities and other high-profile members. The IB Times did an article about the new app and shows some interaction between a critic of Whoopi Goldberg films and Whoopi herself, it was quite amusing and ... read more ...
Mon 28th July 2014
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The other side of Click Fraud - Krebs On Security took a look at the practice of click fraud that depletes a competitors ad budget. The practice is to run up the costs and maybe get them to blow their wad early in the day. I have spoken to people over the years who certainly felt their AdWords campaign was a waste of time and money. While many focus on click fraud on the AdSense side, it seems that the AdWords side is also a big problem. From the article: Today’s post looks at a popular service that helps crooked online marketers ... read more ...
 
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Vertical Axis Hit With UDRP on 8 Year Old Domain GlobeWay.com - Vertical Axis has just been  Hit With a UDRP on the domain name GlobeWay.com The domain according to DomainTools.com has been owned since at least 2007 and possibly 2006 by Vertical Axis. The domain name is parked to a very generic parking page. The Complainant is not yet listed. I don’t see any federal trademark for the term Global Way, in the United States Database. However there is a trademark for Globalways that was filed in November of 2013 by a German company Jason and Ari have done a great ... read more ...
 
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As Rightside (futures) Starts Trading Its Market Cap Is 260M Of Demand’s $465M -                 Rightside, the spin off of Demand Media which begins formal trading on August 1, started to trade on Friday on a pre-issue basis on the symbol NAMEV. Although shares are lightly traded the price is $14.30 which is up from an opening of $14 a share. Interestingly the market cap of Rightside as its trading under NAMEV is $260 Million. Demand Media, Inc. is trading today at $5.12 a share with a total market cap including Rightside of $465 Million. Meaning that if the valuations ... read more ...
 
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3D Search Engine Launching to Protect 3D Content - The longest comment thread in the history of domaining is the post that Michael wrote four years ago about 3D, it has 5,371 comments. So for those interested in the topic of 3D there is a new search engine launching on a .es domain is all about 3D content, the engine will be using the domain hack 3Dshap.es. Jennifer Hicks of  Forbes covered the launch and went over what the future growth rates for 3D content look like. Jennifer also gave some background into the funding and who is behind this new ... read more ...
Sun 27th July 2014
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Tech Radar: “The new domain name complement is causing problems for brands” - Tech Radar published an article todayon new gtlds and the problems brands are already having with protecting their brand. The article references a study from Brad Newberg at Reed Smith, the sample study took a look at 20 brands in the bicycle industry and how fast some of their names were taken by those not affiliated with the company. Canyon.bike is referenced as to being regged, “seven seconds after it became publicly available”. The article goes on to tell brand owners to be more proactive ... read more ...