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 13th June 2014
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Priceline Group Acquires OpenTable for $2.6 Billion - Priceline has acquired OpenTable.com iClarified.com reported that Priceline has acquired OpenTable.com for $103 a share or $2.6 billion. From the article: Priceline has announced that they’ve entered into a definitive agreement whereby The Priceline Group will acquire OpenTable for $103 per share in an all cash transaction valued at $2.6 billion. Notably, OpenTable has been integrated into iOS by Apple, letting users make reservations via Siri. For instance, users can ask Siri to “Find a table ... read more ...
 
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ICANN Opens Comment Period On Allowing Two Character New gTLD Domains - ICANN has just opened up a comment period on whether new gTLD strings should be allowed to register, sell and allocate two character new gTLD  domain names i.e (LL, NN, NL, LN) This exact comment period concerns those registries including Donuts that asked ICANN to allow these two charterer domains to be registered “In total, the requests concern 148 New gTLDs.” Of course this is the first request ICANN has gotten on  allowing registration (and thereby sale) of Two Character New gTLD Domains ... read more ...
 
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Not Counting NSI, .XYZ Is Still The Fastest Growing New gTLD According to Namestat.org - I had a long chat with Andrew Brier of Namestat.org about their service, the other day and one of the interesting things I learned it that .XYZ even throwing out all of the Network Solutions (NSI) free registrations, its still the fastest growing new gTLD. Several days ago we reported that NameStat.org removed all of NSI registrations for .XYZ from its stats based on the free giveaway promotion for purposes of computing the best selling domain list on the site as well as from the Fastest Growing ... read more ...
Thu 12th June 2014
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Patient.co.uk UDRP Bid To Grab Patient.com Denied; $2 Million Asking Price May Have Doomed RDNH - Egton Medical Information Systems Limited of the United Kingdom which owns and operates Patient.co.uk, lost its attempt to grab the domain name Patient.com in a UDRP. The domain owner is Health Axis Group of Tampa, Florida. Despite the three member panel of Gabriela Kennedy, Nick J. Gardner and David E. Sorkin finding that the Complainant didn’t meet any of the three requirements of the UDRP, they did not find Reverse Domain Name Hijacking nor did they even discuss the issue. Here are the relevant ... read more ...
 
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1st Day New gTLD; .Events 3.9K, .Futbol 1.6K; .Dating 1K; .Partners 880, .Productions 771 - Five new gTLD’s went into their first day of general availability yesterday and including Sunrise registrations, they wound up with just over 8,000 registrations total. (The totals are combined from ntldstats.com and RegistrarStats.com and we used the higher total in all cases). Here are the totals after the 1st day including Sunrise Registrations .Events 3,902 .Futbol 1,628 .Dating 1.043 .Partners 880 .Productions 771 All and all a very weak showing. Actually Famous Four 3 new gTLD that went into ... read more ...
 
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UDRP Panel Finds Reverse Domain Name Hijacking On BigBang.com - Javier Zetter Casillas of Guadalajara, Mexico, represented by  AN-KI, Mexico,  has  been found guilty of Reverse  Domain Name Hijacking (RNDH) on the domain name BigBang.com,  which is owned by Vertical Axis Inc. which was represented as usual by ESQwire.com PC. Mr Casillas brought his case based on trademarks in the United States , Canada and Mexico based on registered trademarks for the term “Big Bang Identidad Enmpresarial” the earliest of which was filed in Mexico on June 9, 2006 and ... read more ...
 
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Domain Guardians To Broker BTC.com - Domain Guardians put out a press release on the domain BTC.com going up for sale. In the currency markets USD of course stands for the U.S. Dollar, JPY, Japanese Yen, AUD Australian Dollar, etc… In cryptocurrency markets the symbol for Bitcoin is BTC. From the release: The term “BTC” is the commonly used abbreviation for the crypto-currency Bitcoin. As such, this rare domain asset provides an exceptional branding opportunity for new and existing companies within the Bitcoin space. “Whether ... read more ...
Wed 11th June 2014
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Portfolio of 240 .LY domains Goes Unsold with High bid of $100,500 on Flippa - There one letter and two letter .ly domains, along with some top keywords but in the end there was no sale as the 240 .ly portfolio closed not meeting the reserve. Description: View full WHOIS data as collected at listing time Description The winner of this auction and new owner of the following 240 premium domains will “corner the market“, and own some of the greatest domain hacks of all time. Many of the 240 premium domains here are exact match, brandable, and in highly lucrative markets — ... read more ...
 
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Sedo Domain Name Transactions Total $1.1MM For The Week - Please find the weekly sales list attached to this message. Over the past week, 633 transactions took place on Sedo’s marketplace and via SedoMLS, totaling $1.1MM. 52% of total sales were the result of Buy Now listings. Highlights of public sales are: · Top .coms: puzzlerings.com at 18,000 USD · Top ccTLD: casinos.com.br at 10,000 EUR · Top “other” TLD: 011.net at 5,800 USD Below is the complete report:   ... read more ...
 
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.UK Gets Over 50,000 Registrations On It’s 1st Day - According to itproportal.com,  the new .UK extension has surpassed 50,000 domain registrations in the first 24 hours following its launch. Nominet, the UK domain name registry, expects 10 million domain name registrations and why not? There are over 10 million existing domain holders with a .co.uk or one of the other variations that will have first crack at getting the shorter address and with prices set below a .com, £3.50 for a single year (about $5 and £2.50 per year About $4 for multiple year ... read more ...
 
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Light.Co Bought For $25K In May On Afternic/Godaddy Raises $9.7 Million - Back in May of this year we reported that the domain name Light.co sold on Afternic/Godaddy for $25,000 A nice price for a nice .Co domain name. Today the Term Sheet is reporting that Light.co, a digital photography startup, has raised $9.7 million in Series A funding. Bessemer Venture Partners and CRV co-led the round, and were joined by Paul Jacobs (Qualcomm exec chairman) and Sanjay Jha (ex-Motorola Mobility CEO). Now the question becomes what is going on with light.com As present the domain does ... read more ...
 
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Namestat Drops All Free .XYZ Domains & Schilling’s Registration Of Own Strings From Rankings - One of the two new sites that server up new gTLD stats, NameStat.org has made some changes to its ranking system for new gTLD registration. The service has dropped all free .XYZ domain names given out by Network Solutions (actually all Network Solution .XYZ registrations) and all Domain Names registered by Frank Schilling’s North Sound Names in extensions owned by Frank Schilling’s Uniregistry in computing its Best Selling gTLD list. NameStat.org is now showing .XYZ with just under 15,000 registrations ... read more ...
Tue 10th June 2014
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Godaddy/Afternic Sales Total Just Over $1.3 Million -

Godaddy/Afternic reported the weekly sales that totaled only over $1.3 Million dollars.

All sales were led by Suzies.com for $62,050 that was owned by a Scottcraft Label Co. out of Marlton, NJ

 

Via: thedomains.com

 
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.Co.Com Releases “Tens Of Thousands” Premium Domains For Landrush -     The .Co.Com registry just announced on their blog, that they were dropping “tens of thousands” premium domains from their reserved list and placing them into availability where they can be immediately registered in the Landrush period. The .Co.Com registry furnished this list (excel) of over 23K formally reserved premium domain names with Google Searches Per Month, Google Competition and Google Suggested Bid for each domain Here is the list: co.com-released-names-june2014 The Co.Com blog ... read more ...
 
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Network Solutions Promotion For .Events; 2 of 3 Featured Domains Are Reserved and NA - NetworkSolutions.com has done it again. A new promotion going out to all of their customers is marketing the new gTLD  .events. The promotion features three domains, two of which are reserved by the registry thereby not available. We have written about this issue before.   If registrars are going to email their customers to get them to register, or pre-register a new gTLD domain by highlighting  three domain names they should at least make sure the domains are actually available to be registered ... read more ...
 
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Linton’s Fashion Metric Selected As 1 of 11 Out of 1,500 For Techstars Austin - Morgan and Daina Linton’s FashionMetric.com, which uses big data to enhance fit and sizing for men’s clothing is one of 11 startups selected for the latest class of Techstars Austin. FashionMetric was founded in 2012 by Morgan and Daina and world famous entrepreneur Mark Cuban owns part of the company. The news was reported by Xconomy.com Techstars says that more than 1,500 startups applied for this year’s class. The program gives each startup $18,000 in seed funding, provides office space, ... read more ...
 
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Google Basically Shutting Down Adwords On Adult Starting Later This Month - Xbiz.com is reporting that Google has sent out letters to adult content marketers warning that they are greatly limiting their ability to advertise on Google AdWords. Starting later this month they are basically shutting down Adwords advertising for adult sites. “Beginning in the coming weeks, we’ll no longer accept ads that promote graphic depictions of sexual acts including, but not limited to, hardcore pornography; graphic sexual acts including sex acts such as masturbation; genital, anal, ... read more ...
 
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Cisco Predicts There Will Be 1.5 Billion More Internet Users By 2018 - Cisco released the complete VNI Global IP Traffic Forecast Global highlights from the updated study include the following projections: By 2018, there will be nearly four billion global Internet users (more than 51 percent of the world’s population), up from 2.5 billion in 2013 By 2018, there will be 21 billion networked devices and connections globally, up from 12 billion in 2013 Globally, the average fixed broadband connection speed will increase 2.6-fold, from 16 Mbps in 2013 to 42 Mbps by 2018 Globally, ... read more ...
 
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Famous Four Off To Slow Start; .Webcam 3,675 Registrations; .Trade 3,235; .Bid 629 - Famous Four Media launched their first new gTLDs yesterday at 10am into general availability and got off to a slow start overall. .Webcam as predicted had the most registrations at 3,675 according to ntldstats.com, placing it as the 70th  most registered new gTLD. .Trade followed close behind with  3,235 while .Bid managed to get just 629 registrations. All three new gTLDs  were priced the same,  from what I saw between $25 and $40 (but i did not check every registrar). Keep in mind unlike Donuts ... read more ...
 
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Minds + Machines Swings To A Profit in 2013, From Losing New gTLD Private Auctions - Minds + Machines Group, the company, formerly known as Top Level Domain Holdings, (LON:MMX) released its earnings for the year ending December 31, 2013 and swung to an operating profit of £776,000 against a loss of £3.07 million loss in 2012. All the profit came from losing private auctions on New gTLD strings it applied for. During 2013 M+M participated in six private auctions in which it netted £4.1m, in addition to picking up two more new gTLD Strings .fishing and .casa CEO Antony Van Couvering ... read more ...
 
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Owner of x.uk expects a brief web residence to fetch a record £10m - The Telegraph is out with a couple stories about the .UK extension. Stephen Fry is the first  Brit to make the switch to .UK and the second story out this morning is about X.UK and a possible 10 Million GBP sale. Stephen Fry is the first Brit to switch to a .UK domain From the article: Stephen Fry has become the first person to make the switch to a .uk web domain as the service becomes available for the first time. The presenter is making the change from .com to a .uk address, after having expressed ... read more ...
Mon 9th June 2014
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New York Times Reports On Godaddy IPO: Its Go Time - The New York Times is reporting that talk of a Go Daddy IPO is  just like their new slogan states, Its Go Time, as it filed it S-1 with the SEC today. According to the New York Times, Godaddy had 57 million domains under management as of Dec. 31. GoDaddy reported $1.1 billion in revenue for 2013, a 24% increase from the previous year but  continues to lose money as it reported a $199.9 million loss for 2013, which is narrower than its $279.1 million loss in 2012. Blake Irving appears to have a ... read more ...
 
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Ad Impersonation Is The New Click Fraud - Lori Weiman wrote an interesting piece on Search Engine Land a few hours ago, the article focused on a different type of click fraud.  PPC Ad impersonation occurs when an impostor advertiser takes a well known website address, and uses it as the display URL of their own advertisement. From the article: When you first hear about PPC fraud rings, you tend to think of click fraud where an automated system, not a real person, is generating fake clicks on an advertiser’s ad. However, PPC impersonation ... read more ...
 
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Two “Premium Domain” New gTLD Auctions Start; Namejet For .Build; Sedo for .Bid - I see a couple of “premium” domain name auctions are starting this week one at Namejet.com and one at Sedo for the new gTLD extensions .Build and .Bid respectively At Namejet.com they are auctioning off 35 .Build Domains. I have to say I don’t get these. Many of the terms make sense but they are backwards. Many of these domain would be good domains, except that the terms starts with Build, not end with Build so selfconfidence.build doesn’t make that much sense as the proper term using in ... read more ...
 
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Brand Protection Fail!: 25 More Trademarked Domains Drop Including MicrosoftSoftware.com - As we go through Drop lists of domain name in an attempt to acquire some of them, we typically see a good number of what appear to be trademark infringing domain names. As usual we do not point out typo’s but mostly domain names that seem to be right in the wheel house of a trademark holders. Trademark holders have been complaining (and rightly so) about the cost of defensive registrations when it comes to new gTLD’s but these domains are all .com and many have traffic. All of these domains were ... read more ...