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 9th June 2014
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Famous Four Sells 15 .WEBCAM Domains For $175K, including Tube.Webcam & Asian.Webcam - In a press release Famous Four Media, Inc, sold a package of 15 domain names to a single buyer netting them $175,000 after commission in a sale brokered by Hunting Moon All of the 15 domain names were ” for adult oriented terms in the .WEBCAM registry” including Tube.Webcam; Asian.Webcam MILF.Webcam With this sale Famous Four has basically made back the money it spent acquiring the extension. Andy Churley, Chief Marketing Officer at Famous Four Media is quoted as saying, “We are delighted ... read more ...
Sun 8th June 2014
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
GeekWire “Buying A New gTLD The Process Really .Sucks” - Kevin Lisota is not a domain investor, instead he is CEO Co-Founder of findwell, a Seattle real estate startup. He wrote a very good article for Geekwire that shows the frustation for many when trying to research and purchase new gtlds. From the article: Up until this year, buying a domain name was pretty straightforward. With one or two accounts at registrars like GoDaddy or namecheap, you could buy just about any domain extension. Transferring domain names was also relatively easy. However, ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Famous Four’s First New gTLD’s Go Live Monday - Famous Four Media’s first new gTLD extension go live tomorrow Monday June 9th at noon EST. Famous Four which applied for over 60 new gTLD’s first new gTLD’s are .Webcam, .Trade and .Bid. All three new gTLD’s are priced at $39.95 at Godaddy and are of course available at a ton of registrars. I would assume that .Webcam will do the best of the three with a heavy adult influence. According to its site, “”Famous Four Media, (FFM) was set up in 2011 by a small group of recognized domain name ... read more ...
 
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Google Looking To Create Satellite Network - Tim Beyers at Motley Fool wrote a piece on Google looking to blanket the entire world with some form of broadband. The company is looking to spend upwards of $3billion to develop and launch Google satellites in orbit. From the article: According to The Wall Street Journal, Google CEO Larry Page is authorizing between $1 billion and $3 billion for developing and launching 180 small Google satellites into low-Earth orbit. The idea is to supply Internet access via craft similar to (but smaller than) ... read more ...
Sat 7th June 2014
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Dish Network Set to be a largest association in a universe that accepts Bitcoin - In a piece on Reason.com, Paul Best took a look at some recent news related to companies who are now embracing Bitcoin. From Apple to Facebook to Dish Networks. From the article: As government agencies have started assessing ways to regulate Bitcoin, big companies nationwide have begun to warm up to the decentralized, cryptographic currency. Facebook can now be used to send or receive Bitcoin payments with friends through QuickCoin, which launched on May 21. All a user has to do is log in through ... read more ...
 
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New gTLD Domain Name Registrations Top 1 Million (With some Caveats) - New gTLD Domain Name Registrations has just passed the 1 Million domain name mark according to ntldstats.com. The official ntldstats count is 1,001,461. Of course thedomains as well and other blogs have pointed out there should be some caveats to the numbers. For one North Sound Names owned by Frank Schilling who also owns several live new gTLD’s has over 43,000 registrations of the Million + registrations, in his own extensions. The most registered domain extension is .XYZ which is sitting at ... read more ...
Fri 6th June 2014
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.Club Asks & Answers “How do You Define Succcess” - A very interesting, well written post by Jeff Sass, DOT CLUB’s Chief Marketing Officer, was posted on their company blog today entitled “How do You Define Success” I assume most of you do not subscribe to the .Club blog and would otherwise miss this post which is worth a read. For those that don’t know .Club on is a client of RightoftheDot.com which is a company I’m a director of Still good is good so with that in mind side here is the post: “As humans, there are many different ways we ... read more ...
 
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Google Says Keywords In Domain Are Not Needed To Be Successful - Barry Schwartz on SERoundtable.com put up a quick blurb about a comment from Google’s John Mueller. Mueller was apparently responding to a Google Webmaster help question on whether the user needed the keyword in their domain. You don’t need your keywords in your domain name. Websites without them in there rank just fine. Instead of focusing on that specific keyword, I’d recommend spending the time to make your site the absolute best of its kind. Schwartz points out that Mueller has expressed ... read more ...
 
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eBay: Search Ads Have No Measurable Benefit - eBay study warns search ads have ‘no measurable benefit The Guardian did a story on the efficacy of paid search based on a study conducted by eBay From the article: Customers are just as likely to click on natural search results as paid ads, a US study has found, raising questions about the efficacy of the multi-billion dollar search advertising market. The researchers found that most search adverts on most search terms had very little affect on sales at all – and warn that the medium may be ... read more ...
Thu 5th June 2014
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
One Hilarious Look during Net Neutrality - There has been a lot of talk about Net Neutrality and for most this is a topic that gets a bit boring. John Oliver from the HBO series “Last Week Tonight” has put a very funny, sarcastic and layman spin on the topic. John explains without Net Neutrality his start up Nut Flix has no chance. There is also a call at the end to contact the FCC and apparently it has worked. NPR  reported over 45,000 comments. ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
My Preorder For Cool.Vegas Just Got A $35,525 Bill & CoolVegas.com Is Priced during $12K - I placed a pre-order for the domain name Cool.Vegas on a landrush basis with 101domain.com a while back. I got word the other day that the domain name was placed on the reserved list of the registry and made a premium domain. So I got a bill for the difference between what I previously paid for the pre-order $234.99 and the new premium price for the domain name of $35,760.00 I have no idea of how the .Vegas registry thinks a domain name like Cool.Vegas should be priced at $35K I reached out to DomainNameSales.com ... read more ...
 
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ReturnMoi.com, a Largest Lost & Found Co In The World Switches To Return.Me - According to a press release out this morning by the .Me registry, the largest Lost Found Company in the World has switched their domain name from ReturnMoi.com to Return.Me “ReturnMoi was our original company name.” “Due to our international success and growth we decided this year to change our name to ReturnMe. “After looking at many domain name options and setting up a focus group we decided to get the .ME domain as it was a perfect fit with our new name”, says Suhail Niazi, the CEO ... read more ...
 
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Ntldstats.com Updated Registrant Distribution Feature - Ntldstats.com updated their  “Registrant Breakdown” I thought it would be interesting to see who is the top 25 as we now have been live for just over four months. These guys continue to do a great job and the same goes for Andy at Namestat.org I posted the top 25, click the link above to see the whole list.   ... read more ...
Wed 4th June 2014
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.XYZ Moves Into 4th Most Registered New gTLD Topping 38K But 72% Are From NetSol - Ntldstats.com, has updated this morning and .XYZ is now the 4th most popular gTLD with over 38,000 registrations. However over 72% of these, or over 27,500 domains are at Network Solutions (NSI), which as we discussed yesterday and today, offered free .XYZ domains to certain customers on an opt out basis, meaning that many of these customers may not even know they have an .XYZ domain. If we back out the NSI registrations .XYZ still had over 11,000 registrations in its first 24 hours or so more than ... read more ...
 
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Network Solutions Has No Idea What we am articulate about – UPDATED WITH PROOF OF EMAIL - So there was a lot of talk about Network Solutions and .XYZ yesterday. We had a comment in one thread which led to Michael doing a follow up post and mentioning that specific comment. The comment was : “I recently got the email from Netsol offering me a complementary .xyz for my so-so .com free for 1 year. and in order to decline such an offer I had to visit a link and click decline, otherwise the domain would be mine automatically.” So I called Web.com who owns Network Solutions and Register.com. ... read more ...
Tue 3rd June 2014
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
NameJet.com Reports $555K in Domains Sales Led By Liao.com For $100K -

Namejet.com only reported over $555,000 in domain name auction for a month of May 2014.

Only sales of $2K or some-more are included.

All sales were led by Liao.com that sole for $100,000.

PontoonBoats.com was the purchase.

 

Via: thedomains.com

 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Did NetworkSolutions.com Give Away Free .XYZ Domain Names? -         I published a post earlier today about .XYZ registering over 18,000 domain names in its first day of General Availability based on  ntldstats.com, which is what we rely on consistently for our registration numbers. At the time we did point out that over 50% of all registrations were made at NetworkSolutions.com which was quite unusual, since that registrar has only 8% of the new gTLD market overall, including the 9K+ .XYZ registrations. Obviously this seemed strange to me since NetSol’s ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Godaddy/Afternic Sales Total $2.1 Million -

GoDaddy and Afternic’s reportable weekly domain sales for a week of 5/26/14 – 6/1/14 totaled  $2,109,201

All sales were led by a really nice,  rarely brandable domain name, PerfectBalance.com for $28,450

Here are a reportable sales:

 

Via: thedomains.com

 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Sedo Transactions Total $1.1 Million Led By Bouqs.com For $40K - Over the past week, 482 transactions took place on Sedo’s marketplace and via SedoMLS, totaling $1.1 Million Dollars 31% of total sales were the result of Buy Now listings. Highlights of public sales are: · Top .coms: bouqs.com at 40,000 USD · Top ccTLD: watchmovie.to at 8,650 USD · Top “other” TLD: jobboerse.berlin at 8,000 EUR The domain name Bouqs.com was purchased by the companythat owns and operates TheBouqs.com and the domain Bouqs.com is already being redirected to TheBouqs.com Here ... read more ...
 
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Donuts Wins Private Auction For New gTLD .Pizza; Minds + Machines Wins .Fashion - Minds + Machines, (AIM:MMX) has won the private auction for the new gTLD .Fashion The three losing applicants in the private auction held last week for .Fashion were Uniregistry, Donuts and Famous Four Media. The losing bidders for the new gTLD .Pizza were, Asiamix Digital Limited,Minds + Machines, and Uniregistry. Uniregistry previously announced they won the private auctions for the new gTLD extensions of .Help and .Diet from last weeks private auction. Famous Four previously announced the won ... read more ...
 
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.XYZ Gets Almost 18,000 Registrations On Day 1 of General Availability -         .XYZ the new gTLD which bills itself as the new .Com, had a very good 1st day of general availability (GA) winding up with almost 18,000 registrations. According to ntldstats.com, .XYZ has 17,800 domains registered putting it in 11 place after the first day of GA. Interestingly NetworkSolutions.com has over 50% of the registrar market for .XYZ with over 9,000 of the registrations while Godaddy got just over 20% of the .XYZ market. The third biggest registrar for .XYZ is the registry ... read more ...
 
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Best Deal for .XYZ Registrations looks to be during Uniregistry - So far no official numbers on the first day GA registrations for .XYZ.  I have been chatting with Andy from Namestat.org and he said the same. Andy told me,  “Nope, no zone file today, no-one has the figures. Total guess but I suspect they had a very good first 8 hours;) It does look like comedian Kevin Hart regged KevinHart.xyz and KevinHartNation.xyz Ntldstats.com is showing 3,264 registrations but they also tweeted me that the numbers are not final. “As we collect data from more sources ... read more ...
 
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NameCoin Wants You To Forget About The New gTLDs and get Decentralized -

namecoin

Namecoin is a crypto banking that acts as a decentralized domain name system. They expelled a video yesterday that does a good pursuit giving a discerning contribution behind a ideology. NameCoins finish in .bit.

Via: thedomains.com

Mon 2nd June 2014
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
158 .Condos Domain Names Taken in EAP; Here They Are & Here’s The Best Of What’s Left - If your planning on registering any .Condos new gTLD domain names this week, most of the bigger markets in the United States are spoken for. In what looks to be a very successful Early Access Program for Donuts’ .Condos new gTLD,  we counted 158 domain names registered in the 5 day EAP period. In addition to paying the one time fee which ranges for around $12,500 to $250 depending on the registrar many of these domain names also carry a annual premium price registration and renewal fee. However ... read more ...
 
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Legacy Fund Sells Moda.TV For $30,000 Acquired 2.5 Years Ago For $1,200 - The domain name Moda.tv has been sold by Legacy Fund for $30,000 “Moda” is the spanish word for  “Fashion” Legacy Fund acquired the domain name Moda.TV “close to 2.5 years ago”. “Legacy paid “$1200 to acquire it and $52 in renewal fees to hold it? We have reported on other sales by Legacy Fund which specializes in .TV domain names when they sold NF.Tv for $20,000. Other Legacy Fund sales include:: Jeu.tv – $50,000. SS.tv – $30,000 OO.tv – $18,000 Femme.tv – $7,000 Congratulations ... read more ...