Tag Archives: VeriSign

Fri 14th August 2015
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Verisign sues CentralNic and .XYZ over .Theatre, .Protection and .Security - Company upset that Verisign was dropped as registry services provider in favor of CentralNic. Earlier this week I noted a lawsuit Verisign filed in Virginia against .XYZ and Daniel Negari. Thanks to a request by the defendants to remove the case to federal district court, I now have a copy of the lawsuit (large PDF). As it turns out, Verisign originally sued Key Brand Entertainment, applicant for .Theatre, and CentralNic back in March in Circuit Court in Fairfax County. The basis of the lawsuit was ... read more ...
Tue 11th August 2015
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Trump and Bible trending in .com domain name registrations - Donald Trump is making money…for domain name registrars. Domain name registrations related to Donald Trump, the bible and Cuba were trending last month. According to .com registry Verisign, the following keywords showed the biggest increase in registrations from June to July in .com: 1. owned 2. Cuba 3. savings 4. prices 5. Trump 6. SUV 7. economy 8. scope 9. bible 10. frog I understand some of these terms, but frog? There was a big spike of “frog” related domains registered on July 22 for ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Google's Alphabet Inc. Announcement Fires Up .com / .net Registrations - As we noted earlier today over 6,000 .XYZ new gTLD domain names were registered yesterday,  after Google Inc. announced it’s holding company Alphabet Inc., using the domain name ABC.XYZ. It is interesting though, as Mike pointed out that of the 6,000 newly registered .xyz domains registered yesterday hundreds of them related to ABC, Alphabet and XYZ. I wanted to compare that to .com / .net domain registrations relating to those three terms. The “Alphabet” term ranked the highest, followed ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Verisign's lawsuit opposite .XYZ continues, pesters Donuts & ICANN as well - Lawsuit marches on, creating legal headaches for many of Verisign’s competitors. Why did Verisign sue .XYZ for disparaging .com and allegedly falsely inflating the company’s success? It’s pretty clear that Verisign thinks new top level domain names pose a threat to .Com, otherwise it wouldn’t have bothered. This goes beyond .XYZ. The lawsuit is surely costing Verisign and .XYZ a lot of money, something that the former has plenty of thanks to its monopoly on selling .com domain names. This ... read more ...
Tue 28th July 2015
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Verisign gets obvious for presaging domain name renovation rates - A crystal ball for estimating domain name renewal rates. The U.S. Patent and Trademark office has granted patent number 9,094,467 to Verisign for “Method and system for predicting domain name registration renewal probability”. Simply: take a number of factors about the domain name and its history to calculate the chances of it being renewed. Verisign has to run these calculations frequently, and not just for its own forecasting. Because of the renewal grace period, it can’t give final renewal ... read more ...
Fri 24th July 2015
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
3 "New" Risks to Verisign's Business - Company includes additional risks in its most recent quarterly filing. .Com registry Verisign released its earnings and filed its quarterly report with the SEC yesterday. Using Intelligize, I compared Q2’s SEC report to Q1 to look for changes. I found three interesting risk factors added to the most recent report. Some of these aren’t new risk factors, but they weren’t disclosed in the Q1 report. 1. China – newly enforced regulations for business licenses for selling domains in China For ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Are IDN .com owners about to get screwed? - Verisign finds way to sign ICANN contract, but it might come at the expense of IDN investors. [Update: see comment from Verisign at end.] It’s been a long, long wait for owners of internationalized domain names under .com. The idea was that they’d get rights to IDN.IDN-as-transliteration domain names to match their IDN.com names when they came out. So they registered IDN.com domain names and held on to them for a decade, waiting for their investment to pay off. Given that the IDN-as-transliteration ... read more ...
 
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Verisign: Brands Are Keeping Their .Com: Don't See Anybody Abandoning .Com for .Brand or Another TLD." - In the Verisign earnings call yesterday the following question was asked by Fred Ziegel, Topeka Capital Markets. Fred Ziegel (Analyst – Topeka Capital Markets): But we don’t see them abandoning their .com.” Jim Bidzos (Executive Chairman, President and CEO): Added: “And just to clarify — for example, if we were to employ .verisign, we would never abandon verisign.com. Like most brands, we’ve invested heavily in promoting it. And everybody is familiar with it,  we would probably ... read more ...
Thu 23rd July 2015
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Verisign Reports: Revenue adult 4.9%: 133.5 Million Registered .Com/.Net Domains - Financial Highlights Verisign ended the second quarter with cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities of $1.9 billion, an increase of $460 million as compared with year-end 2014. Cash flow from operations was $175 million for the second quarter of 2015, compared with $121 million for the same quarter in 2014. Deferred revenues on June 30, 2015, totaled $932 million, an increase of $41 million from year-end 2014. Capital expenditures were $9 million in the second quarter of 2015. During the ... read more ...
Tue 14th July 2015
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Trending keywords in .com: Gay, Zone, Buzz - Used, Gay, and three keywords matching new TLDS make the list. Verisign has published its monthly “trending keywords” report, highlighting the keywords making the biggest jump from the May to June in .com domain name registrations. “Used” was number one for the month. According to Verisign DomainView, there was a big spike in “used” domains registered or renewed on June 30. Over 1,700 .com domains were registered/renewed. The Verisign trending chart only takes into consideration new ... read more ...
Wed 8th July 2015
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Verisign Announces $30K Winner of #InternetOfficial Contest: KidsCookDinner.com - Verisign the registry for the .com registry has announced the Grand Prize Winner of it’s #InternetOfficial contest. It’s KidsCookDinner.com, registered through Network Solutions. I was one of the five judges selected by Verisign to judge the contest however the Grand Prize winner was selected by the public. Here is the announcement: “”New York-based Kate K. submitted the most descriptive, memorable and original new .COM domain name that resonated with our five judges and received the most ... read more ...
Tue 7th July 2015
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Verisign gets Domain Name Stockpiling patent - The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has granted patent number 9,075,886 (pdf) to Verisign for “Systems and methods for detecting the stockpiling of domain names.” We’ll call it domaindar for short. The patent explains ways that a registry can determine what a domain name registrar is doing with domain names after they expire. Are they deleting them or keeping them for themselves (i.e., stockpiling.)? To discover what registrars are doing with the domains, Verisign proposes checking site information ... read more ...
Tue 30th June 2015
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Verisign Domain Report: There Are Now 294 Million Domains As Of Mar 31, 2015 - VeriSign, Inc. (NASDAQ: VRSN), released its quarterly Domain Name Industry Brief today for the first quarter of 2015 6 million domain names were added to the Internet in the in Q1, bringing the total number of registered domain names to 294 million worldwide across all top-level domains (TLDs) as of March 31, 2015. The increase of six million domain names globally equates to a growth rate of 1.9% over the fourth quarter of 2014. Worldwide registrations have grown by 17.8 million, or 6.5%, year over ... read more ...
Thu 25th June 2015
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Voting starts in Verisign .Com Contest: See a videos - Winners make their cases in videos. Voting has opened to pick the grand prize winner in Verisign’s Internet Official contest. The fifteen winners so far each received $5,000. The grand prize winner will pick up a cool $30,000. Each of the winners was asked to create a video about why they picked their domain name. I just watched all fifteen, and I have to say there’s a wide gap in quality. But voting won’t just be about which video is better…I suspect social media promotion will win the ... read more ...
Tue 23rd June 2015
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Verisign admits: It is formidable to brand fascinating domain names that are available - Patent says it’s hard to find available domains, marketing says most domain lookups are successful. When do your company’s intellectual property efforts contradict your marketing efforts? The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office just issued patent number 9,065,794 (pdf) to Verisign for “Systems and methods for providing domain name suggestions”. The patent describes ways of finding domain names based on user preferences and external data sources. I’m struck by a statement in the patent: A distinctive, ... read more ...
Fri 12th June 2015
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Kevin Ham and Mike Mann let these prize-winning domain names expire - Domains that won $5,000 in Verisign contest used to be owned by well-known domain name investors. Verisign found some great domains for the final five $5,000 winners in its Internet Official contest. All five were previously registered. Interestingly, a couple well-known domainers used to own two of the domain names: Kevin Ham and Mike Mann. Based on DomainTools’ whois history, it seems they let the domain names expire. Here is the history behind the five winning domains: Delectablegarden.com ... read more ...
Thu 11th June 2015
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Verisign Downgraded By Zacks Partially Based on a New gTLD Program - Zacks, a publication that tracks the stock market and covers many public companies has downgraded shares of Verisign to a sell,  partially based on the new gTLD program. “”We believe that gTLD prospects, international expansion through IDNs and investments in intellectual properties will boost results over the long run. “The negative impact of search engine adjustments on domain monetization and increasing operating expenses related to marketing remain the primary headwinds in the near term. ” “Verisign ... read more ...
Wed 10th June 2015
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Verisign Announces #InternetOfficial Month 3 Winners & Upcoming Grand Prize - Verisign has announced the winners of the #InternetOfficial contest for month 3. The month 3 winners are: delectablegarden.com GeorgiaWeddingCakes.com CancerSniff.com WarmEscapes.com BridesWithABudget.com Congratulations to the last 5 #InternetOffical winners! The Grand Prize round will launch on Friday, June 12 and end on Saturday, June 27th. Staring June 12th you can vote for the .COM that you think should be the $30,000 #InternetOfficial Grand Prize winner along with the Judges of the contest ... read more ...
Tue 9th June 2015
Written by The Domains in EN and tagged
Tesla Is The 5th Top Keyword Registered In .Com in May - Verisign just published the top 10 keywords in registered in .COM and .NET for May and noticeably Tesla is sitting at number 5. Of course Tesla is a car maker and a trademarked term. So it seems very interesting that this term would be in the top 10 keyword registered domain names in .com for May The word “Option” led both the .com and the .net list pdf is another trademarked term by Adobe which is the 2nd top 10 keyword term in .net Here are some of the domain name registered in May with ... read more ...
Wed 3rd June 2015
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
.Com winners and losers - Here’s how registrars fared with .com in February. ICANN has published the latest Verisign .com monthly report, containing data from February. Let’s start by reviewing which registrars added the most new .com domain name registrations: 1. GoDaddy 912,763* 2. Rightside 203,096** 3. Tucows 106,910 4. PublicDomainRegistry 92,847 5. Network Solutions 62,104 When it comes to companies that won the transfer game, here are the top five registrars with retail operations for February. These numbers are ... read more ...
Wed 13th May 2015
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Nepal, Cuba and IoT are trending in domain names - News stories generate domain name registrations. Verisign has released its list of trending terms in .com and .net domain name registrations last month. A couple of terms are directly related to news stories: Nepal, which is recovering from earthquakes, came in at #8. Cuba, which is being opened up even more to the United States, ranked #4. (Read this story about a domain name investor who was really early for Cuba domain names.) IoT, short for Internet of Things, ranked #6. (Verisign’s DomainView ... read more ...
Tue 12th May 2015
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Apartments.com's $100 million ad debate includes "We put a .com in apartments" - Ad campaign promotes apartments…and .com. Apartments.com recently launched a $100 million advertising campaign, and Verisign couldn’t be happier: One of the ad lines used in the campaign is “We put the .com in apartments”. The overall campaign is called “Change your apartment. Change the world.” and features actor Jeff Goldblum (Will Grace, Jurassic Park) as a Silicon Valley futurist. The year-long ad campaign aims to reach 95% of 18-49-year-olds with more than 3 billion ad impressions. ... read more ...
Thu 7th May 2015
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
One domicile cashes in twice in Verisign Contest - Twice the cash for Florida household. Verisign recently released the second batch of winners in its Internet Official contest. Here are the five that each took home $5,000: KidsCookDinner.com – Kate K, New York NYC SkinnyLA.com – Sarah G Los Angeles, CA SoldiersOnly.com – Alfred M, Jacksonville FL LastSecondFlights.com – Michael S – Wilton CT SeniorBride.com – Terry S., Port Charlotte, FL I couldn’t help but notice that there are now two winners from Port Charlotte, Florida. Last month ... read more ...
Tue 5th May 2015
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
Verisign wants obvious for "Searchable Web Whois" - Company files patent application for improved whois searching across multiple registries. Verisign has filed a patent with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for a “searchable web whois”. The application was filed in 2012 and just published today. The patent application suggests that current whois search, especially across multiple registries, is hard. It claims that current services only search a single registry per search request, it’s difficult to index whois records in real time, it’s ... read more ...
 
Written by DomainNameWire in EN and tagged
.Com domain name winners and losers - eNom and Uniregistry do well on transfers, GoDaddy and eNom lead in new registrations. ICANN just published the most recent .com transactions report, reflecting registrar results for .com from January. There were no major outliers from January in terms of .com transfers, but Google Domains made an appearance on the top gainers list. 9,770 domains were transferred to Google’s new domain name registrar. I wonder if these were from consumers transferring their domains or if Google transferred some ... read more ...