Domain Name Blog

In what many see as a record ruling in Belgium last week, EURid was ordered unfroze 74,000 domains held over dispute against warehousers. EURid suspended registrations of 74,000 domains in July due to what it referred to as abuse by certain registrars. The registrars were accused of registering domains directly not on behalf of their clients.

But last week, according to an article published in the HT, EURid was ordered to pay $32,000 fine per hour for each domain per hour, unless it allowed the registrars to transfer the domains to the businesses

After the decision, EURid released the domains but refused to discuss the matter further citing a possible appeal. Since the introduction of the dot eu 2.1m domains have been registered and 210 domain disputes have been settled through arbitration. Among the landmark losers there is Oxford university which lost its domain oxford.eu to a small  trademarked business Ox&Ford!

In last week’s decision Cyprus based companies- Ovidio Ltd., Fausto Ltd. and Gabino Ltd– won square and fit. Arguing their case, they defended that they legitimately registered the domains so as to benefit from direct navigation. Direct navigation works under the principle that some internet users usually type web addresses eg. traveltickets.com. directly onto the url without making use the search engine (Yahoo and Google).

This is a big victory for Registrars indeed and a terrible loss for the dot EU registry!

Ever wondered why some might be correct to say that the domain industry in 2006 has pushed into record high levels? Didn’t camp.com this past week sell for $150,000 at Sedo? What’s more, diamond.com in May sold for a whooping $7.5m! DnsBlogs today takes a critical look at some of the domain industry’s top notch players. Did you know that…

Sedo registered over $25m worth of domain sales in 2005

$4b was spent in advertising within the first quarter of 2006

Moniker and Pulse 360 were acquired this summer by Kanoodle (Seevast Corp)

Dan Warner owns Fabulous

Sedo has rolled out a new “better” parking system in late summer 2006

DNForum entered into a strategic domain management and acquisition partnership with iREIT

…

For more insight on the state of the industry and what happened in 2005 and at the beginning of 2006, read The State of the Industry: Insight From 20 Domain Experts On What Happened in 2005 and What’s Coming in 2006

There is a strong demand for the next evolution of the internet. Individuals and businesses in more than 100 countries around the world registered more than 100,000 .mobi domains in the first four days of the domain’s general availability. This is a great show by all means–an indicator that mobile internet has a future.

.mobi is the first and only top level domain dedicated to delivering Internet content to mobile phones. Built on the open standards developed as part of the Worldwide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Mobile Web Initiative, the .mobi domain makes accessing Internet sites on a mobile device faster, less expensive and more reliable by offering content tailored for the mobile Internet.

A few companies have already put their .mobi to use! Here are a few examples:

cnnmoney.mobi

businessweek.mobi

etc!

I was reading through one of my favourite domain discussion forums Domainstate.com when I came across the name Chris Chena. The topic of discussion focused on a popular spanish website Juegos.com that, according to the info posted there, had not only been bought by one Chris Chena for a wooping 7 figure but was also parked on PPC generating $$. As a young domainer, I am always curious to do research and to investigate intriguing issues. I believe in the power of research and development in order to make a break through as an upcoming entrepreneur. Thus I decided to google search for Chris Chena and found substantial info about him. There was one interesting article based on an interview with Chena that was posted by the DRT Domaining Blog. The 27 year-old Chena is the owner and president of Chena Ventures, Inc which controls the Hispanic market. You will like the story about Chena’s ride to stardom from humble beginnings in childhood until he propelled himself into a topnotch a domainer. He entered the domain industry in 2002.

To cut the long story short, Chena not only co-owns the PPC company Namedrive but also has the whole of the spanish domain industry at his control. He boasts of collection of over 100 domains that consists of such prime spanish domains like Juegos.com (games), animacion.com (animation), animation.com among others. According to the story there was a particular day when he posted 8 of the top 10 weekly sales chart on the DNjournal. I have no comments about this guy who has made it. I think he is a model for many new domainers to take after. Take for instance he encourages quality not quantity and discourages typosquatting of whatsoever kind. He remains sceptical and sees no big future for the PPC business model–the bubble will bust at sometime when advertisers will turn to CPA (Cost Per Action).

What is the latest rumor on the net? Facebook’s chatty users love to gossip. Rumors of buyout talks between the student-focused social networking site and any number of high profile media and technology players have been circling since Facebook earned its first round of venture funding in 2004. According to an article published by the Forbes magazine the latest bout of speculation, reported Thursday, involves Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ) and an asking price near $1 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal. That’s not a bad bid given that Facebook has about 10m active users and that number is still growing!
The speculated sale comes after an ongoing series of changes to the site’s privacy settings, which at first infuriated many users though the furor has quieted since Facebook honored some of their wishes. Last week the company said it would eventually open the site to the public rather than limit it to people affiliated with certain organizations like schools or companies.

I can’t hesitate to question the motivation behind making public Facebook content through google indexing and making it open to any ‘other’ interested parties, groups and organizations. I understand Yahoo! wants to make more money through ads but let them leave membership open for every other dick and harry and we’ll see what happens–we will all leave Facebook. The fact that it consists of students only is what makes Facebook so special, however an oversight might predict that employers could be lured into Facebook to scout for talent of potential employees once it is made public. Nevertheless, I highly doubt any progress thinkers would laud Facebook for making their personal info public available in the internet!!!

Oversee.net, a technology-driven media company, today announced it has acquired 10 domain portfolios over the last two months. The Company continues to aggressively build its portfolio of successful domain names and then quickly monetizes them. Oversee monetizes more than one million domain names per month and has more than 100 million unique visitors per month. The Company owns DomainSponsor, the industry leader in domain monetization.

DomainSponsor is the leader in domain monetization—a service that enables domain owners to maximize earnings on the traffic generated to their domains via direct navigation.

InterSearch Group, a leading provider of Internet search services and operator of industry specific destination portals, announced today that it has acquired the internet domain www.Banks.com. The article can be found here.
The sale reminded me of another domain commercialBankers.com that sold for $4,600 at Moniker/Traffic. Going a little backwards in time reveals that www.bankers.com sold $40,000 Jan 04 Sedo/Traffic. Obviously this last sale was done more than two years ago and thus bankers.com is certainly worth a value higher than $xx,xxx!

Back to the weekly sales, according to the DNJournal.com, NewYork.info was sold for $46,392 in a transaction handled by Moniker.com/DomainSystems.com. Moniker actually handled an even larger sale this week, a $60,300 deal for AnimeOnline.net, a fully developed website which is more than just a domain.

Last week was a bad day for automaker Maruti-Suzuki when the company lost its domain name to a domain cybersquatter. Maruti Udyog lost its case to Rao Tella, a US citizen and the present owner of the domain name www.maruti.com, for transfer of the domain name to the auto major.
In January 2003, Maruti Udyog had filed an arbitral complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) alleging that Tella’s domain name infringed Maruti’s trademark, `MARUTI’ and, hence, had the right to the domain name. The plaintiff, Tella said that his use of the domain name was lawful as the domain was at one point primarily used to post photos of a nephew named Maruti though later he converted the Web site to an engine portal. Tella earned revenues from the site through an affiliated Web site that paid him every time someone clicked on www.maruti.com to reach the affiliated Web site. However, Tella is known to be a cyber squatter with a history of registering Web sites having the names of trade marked companies.

While it stands a fact that the domainer won the day, it is not fair at all because the automaker is not able to use its name to market its products in the net.

In the September issue of Sedo Newsletter reports the PPC provider that .DE is rising in popularity on the internet coming only second to .COM. But I already thought that it was a foregone conclusion that .DE was the strongest of all ccTLDs? This is exactly why Sedo has not informed me much in it’s September issue. The letter goes on to say that .DE has been popular because of the huge population size of Germany and economic muscle. While the I find the first reason rather too light the second one that DENIC’s policies have played the biggest role is the best IMHO. Why do I say this? Denic, like any other registry has well laid out a domain registration policy that only allows domain registrants (owners) to provide valid German street addresses while registering a domain. That is ok. But while this has its own advantages, it does have its own disadvantages e.g. leads to cybersquatting. The domainers who own .DEs have won in this regard. A liberal Denic is a good example of a success story as compared to its backward and conservative french counterpart Afnic. However, the good news is that Afnic is slowly loosening the bolts as we saw last June–individuals not companies can now register domains in France.

It was interesting to read in the late August issue of the Economist about the near death of the Newspaper. With a running sensationalist theme “Who killed the newspaper”, the Economist elaborated on how the most useful bit of the media is disappearing. This is a cause for concern, but not panic, concluded the magazine! I was not so convinced by the author of the article who stayed on the fence in his writing without coming out substantially on the “death” of the newspaper! However, with local advertisers migrating to the web, the plight of newspapers seems to get worse daily. Newspapers are being forced to cut on their sizes due to diminishing ads and sales since the invention of the internet. Late last week, according to a report in the Boston Business Journal, the Boston Herald is slashing an average of 6 pages from its daily newspaper to save on costs.