Domain Name, Internet, News Blog

Some say that some domain names have greater value than others. There is no single week that the DNJournal will ever miss to report on domain sales at Sedo, Afternic among others. They have even gone as far as to say that a domain’s value does not just have to be judged from the parking revenue point of view alone. But I would still argue that parking revenue is a potential way of telling what is a generic domain’s value. Dan Warner the COO of Fabulous has elaborated more on branded and branded domains in this article. Domain names with little or no parking revenue at all have a teriffic branding potential. Capital market evaluators usually have difficulties in telling the exact value of a domain name if it doesn’t have any overture score. There are many tools out there to find the overture score of most of the major ccTLDs e.g. Eovt and OVTD. The concept of overture score is important and at the center of purchase and sale of revenue domains. A domain’s overture score with extension is a more practical way of assessing what could be the current market price for a domain. Overture score works under the principle that it able to provide one with the number of times a keyword is searched on the search engines. Overture score without extension is not reliable at all from experience as most domains that i have ever registered on this criteria rarely have they performed well.

I have one problem with parking revenue domains. A lot of domains have gone into waste down the drain as domainers park them earning measly monthly revenue. Think of search names like YouTube.com, Ebay.com and Amazon.com. We all know how much value these domain names have in the market currently because the owners have taken the huge step to develop and advertise them to develop both massive and reliant followers. There is a feeling that many domainers have that just any other name obtained at reg fee is worth several grands. I think this is an optical illusion for many domainers which is misleading. Domainers need to turn to the next niche on the internet which will be developing sites. Webmasters have been doing very well lately with contextual ads. I wont hesitate to mention my role model Shoemoney.com whose empire of sites on the internet mesmerizes me.

Registrars who support .com domain names will use the Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP) system by October 28. From VeriSign:

VeriSign plans on making an EPP Automated Batch Pool will be available in parallel with the RRP Auto-Batch Pool beginning on October 3. The hostname for the EPP server will be epp-auto.verisign-grs.com.

The VeriSign plans on decommissioning the RRP Protocol will be decommissioned from the .com/.net Production and OT&E Environments during scheduled maintenance on October 28, 2006. This will include decommissioning the RRP Auto-Batch Pool, per the July 27 notification.

Registrars must use EPP following the October 28, 2006 decommissioning maintenance and will no longer able to perform transactions using the RRP Protocol.

According to the new regulations there will be an additional step when attempting to transfer .com domains among registrars. Specifically, a piece of information called an EPP code (aka auth code, EPP key, transfer secret) must be obtained from the current registrar and submitted to the gaining one prior to approving with the latter.

This is going to be a real inconvenience especially when one wants to transfers domains in bulk. Additionally the whole process is an incovenience in my opinion that only serves to hurt those people with massive portfolios. It is a pain for the high end players but less for the small players.

British international striker Wayne Rooney, among 30 players on a shortlist for FIFA’s World Player of the Year Award, has won ownership of a Web site in his name, a United Nations agency said on Friday.Rooney, who plays for Manchester United, won exclusive rights to domain name waynerooney.com after proving his name was a registered trademark, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) said.

Rooney’s teammate Joe Cole, Brazilian superstars Ronaldinho and Ronaldo, Dutchman Jaap Stam, Italy’s Francesco Totti and Ghanaian-born prodigy Freddy Adu are among soccer players who have won cybersquatting cases at the Geneva-based agency.

Google finally purchased YouTube for $1.65b. YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal. Subsequently the purchase has put to end speculation over the net over who was going to buy the company. Other media giants reported earlier to be interested in purchasing YouTube were Viacom, Yahoo and AOL. The next question might be who owns YouTube? To answer this question, you need to mention three young men who came up with the initial idea about the site. They are Chad, Karim and Steve.
Chad, Karim and Steve (YouTube Video)Chad studied studied at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Steve and Karim studied computer science together at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The domain name “YouTube.com” was activated on February 15, 2005, and the website was developed over the following months. The creators offered the public a preview of the site in May 2005, and six months later, YouTube made its official debut.

For more information, read here.

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

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Today the blogosphere is awash with news that Google is in talks for acquisition of YouTube, reports the BusinessWeek. While each one of us have their own reasons to consider this not to be news, I would like to ask whether YouTube is really worth the estimated takeover price of $1.6bn. IMHO if Google buys YouTube for such a colossal figure, this is going to be a bit of a gamble with their money. The fact remains that YouTube has not until today implemented a culture of playing ads before videos are displayed. It is also a fact that YouTube receives upto 20m unique visitors per month. But my point of contention would be that a sudden change of the status quo by Google (if they indeed buy YouTube) video ads might drive away a substantial of visitors. There are other companies offering web video clips such as Grouper.com (bought recently by Sony for $650m), Gotuit.com (Gotuit Media) among others.
Google advocates for an entrepreneurial spirit for the devout at heart–publishers. From my experience with PPC providers, there nothing more difficult than monetizing video web content sites.

In the past YouTube has been linked to be involved in takeover talks with other web giant companies such as AOL (Time Warner), Viacom and Yahoo.
Just to give you an oversight into the video advertising dollars:

“The advertising dollars U.S. social networking sites collect is expected to grow from $280 million this year to $1.9 billion in 2010, according to estimates by research firm eMarketer”.

The web is one lawless channel of communication in which only the swift, savvy and gifted at speed succeed. This theory has been proven to be true this week because the leader of Britain’s Conservative Party has fallen victim to cybersquatters and some people trying to access his Internet blog have found themselves entering the world of a little-known Australian poet.

David Cameron, modernizing leader of the Conservative party, launched his blog www.webcameron.org.uk over the weekend in a bid to appeal to younger voters and revamp the image of his party.

But the party did not take the precaution, common in such circumstances, of securing the domains of similar Web site names including www.webcameron.info and www.webcameron.co.uk.

Since then, supporters of small rival political party UKIP have leapt on to the www.webcameron.info domain and made it their own, posting a satirical video of Cameron on it. Find the video here
As of this writing it seems a deal has been reached and the domain webcameron.co.uk transferred to the Conservative party leader. However, it is difficult to tell how much money the cybersquatter was paid in exchange for the domain.

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 am excited about the new look Yahoo email interface. If you have not upgraded your account to Yahoo Beta, then you’re missing the new improved features and tools. At first when I logged on I thought it was my Gmail account but it wasn’t. Otherwise you need to try it out and next time you log in your email do not been taken by surprise. I think Yahoo! is likely to continue leading as the most popular free email service provider. The company’s email site interface will also most likely raise more revenue from contextual ads.