DomainWorks

Iraq.com Domain Name Being Auctioned

2007-09-24T21:58:43Z

The domain name Iraq.com is being auctioned off at Sedo, where the bidding has reached 450,000 Euros, or about $632,215 in U.S. dollars. The bidding started last Thursday at 2,000 Euros and has risen steadily, but has not yet reached the reserve price. The auction is scheduled to conclude Thursday at 2 p.m. EST. Sedo's auction process typically begins once an initial offer has been made on a domain placed for sale with the service. That offer then becomes the opening bid. WHOIS records list the owner of Iraq.com as KuwaitNet Internet Services, which registered the name in May 1997. The company offers managed hosting and dedicated servers, and is also an ICANN-accredited registrar. Given the intense debate about the ongoing U.S. war in Iraq, there might be any number of parties with an interest in acquiring the domain. The (apparently) interim Iraqi government web site appears to be at iraqigovernment.org while the U.S. Embassy uses iraq.usembassy.gov. In Aug. 2005 ICANN authorized the fledgling Iraqi government to manage .iq, the top-level domain for the country, which had been in limbo since the previous operators (InfoCom Corp.) were indicted in 2002.

Top 5 Domain Branding Tips For Bloggers

2007-05-09T20:33:02Z

Domain names are essential tools for bloggers. They become your brand, and are a valuable business tool. Managed correctly, domain names can also be invaluable in helping obtain attract traffic from search engines. Investing a small investment of time to learn about domains can pay dividends on many levels. Here are five domain branding tips for bloggers. 1. Register Your Domain For More than One Year: There are several advantages to multi-year domain registrations. Foremost among them is the fact that Google favors domains that are registered beyond the current year. This bias by Google is part of a broader domain weighting system that also favors older domains that have been hosting active web sites for years. Google considers domains with "good age" and multi-year registrations less likely to be search spam or trying to game the system. Beyond the search benefits, multi-year registrations almost always save you money through a discount from your registrar, and make it much less likely that you'll lose control of the domain by forgetting to renew it. This happens, all the time. In February, 2006 the domain Jasmin.com expired and was sold at auction for $310,000. 2. Shop For An Affordable But Credible Domain Registrar: There are millions of domain name owners who continue to pay $30 to $35 each time they purchase or renew a domain. But don't just opt for the cheapest provider or the one with the flashiest ads. The victims of the meltdown at RegisterFly almost certainly wish they'd been more selective in choosing their provider. Opt for a registrar that provides the combination of a good price, corporate stability and accountability. Go Daddy.com sells domains for about $9, while you can get names for $5.99 at 1&1 Interent.]]> 3. Register Alternate .TLDs For Your Domain Brand: Do you really need to own mybrand.biz or mybrand.info? If you're serious about building and controlling your brand, you absolutely need to own it in other top-level domains (TLDs) like .org and.net. I learned this the hard way. When I bought blogworks.net, the "blogworks" name had already been used in several commercial ventures, so I made no effort to obtain a trademark or service mark for the name. I also neglected to register blogworks.org, which was available. Sometime later the .org domain was registered by a PR agency, which applied for - and was granted - a service mark from the US Patent Office. Even though my blog predated their ownership of the domain. I suppose could've applied first. Buying the .org name would have been even cheaper. 4. Educate Yourself About the Domain Name Aftermarket: Many bloggers develop a blog with an eye toward selling it for a profit. Your content has value, but so does your domain, and you'll want to account for that value as part of any sale. There are many blogs where you can track the domain resale market and valuations, including the Daily Domainer, Domain Name Wire, Domain Tools and especially DomainName Journal. If you're ready to sell, check out the forums at Site Point, Digital Point and DNForum and domain auction services Sedo and Afternic to get a sense for valuations. Look at the auctions and listings that are getting the most attention, and look for common techniques. 5. Lock Down Your Domain Brand on Social Networks: Profile pages on MySpace and other popular social networking sites can be valuable extensions of your blogging brand. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama learned this lesson the hard way, as a dispute over an unofficial site at myspace.com/barackobama became a public relations headache in which the campaign was perceived as strong-arming a supporter to gain control of a profile with more than 160,000 friends.

RegisterFly Web Site Down ... Again

2007-03-07T02:49:44Z

RegisterFly's web site was offline for much of the day, as documented by Netcraft, with posts at RegisterFlies attributing the downtime to a transfer of the registerfly.com domain to give the new CEO better control over the site. Meanwhile, ICANN has asked a California court to force RegisterFly to turn over its database of domain data and compel an emergency audit of its books and records. ICANN has also reached out to central domain registries to protect domain owners. "Last Friday, ICANN convened a telephone conference among those needed to implement a plan that will help cease unintended deletions," ICANN said on its blog. "This will prevent names from being deleted from the registry and becoming available for re-registration by others." While it has taken steps to prevent domain deletions, ICANN acknowledged that "the options for customers to transfer their names to another registrar at this stage are limited." Additional covergae can be found at Daily Domainer and Frank Schilling.

ProBlogger.com Expires, Up for Auction

2007-02-22T16:39:40Z

The ProBlogger.com domain has expired and is up for auction on Go Daddy's Domain Name AfterMarket site. Bidding is up to $95 with eight days to go. There have been seven bids already, and the domain appears to get about 3,000 visitors a month, despite no real content at the site. There's been a lot of interest in blogging domains, and even with the failure of some of the blog networks, there could be strong interest in this domain. ProBlogger.com was registered to ProBlogger.com">Matt Winkler from Chatsworth, Calif. The Wayback Machine shows that in ProBlogger.com/">May of 2006 the site featured a placeholder page that described the coming debut of a "new type of blogging community. Offering innovative technology, fully customizeable layouts, image hosting, and many other features, Problogger is sure to breath new life into the blogging community." Earlier searches from 2004 show a blog with Lorem Ipsum text. So who's interested in ProBlogger.com? It would be a natural for Darren Rowse, who has built one of the blogosphere's most successful and respected brands at ProBlogger.net. It might make sense for Darren to re-invest some of his six-figure blogging income to register the .com, if only as a defensive strategy to prevent another blogger from buying the name and diluting the brand equity he has built on the .net domain.

'Act of God' May Extend Expiring Domains

2007-01-05T22:45:41Z

What happens if your domain is expiring and you can't reach the registrar's web site? There have been many stories about connectivity problems in Asia due to the earthquake in Taiwan, which severed underground cables. The China International Network Information Center (CNNIC) is considering extensions for 10,000 domain owners who lost their expiring .com domains when the couldn't reach the registrar's web site to renew them. "Because the domain names are lost due to an act of God, enterprises and individuals involved may be appropriately compensated by the domain name server, but the scheme is still under discussion," the Xinhua new service quoted a source close to the CNNIC.

The History of Domain Tasting

2007-01-03T03:09:37Z

The practice of "domain" tasting" dates back to 20001, when DotRegistrar and IAregistry began using the five-day add-drop period to test drive domain names for their commercial potential. That's the introduction to The Closing Window: A Historical Analysis of Domain Tasting, an informative article by Frank Schilling at CircleID. Schilling, who prepared the analysis for members of the the ICANN Business Constituency, notes that VeriSign initially resisted domain tasting, and sought to discourage the registrars who were engaging in the practice. His analysis concludes:

VeriSign will have to close the window, just as it did in 2002. Only it may be harder this time because they have permitted the practice for so long. The best solution would likely be for VeriSign to send an email to all registrars announcing a restocking fee effective next-week. Even a 2 cent restocking fee (trivial for real errors) would be enough to curb tasting dramatically.

Britney, KFed Miss Out on JaydenFederline.com

2006-10-24T20:07:59Z

Are we shocked that Britney Spears and her rocket scientist hubby Kevin Federline are not as adept at registering baby domain names as Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt? Despite buying a month of secrecy by leaking a fake name after the Sept. 12 birth, Britney and KFed still couldn't manage to secure the tot's domain name. Instead, Leonard Lee of Union City, Calif. is the proud owner of JaydenFederline.com. Lee purchased the name on Oct. 18, shortly after the first news items mentioning the name. The birth certificate didn't become public until today, and JaydenFederline.org was registered in short order. The poor .net top-level domain doesn't cut it anymore, as jaydenfederline.net was still available as of 3:30 pm Eastern time. So who's the sucker who registered SuttonPierceFederline.com? It was a private registration, so we can't know for sure. But we suspect KFed, who isn't getting any smarter getting dropped on his head by those WWE wrestlers.

5 Million Domains for .ORG Registry

2006-09-13T20:53:51Z

The Public Interest Registry (PIR), managers of the .ORG registry announced today that 5,000,000 .ORG domains have now been registered worldwide. The growth of .ORG was boosted in July of 2005 by PIR"S decision to offer .ORG registrars discounts targeting developing regions of the world, including South America, Asia, and Africa. The promotions have resulted in a 50 percent increase in .ORG domain registrations in the targeted regions. In India, growth has reached a 93 percent annual increase. "This is a significant milestone for the .ORG registry and we are excited that the number of .ORG registrations worldwide has increased by over 25 percent in less than 1 year," said Edward G. Viltz, President and CEO of PIR. "PIR is especially pleased that the global noncommercial community has an expanding online presence to support their organizational objectives. In addition, commensurate with this growth, the PIR Team is committed to continue expanding our support of the .ORG community on relevant Internet issues and to ensure community interests are represented within the domain name space." Public Interest Registry is a 501(c) (3) not-for-profit corporation created by the Internet Society (ISOC) to manage the .ORG domain.]]>

ICANN Group Lets Domain Name Expire

2006-09-11T19:51:50Z

The Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) oversees the Internet's domain name system. But an ICANN committee seems to have had trouble looking after its own domain. ICANN's ISPs and Connectivity Providers working group has lost its domain, which apparently expired and was bought by a pay-per-click parking business. The domain ispcp.org was used to conduct ICANN business as far back as 2001, but now displays a Go Daddy parking page and is registered to an email address at virtualclicks.com. (Link via ICANN Watch)

10 Most Unintentionally Funny Domains

2006-08-02T02:37:33Z

Did you *really* look closely at that domain before you registered it? Not everyone does, and the result is that sometimes companies and online services build their brands around unfortunate domains that can be read several ways. Independent Sources has supplied a list of 10 of the worst ill-named domains. An example: The Pen Island company registering www.penisland.net. Then of course, there�s the Italian Power Generator company that chose www.powergenitalia.com. If you haven't seen it already, check out the full list. It's a major hoot.

eNom Acquires BulkRegister

2006-07-27T13:23:27Z

eNom has acquired BulkRegister, LLC in a deal that combines providers that focus on high-volume customers. BulkRegister, which had been owned by hosting company Alabanza, manages more than 1.5 million domains for its 35,000 customers. eNom said the acquisition gives it more than 6.8 million domain names under management, allowing it to pass Network Solutions to become the second-largest registrar after Go Daddy.

"We are excited about this significant and synergistic addition to our domain platform," said Paul Stahura, founder and chief executive officer of eNom. "Both eNom and BulkRegister have built up strong, loyal and successful customer bases, by providing great tools, high quality service, and a solid technology platform. The combination of the two companies is a natural fit."

]]> The deal further expands the size and capabilities of Demand Media Inc., which bought eNom earlier this year. Demand Media is backed by $120 million in funding from Wall Street investors and venture capital firms, and has been quietly acquiring a portfolio of more than 150,000 domains.

Boing Boing on Kiting: Year Late, Dollar Short

2006-07-24T22:50:56Z

Boing Boing is usually a great read, but this week's item on domain name kiting and the add-grace period (AGP) wasn't its best work. The practice - which Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow called a "new online scam" - has been widely discussed for more than a year (see July 2005 post at Netcraft, among others that mention the practice), and has since been written about by the Internet Stock Blog and Joi Ito (a prominent friend of Boing Boing), among many others. But no one has been more visible on this issue than Go Daddy CEO Bob Parsons, who was the first person to use the term "domain name kiting" on his Hot Points blog on May 10. Parsons then took his case to the pages of Business Week. Maybe Cory Doctorow wasn't aware of the lineage of the term when he linked to DomainNameKiting.com. A whois search shows that the domain name is registered at Go Daddy and "owned" by Domains By Proxy, a privacy service run by Go Daddy. Is the domain name really owned by a third party that just happened to use all Go Daddy's services to register and cloak the ownership info on the name? The related forum, DomainKitingSucks.com is also owned by - you guessed it - Domains by Proxy.]]> Go Daddy information on every line of its privatized whois record raises several possibilities - that it's either a "cloaked" Go Daddy site or a Made-for-AdSense site that co-opted Parsons' anti-kiting advocacy to turn a quick buck. Linking directly to posts on the blogs of Parsons or Ito would have been a better choice.

Domain Incubation: Outsourced Domain Improvement

2006-07-10T02:30:23Z

Domain incubation is a new strategy in which domain owners "outsource" their site management to a third-party service that provides content and link-building support. Internet domain incubation differs from parking in that it doesn't generate revenue, but can improve a domain's resale value by improving its Google rank and the number of incoming links. DomainIncubation.com is a free service from Coast Internet Solutions, Inc. of Edgewater, NJ. Participants point their names at the nameservers for the service, which develops a web site to improve the value of the domain. DomainIncubation.com keeps the revenue from ads that are placed on the site, while the domain owner gets the benefit of improved PageRank and backlinks, which in turn can improve the name's resale value or establish enough traffic to begin monetizing the site through a domain parking service. The service says the designs won't be "first-class" but won't be scraper sites either, providing an example at Security-guard.org. The sample links are managed by blog software or a script that pulls directory content from the Open Directory Project (dmoz.og). "This offer is intended for those with poor quality domains," notes the intro to the concept at the Domain Incubation web site. "You will sell a domain with some PR and backlinks for more than you will without them. We do all of the work and take the risk that you could remove your domain at anytime, that's why we keep any and all money from advertising. If you think your domain is hot and will generate money from type-in traffic, you should use a domain parking service that will pay you part of the income."]]> Demand Media is the best example of this trend, with its purchases of eHow and eNom combining content and a huge portfolio. But domain incubation is not a full-fledged content solution like No Parking.com, which provides professional content development and optimization in exchange for half the advertising revenue and, in some cases, a piece of the profit when a domain is sold. NoParking has also recently launched a service that provides paid content development for domain owners.

Why Google Is A Domain Registrar

2006-07-05T14:47:56Z

It's been 18 months since Google became a domain registrar, a move that initially shook up the domain and hosting businesses amid the notion that Google might make domain names available for free. Before long, Google watchers advanced an alternate theory: that Google would use its access to the list of recently sold domains to clean up its search results, resetting a site's PageRank when its domain changes hands. That theory has now been confirmed, thanks to the sharp-eyes of Kevin Murphy at Texturbation, who noted comments by Google employee (and ICANN chair) Vint Cerf in the recent domain marketplace discussion at ICANN's conference in Marrakech. Here's the cogent excerpt (from a much longer transcript): VINT CERF: When a domain name has expired, and then it's re-assigned to someone else, what happens to the SOA (Start of Authority) record for that domain name as to its start date? Does that change automatically or does it stay the same or are there circumstances where a domain name changes hands but it doesn't look like it has if you are looking at its birth date?]]> PAT KANE: If a name is transferred, the date stays the same. VINT CERF: Okay. So that's a problem for Google. And it's one of the reasons that we became a registrar, but it didn't help. We were hoping that we could detect that something had changed hands and that, therefore, we should invalidate a lot of things sitting in the cache that referred to the former content of that domain name. PAUL STAHURA (eNom): I can answer that. You can still do that because you can monitor the WHOIS and if you see the WHOIS change, then you note the date. At that point Vint says he'll continue discussion after the session. Google doesn't appear to be automatically resetting PageRank once a site changes hands - I haven't seen that in any of my domain purchases or sales - but that clearly appears to be what it had in mind in becoming a registrar. That has implications for the secondary market, as we noted last year in a post at Netcraft:

Given the importance of Google traffic in a site's success and profitability, a high PageRank makes a domain more attractive to buyers, who will pay a premium for added visibility in Google. ... As a registrar, Google would be able to negotiate access to a centralized list of expiring and resold domains (known as the "batch pool"), and then know when to reset PageRank on a domain that has changed hands. The site would then have earn its position in Google's rankings, rather than inheriting the "Googlejuice" of the previous owner. While that would lead to less link spam in Google's rankings, it has implications for web site owners selling a site with an established PageRank. If the strong PageRank disappears once the domain changes hands, the buyer may be less likely to offer a premium for visibility in Google.

I still regularly see PageRank used as a metric in sales of domains, sites and links at forums like Digital Point and SitePoint, which are populated by a pretty savvy crowd of site owners. What's surprising is Cerf's statement that Google has trouble identifying when a site has changed hands. As Paul Stahura mentioned to Cerf, that information is available if Google is keen enough to find it. Given the volume of domain sales these days, the key issue is probably whether they're able to automate the process.

Would You Pay $29K for CondoleezaRice.com?

2006-06-21T15:59:14Z

The Hill has an excellent analysis of domain names tied to the 2008 presidential campaign, which have been targeted by speculators. "Many of the political domain names have been bought as investments with the intention of being sold to the potential presidential campaigns," notes The Hill's Kelly McCormack. "Other buyers acquired the Web addresses to post endorsements or bash the presidential hopefuls. Either way, the cyberbrigade has hit almost all the presidential hopefuls." A bunch of 2008-related names are being for sale through a Blogger site titled Political Domain World, which touts names including condoleezzarice08.com and johnmccain08.net.]]> Laura Heymann, a law professor at the College of William and Mary, says First Amendment issues may make it difficult for candidates to file UDRP cases or lawsuits against the registrants. "The political-speech implications weigh higher in this case. The First Amendment [trumps]," Heymann told The Hill. If the address owners are not trying to deceive the public into believing that the site is official, the politician has no leg to stand on, Heymann contends. One seller has priced condoleezarice.com at $29,000. "Whoever pays for that domain name may have buyer�s remorse, however, because Rice has two z�s in her first name, not one," McCormack notes. Perhaps, but only if direct navigation surfers can spell. The active market for typo domains suggests that there are plenty of folks who'll only type one "z."