• New York state passes their own domain law and tries to change some of the rules. With side effects. While the law supposedly protects against “identity theft”, it seems more like an attempt to change existing practice and law.
• Red Herring on Domain Parking from the May 15th print issue. Standard topics covered, but it also features an startup from San Francisco. From the Eurekster website: SwickiDomain: Enhance any domain page by including a vertical search engine (swicki) to build enduring value from the domain or set of domains.
• As of June 7th EUrid will show the release date for any .EU name that becomes available again in the whois. The domains will be released on Tuesdays 11:00 CET, starting on June 13th.
• Another press release about domains for sale (discountE85.com , DiscountE10.com and DiscountFlexFuel.com, bidding starts at $50,000US). I bet we will have a nicer name for alternative fuel by the time it hits the public pumps. And what’s with the “discount” prefix, would it be nicer to sell e85.com, e10.com and ethanol.com?
• Talking about press releases, here comes another one, trying to sell sex.nr and nic.nr on Ebay. .nr = Nauru, Republic of Nauru, is an island nation in the Micronesian South Pacific. 21 sq km, 11,300 inhabitants.

Judging by the title of the article “typo.com“, it’s not a very good one. But keep on reading, the interview with Internet REIT’s Marc Ostrofsky and Bob Martin does a good job of explaining the state of the domainer industry - just the title should have been changed.

The domain names are being offered for sale as a portfolio and consist of www.NewYorkCityHousing.com, www.ManhattanHousing.com, www.BrooklynHousing.com, www.BronxHousing.com, www.QueensHousing.com and www.StatenIslandHousing.com.

Name Ministry » Domain Name News

CondoBuzz.com (…) launches web sites with local targeted advertising, marketing, rich media ads and lead generation opportunities.

“Our domain names say exactly who we are, what we do and are niche focused. Our domain names say the location (city), the product (condo) and service (guide). We are providing premium web sites with domain names such as: SanDiegoCondoGuide.com, LosAngelesCondoGuide.com, LasVegasCondoGuide.com, DCCondoGuide.com, SanFranciscoCondoGuide.com, NewYorkCondoGuide.com, PortlandCondoGuide.com, DenverCondoGuide.com, DallasCondoGuide.com and many more,” said Kempenich.

Sample Site: http://www.MinneapolisCondoGuide.com/

[Press Release]

MSNBC features an article on domaining today. Not many big news in the article, other than that the author does not seem to get the concept:

The Web addresses being amassed by these companies have generic-sounding names like moviedirectory.com and internetgames.com. They typically don’t get enough traffic to make it to the top of Google or Yahoo! search engine results. But the owners of these sites hope that Web surfers will happen upon them by typing an obvious-sounding word or phrase directly into their browser’s address bar — a process called direct navigation. For example, someone interested in motor scooters might try motorscooters.com.

Most of these domains do not need to rely search engine traffic, because people actually do type them in. People use domains as a method of search.

Some interesting data:

Those clicks add up. Direct navigation sites generate an estimated $150 million in revenue per quarter, according to RBC Capital Markets, a Toronto-based investment bank. That’s 7.5 percent of the $2 billion in total search engine revenue each quarter.

[...]

Traffic to Marchex sites has grown substantially, from 21 million unique visitors in July 2005 to 28 million this March. The sites generated revenue of $11.3 million for the company in the first quarter of this year, which is more than a third of the company’s total revenue for that period.

And here is something that I found quite interesting:

Some domain-name companies are eyeing so-called user-generated content, in which members of the public contribute content for free, to expand their generic Web sites. That’s clearly the strategy of Demand Media, the company that recently bought Bellevue domain-name registrar eNom.

Demand Media’s lead investor is Richard Rosenblatt, former chairman of the wildly popular social networking site MySpace.com. MySpace allows people to post content such as text, photos, music and more. The site has become one of the most popular on the Web and was sold to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. last year for $580 million.

“Consumers want more than just a link to something else,” said John Kane, vice president of business development for eNom. “We’re using the same concept of what Richard had built at MySpace.”

Demand Media has accumulated 150,000 domain names so far and is “aggressively” looking for others, Kane said. ENom, now a subsidiary of Demand Media, will handle the technology infrastructure of the new company. ENom will expand its staff 30 percent to 50 percent by the end of this year, and plans to move into new offices, more than doubling its space, in June, Kane said.

The idea of combining user generated content with domains is nothing new. But maybe there’s some potential in allowing users to create content on a larger group of domains in order to drive additional traffic and advertising revenue.

Two Press Releases in a row:

Major Acquisitions Establish Internet REIT as a New Force in Online Advertising

Internet REIT (iREIT) [...] today announced its acquisition of the Netster.com web portal and major portions of the Netster domain name portfolio. Netster is the latest in a series of strategic acquisitions for iREIT, which has acquired over 50 portfolios of Internet traffic in the past fifteen months, including such high-value domains as Bands.com, OfficeSupply.com and AfricanAmericans.com. The addition of the Netster portfolio gives iREIT more than 400,000 domain properties under management and brings the company’s total portfolio of traffic up to 50 million visitors per month.

[...]

Direct navigation comprises more than six percent of the US and UK search advertising markets and could exceed $1.2 billion in ad revenue by 2007, according to Susquehanna Financial and RBC Capital Markets.

Top Investors, Industry Talent Rally Behind Internet REIT

Internet REIT (iREIT)[...] today announced that it has raised a new round of equity and debt financing led by Maveron LLC, the venture firm co-founded by Dan Levitan and Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz. The round of funding also includes significant investments by existing investor Jacobson Family Investments (JFI), as well as Perot Investments, the investment firm founded by H. Ross Perot. With this round of funding, Dan Levitan, Managing Partner, Maveron LLC and Steve Blasnik, President, Perot Investments join the Board of Directors.

GoDaddy’s Bob Parson even invents a new term for traffic testing: Domain Kiting. Here’s a brief summary of the coverage:

• Bob Parsons: 35 million names registered in April. 32 million were part of a kiting scheme. A serious problem gets worse.
• In Bad Taste by John Levine
• How Kiters and Snappers Suck the Air Out of ICANN (email battles)

The main focus of the public concern is linking traffic testing to the price increase proposed in the settlement agreement between ICANN and Verisign.

Bob Parsons: 

Here’s why I chose to call it domain kiting. All of us are familiar with the illegal practice of check kiting. Quite simply check kiting involves taking advantage of timing and the banking system to generate cash that simply isn’t there. In many ways that is what domain kiting does. Domain kiting takes advantage of timing and the domain name system in an abusive and improper way to generate cash. 

There is one difference. The registrars that participate in this testing do have to float the amount of money needed to cover the registrations at the registry. While they do receive a refund for the names that are deleted within the 5 day grace period, the money is under the registry’s control. (He does mention this in this article, but I would like to underline the point that the money is under the registry’s control at this point.)
Bob Parsons

After a domain name is registered, a registrar has five days to cancel a domain name registration – i.e. drop the name – and get their money back. Domain kiting registrars abuse this rule and cancel the lion’s share of the names they register just before the five day period expires – so they get their money back. But then something unexpected happens. After names are cancelled or dropped, the domain kiting registrar goes out and immediately registers the same names again. The domain kiting registrar will then put the same simple Web site back up for each domain name, wait another five days and then cancel all the names again — just in time to get a full refund.

By doing this, the registrars do in a way put the money on the line, since it is held by the registry. Obviously this is more than the usual everyday traffic testing.

I imagine that this debate has not yet ended.

Let’s end this with a quote from Karl Auerbach:

As we see from the numbers, the actual cost (ed. per domain name registration) to Verisign is about $0.02 or less.  That does not seem to warrant the $7, or 35000% profit, that ICANN is allowing Verisign to charge.

pcNames.com’s secondary domain market tool now also offers information on domains that are auctioned before the actual deletion via exclusive agreements with the registrar. I played around with their service for a bit, and while I was missing some features (i.e. sorting exlusive auctions by popularity & date), I was quite impressed. I even ended up placing some bids.

[via webhosting.info]

How much is my domain name worth? Leapfish.com has created an automated free domain appraisal tool that evaluates the value of your domain according to TLD, search engine and archive listings, dictionary words in the the name, unwanted characters and domain length. Leapfish estimates the value of DomainEditorial.com to be $10,584.00. Of course that is way too little.

Apparently Marc didn’t like the results either.

[via Lifehacker.com]

The company operating Ireland’s domain registry service IE Domain Registry Ltd (IEDR) has announced after-tax operating profits of €865,000 for 2005, growing the namespace by 26%.

[via IOL]