Moniker just released the full list of the names in the TRAFFIC West 2007 domain name auction in Las Vegas starting on Wednesday, March 7th at 2:30pm EST. You will also be able to participate remotely; for further information see the Moniker Website.

Some names included in the auction are:

• AirlineTickets.net
• LimousineService.com
• AntiVirusSoftware.com
• MedicalRecord.com
• Bourbon.com & Whiskey.com
• Pizza.mobi
• Carbs.com
• Plans.com
• CheapGames.com
• RealEstate.mobi
• Closings.com
• Ringtones.net
• ConsumerElectronics.com
• Settlement.com
• CurbAppeal.com
• Singles.mobi
• Debit.com
• SlideShow.com
• Directions.mobi
• SpecialOffer.com
• FamilyPhotos.com
• Spend.com
• FashionPolice.com
• SportingGoods.com
• FreshFood.com
• Televisionshows.com
• Friendships.com
• Text.com
• GarageSales.com
• Transplant.com
• HealthcarePlans.com
• TruckLeasing.com
• HomeForeclosures.com
• VideoShop.com
• Homerun.com
• WeightLossPills.com
• InsuranceQuotes.com

You can download the full auction list here and also listen to the auction live on Webmasterradio.fm.

[Press Release]

While you don’t normally hear a whole lot about domainers doing good things with their money, there are actually plenty of stories out there. Now here’s finally one that is documented by this story in the 2theadvocate.com:

A man who made a fortune from Internet domain names has pledged with his wife one of the largest donations ever to LSU [Louisiana State University] - a $25 million gift. [...]

According to a news account, Stephenson told LSU business students in 1999 the biggest decision of his career was to purchase three dozen generic Internet domain names.

Other stories never published include: people that pay the bill for the person behind them at the supermarket, pay for layaways at stores, take an orphanage out to Wal Mart for Christmas shopping and Michael Mann’s grassroots.org.

There are many people feeling a need to share their wealth. If you want to share your story, or someone else’s, please do so in the comments. After all, most of us are so much more fortunate than many others in this world.

[via Seven Mile]

The parking company Hotkeys (that is known to occasionally email owners of domains directly, asking them to park their names with them), apparently is a part of Demand Media now, according to this Job Posting for a Business Development Manager, we found on Craiglist.

Hotkeys Internet Group is part of Demand Media, a newly formed company backed with a $220mm in capital from top tier investors.

[via Google]

TrafficClub is a domain parking service operated by Moniker (which is part of Seevast) that alternates domains between different parking services. DomainSponsor was one of these services. On Friday their largest upstream ad provider (Google) terminated their ability to syndicate the advertising feed to TrafficClub.
DomainSponsor contacted Moniker’s customers via email (through addresses apparently harvested from whois) TrafficClub on Wednesday, offering them to park the domains directly with DomainSponsor.

Here are posts (from DNForum, but they were also posted on other boards) from Monte Cahn of Moniker and Ron Sheridan of DomainSponsor that add details to the situation:

As some of you may know, Google decided to make some sweeping changes with their partners regarding 3rd and 4th party feeds. TrafficClub.com was unique as it allowed multiple feeds to compete on a domain by domain basis and select not only the feed but the landing pages that monetized the best for each domain.

DomainSponsor/Oversee was one of 3 Google feed in TrafficClub and WAS considered a partner until yesterday when they decided to do whois look ups and aggregate all contact information they had on TC customers on every domain name and directly solicit our customers. In my opinion and after a direct conversation with their management (after I was even solicited), their intent was to take advantage of the situation and steal our customers. They were actually planning this for days.

Sometimes it takes a while to discover the true colors of companies and their management.

The great news is that they flushed themselves out of the system and revenue and performance will increase as a result. TrafficClub will only get better when we learn from experiences such as these.

My advice is to choose your partners carefully and work with people/companies you can really trust and who are aligned with with you. If you never learn from your mistakes, you will never grow. We just learned from ours.

Things always happen for a reason!

Monte Cahn, Founder / CEO, Moniker.com & TrafficClub.com

And here the response from DomainSponsor:

Yesterday we sent out an e-mail inviting TrafficClub customers to deal directly with DomainSponsor.

We would like to apologize if our email notification appeared as “spam”. We were attempting to reach out to customers who were enjoying our DomainSponsor program via TrafficClub. We felt we had good reason and justification to do so but the email did not speak to the reason we were forced to send it. The email was created and sent in haste and failed to give the larger context.

Background: On mid day Friday we were notified by our largest upstream PPC provider that we were to immediately terminate our participation in TrafficClub. We quickly notified TC and apprised them of the situation. TC asked for more time which seemed reasonable. While we were not given more time on our end, we decided to extend the deadline to Wednesday (yesterday) midnight and absorb any financial and legal risks ourselves.

We were expecting an announcement by TC to those customers affected. As of 5:00pm pst on Wednesday no announcement seemed forthcoming, and we saw that as a direct reflection on us. We decided it was necessary to send an announcement on our own. We have been very happy with our relationship with TC and it is with great sadness that we had to terminate it. This was not a DS decision or a TC decision…it was something forced upon us.

We think this development which precipitated our email, is part of a larger effort from the large upstream providers to exert more control over their distribution. In that context, our main concern is to ensure we abide by our terms of service thus ensuring our clients the most sustainable and highest performing experience. That said we could have and should have handled the specific communication better, and we apologize to those directly impacted especially the TrafficClub team. We welcome anyone who has concerns to contact us directly and discuss with us.

In the words of the great Paul Harvey, “Now you know the rest of the story”.

Ron Sheridan - DomainSponsor.com

[via DNForum]

The reports on problems with the registrar Registerfly have been numerous over the past months. It appears that the escalation point came, when eNom decided to cut Registerfly off as an reseller - more and more people went public about their problems with Registerfly. So after many complaints (including yesterday’s letter to ICANN by the ICA, the RegisterFlies website and the article by Computer Business Review online) to ICANN has managed to finally to pick some of the complaints and put Registerfly on notice for a breach of their registrar accreditation agreement. Registerfly now has 15 days to correct the problems that ICANN listed in their letter.

The main basis for the notice appear to be several recent incidents where Registerfly failed to comply with a registrant’s request within five days. But apparently ICANN has been receiving complaints about Registerfly since late 2005.

A list of the breaches of agreement according to the ICANN letter:

1. failure to provide authorization codes
2. (documentation breach) invalid whois records
3. non payment of ICANN invoices
4. insufficient funding of registry accounts

Other items mentioned:

• failure to unlock names
• failure to renew domain names
• customer service failures
• customer billing errors

What are the lesson from this for registrars?

• Customer service is key.
• Try to keep personal issues out of the business.
• Provide customers with accurate information, let them know what is going on.
• It still takes ICANN a long time after serious complaints against your company to take action.

And what are the lessons for Domain Name Owners?

• Pricing alone should not drive where you register your domains.
• Don’t count on ICANN to protect and help you quickly when needed.
• Watch and choose your registrar carefully.
• If you hold enough domains (or domains of a high value), you should consider becoming an ICANN accredited registrar. I’ve been saying this for years.

Frank Schilling’s got the blogging bug. He just start blogging a few days ago and I’ve already got difficulties keeping up with his great posts. One of his latest articles “When is a Typo Domain, Not a Typo?” shows how difficult it can be to distinguish between a typo and a generic domain in some cases.

Truly generic domains are free to be registered by anyone and owning them does not make you a cybersquatter, as you didn’t take something that actually belonged to someone else, but rather claimed a stake that was available to everyone before. That’s pretty much a clear case. But how about the following scenario:

Deel.com (not owned by me) may look like a variation of Dell.com but in fact it can also be a brandable variant of “Deal” the English word for ‘discount’ or ‘bargain’. This is not an isolated example. I own eShopping.com and paid alot of money to acquire that name at auction because it is one of the big “e” names (email, ecommerce, eshopping etc.) But wait!! The “E” is very close to the “S” on my QWERTY keyboard. Does that make it a typo of Shopping.com?!

[...]

Representatives of Yahoo indicated they would try to secure Flicker.XXX as a TYPO of Flickr.com (their made up brand name) during a potential new TLD sunrise period.

[via Seven Mile]

This time, there’s actually an Associated Press piece about domain testing/tasting. If you want to read more about traffic testing, you might want to read Frank Schilling’s: “The Closing Window: A Historical Analysis of Domain Tasting” over at CircleID or my earlier post “How does traffic testing/tasting work?“.

While the article does not really bring anything new, there’s one sentence that I cannot resist commenting on:

A newer variant, sometimes called “kiting,” involves the same company reregistering the same name every fourth or fifth day to hang onto it in perpetuity, without ever paying for it.

As I mentioned before, the registry requires pre-payment for any registration a registrar processes. While the registrar does receive if they delete the domain within the grace period, the amount will be deducted from their account again if the re-register the same (or any other) domain. So the only possible savings are

1. If the registrar has a credit line at the registry and thus would not really have to pre-pay the registrations. Of course the registry could revoke this credit line after a while if the registrar was “kiting” too many domains.
2. The ICANN fee. Since it seems that the ICANN fee is not charged for domains deleted during the grace period, the registrar performing the kiting, would save the current ICANN fee of $0.25 per domain under management per year. I am not quite convinced that this would be worth risking your entire ICANN accreditation.

[Update]: And let me add something. I’d like to see an example of someone who abuses the grace period for spamming. Spammers are not really likely to be accredited registrars themselves, so why exactly would their registrar give them free deletions? Most registrars I know actually charge a small fee for deletions. I can imagine spammers using domains that are being tasted as a sender address, but that would mostly just be a coincidence, like any other address they use.

[via MyWay.com/AP]

PIR, the Public Interest Registry, operator of the .ORG gTLD, is conducting a search for a new CEO and president.

PIR says “The President and CEO will need to be a passionate leader within the internet industry and will work diligently to articulate PIR’s mission around the world. He/she will be an articulate and accomplished speaker, with collaborative leadership skills and adeptness at managing key relationships with all constituents, including ISOC, ICANN, and Afilias.”

Read the job description here. This also serves as the introduction of the new “job” section of DomainEditorial.com - let me know if you’ve got a job to post here.

[via DNJournal]

Ron Jackson of DNJournal published his preview for the TRAFFIC West 2007 show, which will be held in Las Vegas from March 5th to 8th, today as part of his DN Journal newsletter.

The topics include:

• Development of Domains
• Domain Leasing
• The GoDaddy girl
• The Moniker Domain Auction

While I did see the Sendori booth at DomainFest Global, I did not get to talk to them there. So I was glad to find out that TechCrunch posted something about them yesterday.

Sendori is a traffic broker company that connects domain owners and advertisers. TechCrunch’s Marshall Kirkpatrick has more information:

Sendori will auction off redirects from parked domains through their servers and to sponsored advertiser pages.

There’s a $2000 minimum buy-in for advertisers and the company is just expanding beyond very small beta tests now. Advertisers bid on a per-visitor basis. Sendori is currently running on angel funding.

The company’s patent pending technology will use cookies to ensure that visitors are redirected to the same page for 30 consecutive days even if the winning bidder has changed. Sendori will also track sales conversion rates for visitors it redirects to your site, it will allow advertisers to geotarget redirects and it will (try to) monitor and block click-fraud automatically.

[via TechCrunch]