… after a brief break due to the arrival of a new member (my son Kaeden) of the main editor’s family :)

The Canadian site “advisor.ca” now also features an article that covers domains as an investment: Alt Assets: Name raiders. The article features some advice on how to understand the value domain name in the secondary market.

[Thanks Gordon]

A new site has been launched which monitors forums that post domains for sale. While it is still in Beta, it looks like it’s working already. http://domainershub.com/. So far it collects posts from DNForum.com, NamePros.com, DomainState.com and WebHostingTalk.com.

In his Feb 28th Article “Evaluating Search Syndication Partners” Andrew Beckman, president of the SearchAdNetwork, shares some interesting research from an advertising campaign in the education vertical:

With our internal tracking system, we selected the education vertical to analyze where traffic originates from, and noticed that directional navigation is 5 percent of the overall syndication of the major search engines.

[…]

Our tracking system shows, from the same education vertical, that search toolbars deliver 3 percent of the major search networks’ traffic with acceptable conversion percentages from those efforts.

[via DMNews]

The Canadian magazine Macleans follows the footsteps of the Business 2.0 article “Masters of their domain” with a similar title and content: “Masters of our domain (names), the cash cows of the Internet” .

The Canadian edition features Yun Ye, Dan Cera of Domaintrader, Buydomains, John Berryhill and some bad examples for parked domains.

In a 9 to 5 vote, the ICANN board approved the much criticized VeriSign settlement.

http://icann.org/announcements/announcement-28feb06.htm 

These settlement documents include a new registry agreement relating to the operation of the .COM registry. The new .COM registry agreement will now proceed to the U.S. Department of Commerce for final approval, and the entire settlement is dependent upon this approval before it is finalized.

 ICANN’s Board voted 9 to 5 in favor of the settlement agreements with one director abstaining. Affirmative votes were cast by the following Board Members: Vint Cerf (Chairman), Alejandro Pisanty (Vice-Chairman), Mouhamet Diop, Demi Getschko, Hagen Hultzsch, Veni Markovski, Vanda Scartezini, Paul Twomey (President and CEO), and Hualin Qian. Directors who voted against the approval of the settlement documents were: Raimundo Beca, Susan Crawford, Joichi Ito, Njeri Rionge, and Peter Dengate Thrush. Director Michael Palage abstained. Statements by Board members on their votes will be posted on the ICANN website within the next two days.

[Thank you Taryn]