eNom, Inc. (www.enom.com), announced that it has completed the purchase of the business and operations of BulkRegister LLC. (www.bulkregister.com). Already one of the largest registrars in the world in terms of domain names under management, the addition of BulkRegister(R) gives eNom(R) an additional 1.5 million domain names, and 35,000 bulk membership customers. With more than 6.8 million domain names on its platform, the combined company is now the second-largest registrar in the world, surpassing Network Solutions(R), according to Name Intelligence(R) (www.nameintelligence.com).

In 2006, eNom’s parent company, eNom Ventures, Inc., was acquired by Demand Media, Inc. The purchase of BulkRegister further expands the size and capabilities of Demand Media’s new media platform. In addition to eNom, Demand Media owns hundreds of thousands of domains and niche content websites, including eHow.com.

EURid, the EU registry, suspends 74,000 domain registrations and sues ‘phantom’ registrars.

EURid, the non profit organisation operating the Internet top level domain .eu, has suspended 74 000 .eu domain names and has sued 400 registrars for breach of contract. This move was prompted by abusive behavior from a syndicate of registrars who have systematically acquired domain names with the obvious intent of selling them. In the domain name business this is called warehousing and is not permitted.

“In this case we are convinced that the domain name holders of the 74 000 .eu names (Ovidio Ltd, Fausto Ltd and Gabino Ltd) are acting as a front for a number of registrars. The domain name holders and the registrars can be regarded as one and the same. Since registrars should only register domain names for existing customers and not ‘warehouse’ the names in order to resell them at a higher price, this is clearly in breach of the registrar contract,” says Herman Sobrie, Legal Manager of EURid.

There had been complaints about these three entities maintaining a total of 400 accreditations. This also brings .EU back down under the 2 Million Domain mark.

[via EURid News, The Register]

Oversee.net, a technology-driven media company, today announced the acquisition of two small, privately held domain portfolios. Two of the niche portfolio components are CareerSeeker.com and DreamVacations.com, both of which have high traffic and retention rates.

DomainSponsor will host the first DomainFest Barcelona on July 25-26. The gathering will promote continuing education on the state of the industry and discuss issues that are relevant to the global domainer community. The event is also sponsored by Renova, EuroDNS and Afternic, companies who play a major role in the success of the domain business.

[Press Release]

Today’s Miami Herald features an article about Direct Navigation traffic. While the article itself does not feature any big news, I’d like to quote some figures and add some comments.

Michael Berkens, a Fort Lauderdale lawyer, has bet his business, Worldwide Media, on the concept. […] He owns 50,000 website names and hopes the next time someone wants their prayers answered, for example, they will visit one of his websites — specifically AnswerMyPrayer.com or HearMyPrayer.com — rather than invoke Google or Yahoo.

Hey, here’s someone who I haven’t seen profiled before :) How does he get his ads though, if he does not involve Google or Yahoo! There are not too many alternatives for search feeds out there.

This year, advertisers will spend between $400 million and $800 million advertising on direct navigation sites, said Malindi Davies, an analyst at Susquehanna Financial Group in New York.

[…]

Denise Garcia, an Internet analyst at WR Hambrecht, said the websites are increasingly competing with search engines. ”The Internet is so new and searching for information is so important that I just don’t see that the search engine is the only way to find information online,” she said.

Well in the end the ads are still provided by search engines. Even some of the parked pages integrating content are doing this in order to attract additional eyeballs, referred to them by search engines. At least currently I see this more as a symbiotic partnership rather than any type of fight over traffic - at least for the moment.

Overall, 70 percent of Internet surfers type a name in an address bar to reach a destination, according to WebSideStory, an Internet analytics firm in San Diego. That’s up from 53 percent four years ago, although those numbers include visits to sites known to users. Most of the rest use search engines.

The article also confirms the trends to hold on to your domains and to develop:

Berkens said he rarely sells his domain names unless the offer is extraordinary. He’s asking $5 million for malls.com and OutletMalls.com together.

Many direct navigation sites are taking a different tact — they’re adding simple content to their pages to get visitors to return those sites. At Marchex’s NewYorkDining.com, for example, visitors can post reviews for restaurants in Manhattan.

After AjaxWhois pcNames.com also now offers an Ajax domain lookup. Considering the fast speed of the tool, I would assume that it works of the zonefile data.

The French registry operator AFNIC has suspends 7,000 speculative registrations.

AFNIC noted that the Guillaume.net / ZioConcept.net association registered more than 7,000 .fr domain names, corresponding for most of them to family names.

These massive registrations are restraining many individuals to register their last names under .fr. These registrations are considered as an obvious violation of the .fr Charter. Article 12 of the Charter stipulates that third party rights must be respected. The AFNIC has also received a high number of complaints. The action taken by the AFNIC is therefore in accordance with its outlines to fight obvious violations of the .fr Charter.

I the light of the rise of the recent “cybersquatter” screams, many companies in this business are starting to clean up their act. This is an attempt to summarize some of the things that have been happening - please add your information in the comments.

• Sedo has started removing domains from their system that are listed in the Strider Typo-Patrol domain list.
• If you use the Fabulous domain parking system for expired domains, you might have noticed a change that was recently introduced in order to ensure qualified link traffic. If you enter a domain parked with them via a deep link, the system does not show ads, but a link to the homepage instead.
• The publicly visible larger portfolios have (or are still) selling off some adult and trademark names.
• Some landing pages have now added additional “over 18″ warning to their adult domains.
• Ad-feed providers talk more and more about traffic quality (and also landing page quality)

This is only the beginning of some of the changes coming to this industry - exciting times are upon us.

No, webnamesolutions.com is not a broker (well, their broker service is supposed to be “coming soon”, according to their website). They actually seem to email unsolicited offers for names that are ‘for sale’ on their website. I just received an email offering to sell me a domain that currently is ‘pending-delete’.

I actually do own the “.net” version of the name, so it’s quite likely that they did some whois checking before offering me specifically that name. So were they going to try to get the name at the drop auction for me? What if the auction for the name had been higher than the 200 dollar price they were quoting me. Questions over questions?
I have some reports where others have been offered names they already own. Maybe this was just a broken script on their end, or a money grab? Indeed many of the names listed on their site (I did a couple of spot checks) do not seem to be owned by them  according to whois.
According their Verisign SSL certificate, they company is based in Montreal, Quebec. Their whois record shows an address in St. Louis, MO, but at least some of the domains listed for sale on their site do not appear to be under their management (i.e. different whois). When I checked for their hostnames (ns1/2.webnamesolutions.com) in the whois, I found about 530 domains pointing to their nameservers. They also offer a hosting service, which appears to be GoDaddy’s co-branded web hosting.

Antony over at NamesAtWork has found a solution for the lack of good names available for registration today: Drop the last vowel. Of course many companies are already on the bandwagon, you so you better hurry up, before your reduced name is gone as well.

Well, somehow after Flickr it does not seem all to original anymore. Plus, do you attract more people that cannot type properly? Another naming fad comes and goes, true generics increase their value.

.EU has passed the two million registration mark last night. This must make .EU one of the fastest (if not the fastest) growing registries.

[via NameMinistry]