• Yahoo CEO Seme Steps down
• Sedo buys GreatDomains
• Sedo Product Pipline
• Tucows sells DDN premium domains
• New Registrar Solution: My Rebel
• Tucows sells 2500 domains for 3 million

A new domain news project is launching in Beta today. Adam Strong and I partnered in order to bring you DomainNameNews.com. If all goes according to plan, the new site will be more of a group effort. I was more than happy when Adam approached me with his plans, as I had been looking for ways to take DomainEditorial.com to a new level. Initially I will continue to keep DomainEditorial going, but who knows where the journey will take us.

At the targeted TRAFFIC conference, which starts on Tuesday in New York City, Modern Gigabyte (the makers of the hosting billing software ModernBill), will be announcing the launch of their dnZoom tool. The system is a full hosted solution for domain monetization and management.

As Dan Kimball shared with me, one way that this product will be offered is a co-branded solution through parking and domain name registration companies. The platform connects to different registrars, marketplaces and parking providers (eNom, register.com, NetworkSolutions, tucows, EuroDNS, NameCheap, TDNAM, Afternic, Sedo and Domainsponsor) and diplayes the informaiton about your entire portfolio in one location.

I imagine that the registrars and parking companies will try to limit their offerings to their own, especially if they are going to give their product to their customer base for free. However you can often prove that you are the best by enabling your clients to compare.

Another question remains if domainers trust others with their sensitive data. ModernGigabyte has lots of experience in keeping data safe and private and has put a lot of that knowledge into this product, but some domainers might still prefer to handle this data in-house.

I for one think that this is just the first of many new tools that will help domainers manage their portfolios in a more automated fashion, which in turn will allow all of us to spend more time on sustaining and improving our businesses.
Find out more about the new product by visiting the Product Tour – you can also apply to be one of the 100 beta testers.

Demand Media continues to invest into content and content infrastructure:

SANTA MONICA, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Demand Media, Inc., the next-generation social media company, today announced its acquisition of ExpertVillage.com, the premier Internet source for professional “how-to” videos filmed and produced by local filmmakers that feature experts on a broad range of topics. The acquisition significantly expands Demand Media’s social media platform with a growing library of diverse video content to be distributed across its network of niche social media web properties and available for users to integrate into their Channelme.tv video sites.

Launched with video in 2006, ExpertVillage is a highly trafficked video portal for how-to information and the largest provider of “made for the Internet” video content. This content was created through ExpertVillage’s proprietary process wherein filmmakers select specific how-to topics and produce videos on that subject matter. The filmmaker engages an expert on the selected topic and produces approximately 15 short how-to videos.

[...]

“We intend on increasing the scale of ExpertVillage’s existing business and expanding into new content areas,” said Demand Media co-founder and CEO, Richard Rosenblatt. “While we have enhanced our media properties through textual, photographic and social media content, we were seeking a video solution that could be integrated into our platform. ExpertVillage’s video solution and its network of filmmakers epitomize our approach to new media and our scale will provide their filmmakers with substantially more topics to develop. We are anxious to begin working together as one company.”

[full Press Release]

David Bleaman’s daily domain drop, a list of available domains sent via email (featured before), is now on a new membership based website.
David writes:

Over the past few months, we’ve had numerous requests from many of you asking to view the daily lists prior to it being released each day in exchange for paying a premium.  As such, beginning this Monday we will now be offering a Premium Membership for those who have been requesting this “sneak peak”.   As such, I am excited to announce the launch of Daily Domain DropT (www.DailyDomainDrop.com), which effective Sunday evening will replace the Daily Domain Drop list that each of you have been receiving via email over the past several months.

David offers two types of memberships:

Standard Membership

• No monthly fee
• $5 honor payment per registered name
• Lists become available Monday-Friday 8am EST

Premium Membership

• $60/month subscription fee
• $2 honor payment per registered name
• Lists become available at 8pm EST Sunday-Thursday, 12 hours before the become available to standard members.
• Premium members will receive exclusive bonus niche lists
• Premium members have access to an archive of all previous lists and can search those by keywords.

Great looking site Danny & David. I wish you the best of success.

Quoted from the DomainTools Blog:

You may recognize the name, Michael Collins ran Afternic with his brother for a few years (His brother still works there). Well, Michael moved on to run a new business that he had purchased called Speed and Truck World (Speed-Truck.com) but the call of the Domain Industry was too strong to keep him away. He was asked if he would be interested in joining the ICA by Ron Jackson as their new Executive Director. He was not that sure about the job until after he talking with some of the Board Members like Bob Martin and Frank Schilling.

Now that he has the job he said, “I am not able to sell anything I don’t believe in. I feel like I would be making a difference.” For those of you that know Michael, he has a big heart has always treated his partners with a lot of respect. I personally think Michael is an excellent choice for the ICA position.

Congratulations on the new job Michael, I definitely agree with Jay on this being a great choice.

[via DomainTools Blog, Picture from ICANNWiki]

Since I didn’t have the time to summarize the Verisign Q2 DomainBrief, I’ll just quickly point to Andrew’s summary of the information over at DomainNameWire. He also discovered a second report entitled “VeriSign Domain Name and Pay Per Click Advertising Report” (pdf), which clearly underlines how much attention our industry is getting lately.

VeriSign estimates that 12%-14% of new .com and .net registrations in the past 2 1/2 years were PPC-intent domains.

[via DomainNameWire]

A new Domain Industry Event Calendar was launched today. Take a look and let me know what you think, but keep in mind I am still working on the site.

Keith Pieper of Zetetic sends an email with his report “Eight players dominate the domain name aftermarket“.

While private sales account for the vast majority of the US$111 million domain resale market (more than 24 percent), eight exchanges or brokers compete for dominance while domain valuations skyrocket.

“Private transactions are where most of the big deals take place,” Zetetic Senior Analyst Keith Pieper said. “But the market has gotten very lucrative with a dominant four holding companies accounting for nearly 46 percent of all transactions.”

1. Afternic
2. Afternic Bazaar
   
3. BuyDomains
4. DomainCargo
5. GDNX
6. GoDaddy
7. Moniker
8. Sedo

For more information please see the full report.

Interesting that DomainCargo made it to Keith’s list, while DomainMarketPlace does not appear in it. I am surprised to see GDNX in the report, unless this refers to Pool.com sales. I would imagine that there are some brokers that dominate the domain sales market in private sales, but the sale data is almost impossible to obtain.

NameBio 3 released a report today of the 3 letter domain sales over the last 60 days.

As it would seem from the chart above, a little less than 82% of these domain names were purchased by domain investors and setup on parking services. Only 12% of LLL.com’s purchased in the last 60 days ended up as actual websites.

Of the four domain names that ended up in the hands of end-users, 2 of them were in the top 3 reported domain sales (AMT.com: $100,000 and BCF.com: $71,200). The only domain sale that was higher was for Rex.com: $395,000. Although this domain name is somewhat developed, it is basically an elaborate parked page, and is included in the parked domain figures.

Of the 33 domain sales, only 2 of them were for below $4,000 dollars (JHW.com: $2,200 and VKY.com: $3,498). The sale of JHW.com was well below the standard resale value and we wanted to know why.