From an article in the National Post:

Yellow Pages said yesterday it picked up the suite of sites — including autos.ca, debts.ca, doctors.ca and RVcampgrounds.ca — from Montreal-based Emall.ca Inc. for $2.5-million. It is a tiny investment compared with the close to $4-billion Yellow Pages has spent in the past year to buy the former Telus Corp. phone book business in western Canada and a range of specialized classified publications across Canada including Auto Trader.

But Yellow Pages chief financial officer Christian Paupe said the acquired Web addresses will “become a very precious inventory. Online is the future. We don’t exactly know how this space is going to evolve, exactly. But I’m convinced this was a no-brainer for $2.5-million. Their worth over time will be very significant.”

Indeed. $6250 per category-specific domain seems like a good deal, even though it’s probably a new high for a .CA portfolio sale. But for a Yellow Pages directory provider, this is a no-brainer purchase, indeed.

Yellow Pages chief executive Marc Tellier said some of his new sites, such as attorneys.ca, may feature basic editorial content, such as advice on how to select a lawyer, as well as contact information for local advertisers.

Time to renew your .CA domains Looks like emall still got a couple of them left as well.

[Thank you Adam]

• It is the week of the ever growing Targeted TRAFFIC conference in Las Vegas, so it appears that the industry is getting some of their news in a bundled fashion this week.
• LiveDoor, the company that had a lot of negative news due to possibly shade accounting practices issued an announcement from their Innovation Interactive subsidiary: They have release SiteParker, a domain parking system. It apparently is built based on the experience of serving advertising for their own 20,000 domains.
• Marchex purchased some assets of AreaConnect.com for $16 Million of cash and stock. While I am still not sure what exactly AreaConnect is (apparently it has 1 Million page views per month) it sounds to me like it would fit right into Marchex’ local strategy. The company also appears to have partner ships with yellow and white pages directories across the US and Canada, which could provide additional local content and targeted traffic for Marchex. (Press Release) While we are talking about Marchex, I should also mention that they did launch new page layouts recently (I like them) and actually announced them with a press release.
• WhyPark.com launched a new service that says that it’s not parking, but asks you to host your sites with them. You point your domain to their servers and set up the domains and corresponding keywords. A sample site is PCviruses.net. They charge almost $100 to get you going. I am not quite sure if this is a one-time fee, or an annual fee. Judging from the sample site the content originates from free article websites. Apparently they provide you with “hundreds” or “thousands” of pages of “fresh content“. There is a limit of 100 domains per account – they charge $99.95 in order for you to sign up for their service. You provide your own Adsense/YPN/AdBrite code. (Press Release)
• Bulkregister re-discovers their market niche and give it a name with this press release: Domainers. They have introduced “Magic Folders”, which allow you to sort your names in different folders and connect those folders with specific attributes, such as different nameservers, whois information or the like.
• Meanwhile Ben Edelman who told us how Spyware generates fake clicks shows us a possible use for his research in being the lawyer for a law suit against Yahoo!. (PDF of the suit)
• With all of these news we are all looking for a new forum to discuss all of this. And along comes DN Fish. Well, as long as it’s not DN Phishing, hehe. (By the way, dnphishing.com is still available.) Hardly any posts on there so far, though. (Press Release)
• Oh and yes, there are rumours about a cooperation between Yahoo! and MSN.

[via OnlineMediaDaily, ClickZ, SearchEngineWatch, Forbes, Peter Ejtel and others]

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.

As reported earlier the domainers and investment communities met in Santa Clara at the Targeted Traffic conference. For those of us who were not able to attend, Ron Jackson of DN Journal has got the story for us:
Domain Business Moves Into the Fast Lane After T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Stop in Silicon Valley

Some quick facts from the article:

• Jan 30th to Feb 2nd
• 325 attendees
• reception at Google
• Dan Warner of Fabulous shared amazing statistics (as always)
• selling and buying portfolios was one of the major topics
• domains as an investment strategy
• Sedo is buying main stream business print advertising in order to increase awareness of the market
• Lou Doctor of Arbor Advisors cautioned against holding on to the names for too long and against just PPC-parking your names
• a panel on domain development took place

And those were just some points for the first day. For more information, read the full DN Journal report.

Tucows Inc. (AMEX:TCX, TSX:TC) today announced the beta release of Domain Name Auction and Parked Pages, the first two in a suite of services expected to generate new revenue from the growing secondary market for domain names. [...]

Domain Name Auction is a white-labeled service. Service providers can offer potential new registrants the ability to bid on expiring domains via links from the service provider’s website. The first auctions are expected to begin February 13, 2006. Buyers of domain names will be able to find out information on how to participate in the auctions at www.tucowsauctions.com. Registrants maintain their right to renew and keep their domain throughout the auction process. Tucows’ Parked Pages service will generate revenue from pay-per-click advertising for both expired and unexpired domain names. This revenue will be shared with service providers. [...]

Press Release

(Disclaimer: I am currently employed by Tucows.)

BuyDomains (http://www.buydomains.com), a division of YesDirect, Inc., today [Jan 23rd] announced the acquisition of 32,000 “.com” domain names, increasing the company’s industry leading portfolio size to greater than 600,000 high performance domain names.

The acquired one and two word domains are concentrated in the lucrative advertising verticals of finance, travel, education, and recruitment. Additionally, the 32,000 domain addition consists exclusively of coveted one and two word “.com” domains.

Original release

At the end of last year, YesDirect had also announced a new partnership with GoDaddy‘s TDNAM. They already had similar agreements with Sedo and Afternic in place.

Ron Jackson of DNJournal posted his latest report on sales of domain names. Highlights include the infamous sex.com sale as well as übersetzer.de, a German IDN name meaning ‘Translator”.

Blogster.com Purchased for $100,000, Making it a Top Domain Name Acquisition in 2005

While we normally do not report every posted Domain Transaction, I think it is very interesting to note in this context that more and more of the domain name sales nowadays are accompanied by a Press Release. The public mentioning of those Sales helps to bring more visibility to our industry and can possibly help drive the prices up (which of course is not necessarily in the interest of the people still building their portfolios).

The weekly domain sales report is out at DNJournal.com and the market just seems to get stronger every week. In the past 7 days we had a sale just under $1 million that is the 2nd highest reported in 2005, the highest price ever paid in an expired domain auction (over a quarter of a million dollars) and a tie for the highest .US sale reported this year at $25,000. Read all about it through the link below:

Weekly DNJournal.com Domain Sales Report