Domain Name Sales Maintenance

If you visit DomainNameSales.com to check on your parking revenue or lead management platform, you will notice it is currently not operational. A message on the website states, “We’re taking some time to do some much needed maintenance. We’re not often down, but when we are it’s for a very good reason.”

Earlier this week, the company email customers to apprise them of the maintenance downtime. Here’s the message that was sent to customers:

Rook Media / Domain Sponsor Hosting NYC Meetup at Nets Game

DomainSponsor/RookMedia is hosting a meetup in New York City on  Tuesday, December 1st at 7:30. The company has a suite at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn for the  Brooklyn Nets Vs. Phoenix Suns basketball game. There will be a meetup in midtown Manhattan prior to the game, and details about that aspect of the evening will be forthcoming to attendees.

The company sponsored another meetup this Summer  at a Cubs game in Chicago, and I had a great time.

In anticipation of this New York City  event, Joe Higgins told me, “There is no sales agenda – just an evening of hanging out – similar to the Cubs game. People get themselves to NYC or the game – we take care of the food, drink and fun…”

I was told there are

101Domain to Donate Registration Proceeds to French Red Cross

I want to highlight a generous offer in a tweet from 101Domain that comes in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris:

The company linked to a Facebook post announcing that

Report: LasVegas.com Deal Valued at Nearly $90 Million

George Kirikos is reporting that LasVegas.com sold in 2005 in a deal valued at nearly $90 million over 35 years. The source of his tweet is a Vegas.com SEC filing from earlier this year that discusses the purchase agreement for LasVegas.com dating to 2005.

Here are some of the details from the SEC filing that spells out the value of this deal:

“In June 2005, VEGAS.com, LLC entered into an agreement for the purchase of LasVegas.com. The agreement specified that a $12,000,000, one-time payment be made upon execution of the agreement along with monthly payments of approximately $83,000 for 36 months, $125,000 for the next 60 months, and then $208,000 for the next 36 months. Per the terms of the agreement, after June 30, 2016, following the 132 initial monthly payments, VEGAS.com, LLC in its sole discretion may terminate the agreement and forfeit the domain name. If VEGAS.com, LLC chooses not to terminate the agreement, they will continue making the monthly payments of approximately $208,000 until June 30, 2040, at which time the seller will transfer the domain name to VEGAS.com, LLC without further payment or cost to VEGAS.com, LLC.”

There are more details about the transaction within the SEC filing if you are interested in reading more about the deal and its value.

I exchanged a couple of emails with George this morning, and he shared the math that shows the value of this deal:

Paul Vixie on New gTLDs: “They Are All Commercial Failures”

ZDNet published an article with commentary from Dr. Paul Vixie, who offers a pretty scathing assessment of the new gTLD program. According to Paul Vixie’s Wikipedia page, Dr. Vixie is described as “an American Internet pioneer.” ZDNet described Dr. Vixie as “a pioneer of the internet’s domain name system (DNS).” Currently, Dr. Vixie is CEO of a company called Farsight Security.

Below is an excerpt from the article with comments from Mr. Vixie. I think it’s worth reading the article in its entirety when you have an opportunity.

“I think it is a money grab. My own view is that ICANN functions as a regulator, and that as a regulator it has been captured by the industry that they are regulating. I think that there was no end-user demand whatsoever for more so-called DNS extensions, [or] global generic top-level domains (gTLDs),” he said.

Revamped Whoisology Website Relaunches

Due diligence is an important aspect of buying a domain name in the aftermarket. Whoisology is a tool that allows people to easily search for public information found in Whois data. I was told that Whoisology was created to help people perform due diligence on domain acquisitions, and it is now a robust tool that can be used in many ways. I learned that a revamped Whoisology website was just relaunched today.

I had a look around the new site before it went live, and it looks pretty robust. One of the nicest aspects of the website is that many of the useful tools can be accessed for free. There are other aspects of Whoisology that will be available for a monthly fee (I am not sure what the cost is, as I do not have a paid account right now).

I asked for some details about the revamped website, and here is what I was told: