I want to let you know that DNForum is offering a membership discount from now until August 1, 2013. If you sign up for a new account or you upgrade to a higher account status, you can save 50% off the regular price for the next week or so.

There are three membership levels at DNF: Gold, Platinum, and Exclusive. I am a Platinum lifetime member.

The different membership levels offer the ability to post in different upgraded sections on the forum. For instance, Gold members are able to browse sales threads and purchase domain names from them, but they are not able to list domain names for sale. Exclusive members are able to see private sections of DN Forum and they can post domain names for sale in an Exclusive section.

As of the time of this post, there are a total of 241,416 members of DNForum. There are also nearly 4,000 members who are actively visiting DN Forum right now.

If you have an interest in upgrading at the discounted price, or if you have any questions, send an email to chuck@dnforum.com.

Here’s the membership pricing / cost breakdown (provided by Chuck):

Sadly, Dr. Chris Hartnett’s father passed away this week. I want to share the C-SPAN video of a special tribute that was given to him on the House floor by Indiana Congressman Todd Rokita. You can read the Chicago Tribune obituary to learn more about Mr. Hartnett’s extraordinary life.

My condolences to Chris and his family on their loss.

If you haven’t seen the Love Logo infographic about domain industry blogs, check it out. It offers some very cool insight into domain industry blogs, including my own.  Love Logo has created similar infographics, shared on Hybrid Domainer in December of 2012 and August of 2012.

It’s interesting to compare the numbers, and I especially appreciate the fact that readers of my blog comment so frequently. Yes, the comment numbers are likely juiced by the weekly brokerage listings posts I do, but you can have a look at various posts, and there seem to be great comments in just about all of them, and I appreciate that people are willing to share and discuss the business here.

One thing that has changed most significantly, and perhaps not for the best, are the Alexa rankings of just about all of the domain blogs (domain forums, domain registrars, and other domain industry websites are similarly dropping as well). Taking out a couple of anomalously  high traffic days in 2012 due to breaking news stories, my traffic figures aren’t down as much as the Alexa numbers would imply, so I think there’s more to the lower rankings than simple traffic loss.

In light of the higher Alexa numbers (lower is better in this case), I want to share some personal guesses about what may be causing the Alexa rankings changes across the domain blog sphere.

Bhavin Turakhia, co-founder of Directi, was interviewed in Medianama, a website that covers digital media in India, and I think you’ll find some interesting nuggets in the article. Although Directi is a privately held company, Bhavin was willing to share some impressive numbers about the company with the interviewer.

According to Bhavin,

“Across Directi, we have about 70%-75% of market share in India. I don’t have the exact numbers but there are three of our businesses which provide domain names and websites – Resellers.com, Logicbox.com and BigRock.com. With these, every 100 websites set up in India, over 75 of them are set up and operated through us. So we are already in market monopoly position.”

In addition to this figure, there was an editor’s note about domain name registrations via Directi: “Directi claims that it has 47% marketshare – 1,653,187 of 3,507,100 domains in India are powered by Directi.”

Bhavin Turakhia co-founded Directi with his brother Divyank Turakhia. Together, they’ve grown the company to be worth a reported $350 million + as of 2012. In addition to the three company mentioned by Bhavin in the interview, Directi also owns and operates Media.net and Radix Registry, a company that applied for 31 gTLD strings. The company also operates the .PW Registry (a blog advertiser), which has reported over 250,000 registrations.

It’s quite impressive to see what the  Turakhia brothers have built since the company was founded in 1998.