General Domain Information

Comcast Announces Streampix But Doesn’t Own Matching Domain Name

Apparently Comcast has Netflix in its sight, as the company announced it will be launching a new streaming video service to compete with Netflix. Unfortunately for Comcast, it appears that they do not own the matching domain name, which I believe will be problematic, especially in the short term.

According to the Media Decoder blog on the New York Times website,

Called Streampix, the service will give Comcast’s 22.3 million Xfinity cable subscribers access to 75,000 television shows and movies via cellphones, tablets and laptops.

The service is the result of a handful of licensing agreements Comcast has struck with media companies like Disney, Sony Pictures, Warner Brothers and its own NBCUniversal.

As you are undoubtedly aware, Netflix is a huge advertiser, spending a ton of money on banner advertising as well as direct mail and other marketing campaigns. Netflix has established itself as the leading popular video service, and the company makes it very easy for consumers to access videos online at Netflix.com as well as by mail, when you add movies to your queue on Netflix.com.

Whois records show that Streampix.com was registered back in 2003, and it’s currently owned by a Canadian company called Norpix. The company’s “flagship product,” which “has become the ultimate Digital Video Recording software” is known as Streampix. Judging by the domain name’s expiration date of 2019, it doesn’t appear that the company has plans to relinquish this name any time soon.

Undoubtedly, if consumers are intrigued by a new service provider called Streampix, they will visit Streampix.com. Luckily for Comcast, the domain name does not appear resolve at the moment. However, NorPix does appear to have a trademark  in Canada for StreamPix, granted it’s for digital recording software and not streaming videos, and it is in Canada.

**Update**

I received an email from the CEO of Norpix, Luc Nocente, who commented:

I was shocked and surprised at the actions taken by Comcast regarding the name Streampix.  Norpix has a  trademark protection on the word Streampix in Canada and the US since around 1999.  We do a great percentage of our business in the US market and this is a blatant violation of our rights.  I intend to take legal actions against Comcast.  We feel this is going to create confusion and damage our business in the US market.

Take the 2012 DNW Survey

Every year for the last seven years, Andrew Allemann from Domain Name Wire has conducted a survey with questions pertaining to the domain industry. The topics range from domain parking, domain news, conferences, and everything else in between. I think the results show an interesting overview of the domain business, and the more participants, the better.

If you have not taken the 2012 DNW survey yet, I urge you to take it now or as soon as you have a chance so you don’t forget. It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes, and your answers will help provide valuable information about the domain industry to people who read DNW (everyone). The survey will be given until January 31, 2012, and once the results are tabulated, Andrew will share them publicly.

The survey is hosted on Survey Monkey and it can be completed anonymously. There will be a drawing for Andrew Kesmodel’s Domain Game book, or you can get $20 via Paypal if you are the randomly selected winner, assuming you leave your name and contact information.

Worst Thing About the New Year

New year’s eve is always a fun night for my friends and me. As more of us have kids, I think this will likely change, but for the last several years, it’s always been a celebration with several of my college friends and their wives.

Last night, a group of us cheered in the new year at a restaurant called Buddakan. As we raised our glasses to toast to a new year which promises to be filled with babies, weddings, and other happy celebrations, I couldn’t help but think about one aspect of the new year that is bad for me: starting the new year from $0.

While the majority of my friends have salaried jobs, and the new year doesn’t mean much for them in terms of their income, for me, it is always an anxiety provoking time.

As the clocked ticked past midnight, some of my monthly invoices started rolling in, including a hosting bill and domain renewals. Although there will be advertising revenue soon from my various websites, there is not much else guaranteed with this business. Every year, it’s a new challenge to drive revenue and generate income. In some ways it’s exciting, but it’s also quite nerve wracking.

As I write this, I was surprised by the first stream of income for the year – a new cat sitter listing on CatSitter.com. I will take that as a good omen.

Wishing you a great 2012.

Thank You Aggregators

Yesterday, I thanked the advertisers who financially support my blog, allowing me to post new content daily. Today, I want to thank another important group that also helps my blog considerably.

Aside from Google, Bing, and Yahoo, there’s another group of websites that sends consistent traffic to my blog at no cost to me, and I want to say thank you to the people who run those websites. The payout may be low, and it may be time consuming and expensive to launch and market these sites, but it is very helpful to people who manage blogs.

I want to give a big thank you as both a domain blog publisher and domain investor who reads other blogs to these websites:

Thank You Advertisers

I don’t ask for anything from people who read my blog, aside from posting respectful comments to help enhance the articles that I write.

In order to continue writing my blog daily, I rely on advertisers to financially support this endeavor. Frankly, if it wasn’t for the advertising revenue, I couldn’t afford to take the time away from my business or share some of the private bits of knowledge I’ve accumulated.

I am extremely grateful for the support of a number of companies within the domain industry, and I hope that you support these companies as well.  Thank you to the following companies who have advertised on my blog during the past year, most of which continue to advertise today, and some of whom have advertised on my blog for more than a couple of years:

Domain Industry Professionals: “One Thing I Learned in 2011”

In my opinion, the best way to improve your business is to learn how others are achieving success and to learn from mistakes. I’ve learned quite a bit this past year, and I reached out to a number of domain industry colleagues to ask if they’d share one thing that they learned.

Several people responded with in-depth answers, and I hope their knowledge will help you with your business. Please post something you learned in 2011 that might be beneficial to others who read this article.

Charlotte Gilbert, Dobhran Development  –  I work 60 + hours a week on several domain development projects, and I’m sure most developers work that hard or even harder. Some developers may put in more hours, some may put in a few less.  But I don’t really think of it as work because I enjoy what I do. I really have a passion for it. If you’re not passionate about what you do, stop right now and think about what you really want to do.

After going out on my own as an independent web site developer,  I learned it is harder to gain customers than initially thought.  One of the most important things to remember when I was trying to establish my development business is I must always be looking for clients and ways to get them to work with me.  I have also learned not to sell myself or what I do, short. I worked very hard to become educated in this field  and I have over 12 years of experience.

One of the largest mistakes I made was keeping  my fees low so I would  attract a wider audience. I ended up with clients who complained all the time. The end result was working myself to the bone trying to please them (and using up all my profits in the process).  By charging a premium price it establishes the seriousness of my stance as a web site developer, It cut the mediocrity of the client base and I continued to provide excellent customer service without sacrificing my standards.

Warren Royal, Bobbleheads.com – The most important thing I have learned is that development should not be the objective of the domain investment life-cycle; rather, it is just an early step in the process. Many of us have purchased a great ecommerce name, and developed a great site, and then waited confidently for the world to beat a path to our door. And then we have been surprised and disappointed when that didn’t happen. I have done this many times myself.

I didn’t understand that the huge majority of the work which is required to build a successful business (especially an ecommerce one) comes AFTER development. In fact, I’ve learned this: You may spend 5% of your time researching and purchasing a domain, 10% developing the site, and 85% building the business.

There are hundreds of things which you must do to source and/or develop products, identify prospects, develop infrastructure and operations capabilities, hire and train staff, develop distribution channels, warehouse your products, develop vendor relationships, market your business, finance your inventory, sell your products, and deliver them to customers. I think it is important to understand this and to plan and allocate time and resources for these critical tasks.

In my experience, these are the things that determine success or failure in an ecommerce business. Of course, having a great name and building a great site are important – but development should not be the end-game. If success is to be achieved, domain development is an important, but early, step in  the process.

Toby Clements,  TobyClements.com  –  The one thing I will remember about 2011 is the feeling that everything leveled back out again. Since 2009 things have been a little sluggish, but  this year has been very consistant. There are normally peaks and valleys with sales, but I found myself closing deals on such a regular basis that  it’s just an expected part of my day.

Paul Goldstone,  iGoldrush –  After 15 years in the business I learned the same in 2011 as I learned in every year prior – expect change!  The most  significant change in the domain industry over the past year was of course the dramatic loss of parking revenue and the switching of gears to  web site development.  Change is progress, change is opportunity, and change is inevitable, so my advice is to expect it, accept it, and roll with  it.  In some cases change can be devastating to a company which is why I have always considered diversification an important factor in a well  balanced business plan.  There’s a lot to be said about being focused but it’s important to have multiple fires burning because you never know  when someone might walk up and pee on one of your fires.

Bill Sweetman,  YummyNames – I learned that “development” — even so-called mass development solutions —  can be a huge distraction from (and impediment to) domain sales efforts as  well as a massive time suck. If you have a large portfolio you may be better  off just parking everything.

Brian Gilbert,  Innovation HQ  –  One thing we’ve learned in 2011 is that development definitely works if  you’ve got the right plan, resources, and PATIENCE.  Our developed domains  have increased by huge percentage points across the board.  This not only  increases their value, it keeps us at lower risk since we don’t have all of  our eggs in one basket (parking).  A major part of our 2012 plan is to  continue development.

The Honorable Neil Brown QC,  UDRP Arbitrator and Mediator –  I have learned, although I knew it  before, that in the arbitration of    domain    name disputes, cases are won on the  evidence. Assertions of what  happened are not enough; what is needed is evidence of what happened and its  significance. The UDRP makes it clear that the issues that the Complainant has  to prove are factual, that they must be  proved if the Complainant is to be  successful and that they can only be proved by evidence.

Moreover, as these  proceedings are civil proceedings they must be won on the balance of  probabilities. That in itself means there must be  evidence of factual matters  that tilts the scales one way or the other so that tribunal can conclude that  one version of the  facts is probably what happened. So practitioners should  always remember , whether they are acting for a complainant  or a respondent  that their case will be won- or lost- depending on the evidence, the quality of  the evidence and how it  can help the tribunal to come to one conclusion or  another.

Eric Borgos,  Impulse Communications, Inc.  –  I learned that it takes a lot of work nowadays to buy a big domain name and develop it into a site that gets ranked well in Google. Instead, I can  make the same amount of money buying a domain and flipping it, and that involves very little work. So, I plan to decrease my domain  development and increase my domain speculation.

Josh Metnick, Chicago.com –  Domains that people identify with–  fishing.com,  Boston.com, etc.– are going to become worth orders of magnitude compared to the way we used  to look at domain development.

Larry Erlich – DomainRegistry.com Inc. – All those spam emails that we all get from China and elsewhere? Well this year was the year that I took them seriously and actually made money by not leaving any stone unturned. In addition to selling them domains which they inquired about I have sold other domains by responding with a short email with some other names that I have available. I never did this in the past feeling that I could always identify the “real” buyers.

By the way by spam emails I don’t mean ones that are inquiring about a single domain and hiding an identity. I mean ones that are mailing out to every owner of a 3 letter or 4 letter domain. (So I get multiple ones frequently.) They are buyers. Ok so not end user pricing but still pricing I would accept. Like Glenn Gary, always be “selling”. Every inquiry is an opportunity to sell something. The premium domain they inquire about that they will never buy because of the price? Find a domain that they will buy instead.

The other thing I realized in 2011 was the following: We all get annoyed with people who “waste our time” with inquiries and don’t turn out to be the buyers that will pay the big dollars. We’ve all had these. Someone from a medium or big company that makes an inquiry that we feel could result in big dollars. They then write back and say the amount is way to high and have a nice day (or don’t write back at all). So we get pissed off.

I finally realized that in this case that we are not mad at them we are just disappointed that we got our hopes up that we could be making big dollars and that didn’t happen. Because every email we get could be the big one. And when it’s not the big one we tend to react negatively to the person sending the email as if it’s their fault that they aren’t clued into our way of thinking. We take our anger out on them when we are really made at ourselves for getting our hopes up.

Braden Pollock,  Legal Brand Marketing  –  We’re far too dependent on Google, in a variety of ways.

Mike Mann,  DomainMarket.com  /  Phone.com  /  Grassroots.org  /  MikeMann.com  –  Still lots of money to be made with adequate work and research and helpers.

Elliot Noss, CEO  Tucows  –  2011 reinforced for me the importance of pricing. So many people overprice, but just as many underprice. There is no price elasticity in domain  names. It is all about finding the right buyer at the right time which means the focus need be on distribution and pricing “properly” which is art not  science. Maximize total revenue, not average revenue!

Karen J. Bernstein,  Law Offices of Karen J. Bernstein, LLC  –  I’ve learned in 2011 that the Anticybersquatting Protection Act and the federal trademark laws need to be changed  to make it harder for unscrupulous companies to sue unwitting domainers.  The standard needs to be raised for  granting injunctions in ACPA and trademark infringement cases when domain names are involved.  Indeed, if  domainers don’t have the money to defend themselves they may face a default judgment attaching their homes and  other large investments or just be financially run into the ground and bankrupt because the plaintiff companies will  litigate them to death.

Large portfolio domainers can be sued by any company that has the money to bring them  to court no matter how frivolous the lawsuit can be.  In 2011, my firm successfully defended a large portfolio  domainer that was the subject of a restraining order by a company for being an apparel counterfeiter when indeed  the domainer had never been in the apparel business.  All the company wanted was the domain name and they  counted on the domainer defaulting on the judgment.  It didn’t happen.  The case has since been dismissed and a  motion for sanctions has been filed on behalf of the domainer asking for the company to pay $96,000 in attorneys’  fees.  That motion is still pending.

Juan Diego Calle, Founder  .CO Registry  /  Straat Investments    –  A community of evangelists is 100x more powerful than your total marketing budget.

Kathy Nielsen,  Sedo  (These are Kathy’s personal views, not necessarily Sedo’s)  –  I learned that buyers by far prefer to buy domains that are priced.  The Buy Now (Fix Priced) domain sales continue to grow at a  very strong pace on Sedo’s network and feedback from buyers supports this buying preference.  They want to buy things now,  not 1 month from now.  They don’t want to haggle in negotiations that make no sense to them or reflect their normal buying  practices.  They are used to registering a domain, and want to buy a premium domain as easily as registering a new domain.  Price  will always be a factor, but the chances of someone buying that domain are  greatly  reduced if the domains don’t have a price.

Fred Mercaldo,  Cities Planet  – Everything takes twice as long as you think it will, and revenue is half as much as you expect!!!

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