You’re A Fool!

Elliot Silver
-
6

Yes… another April Fools’ Day post, but this one has a twist. The “You’re” to whom I am referring in the title is actually me, and the things below are some of the foolish things I’ve done recently (that I can remember). This isn’t the typical attempt at humor post that most others are trying, although Rick’s new venture is hularious (.com).

  • I bought a targeted keyword geodomain name on Snapnames over a year ago and never changed the DNS. I just realized this last week.
  • I kept complaining about how TropicalBirds.com was not making much money, but then I worked with Craig at WhyPark, and it’s now making 1.5-2x what it made per day on Adsense. We’re not talking big money at all, but it’s bigger money. More on this to come, but after around one month of the same site with different monetization strategy/feed, I am realizing that I left a couple of nights in New York City on the table in earnings every month for the last year plus.
  • I stopped invoicing   my hotel advertiser on Lowell.com in January because I was hoping the new site would launch in mid February or early March at the latest, and I was concerned that they would be upset paying for a banner on a newly launched website that wasn’t the exact same as the current/old site. Well, as all development projects go, my design requests grew, and we’re now in April, and the old site is still up, so I lost out on two months of payment… again, not a whole lot of money, but a couple of nice dinners.
  • I spent a lot of time building my own mini sites, and when all is said and done, I shouldn’t have been so cheap and left the work to the professionals. Even if the results were equal to mine, it wouldn’t have been a waste of my time.

I am sure I’ve done more foolish things than those listed above, but I can’t really think of others off the top of my head right now.

What foolish things have you done that you’d like to share?

=========

Please help me raise funds for the Ronald McDonald House

Sedo’s Domain Market Study: 2009 Overview and Outlook into 2010

Elliot Silver
-
7

This is a guest post written by Simonetta Batteiger, Director of Sales Operations North America. The article discusses Sedo’s 2009 Market Study (that’s a link to the pdf file), which was recently released. The information in the study is valuable to domain investors and can be helpful in seeing market conditions and trends.

————-
Looking for some domain inspiration? Check out the latest Sedo Market Study to help you identify market trends and new opportunities! Our market study gives insights into overall marketplace activity, top domain sales and successful domain extensions. Sedo’s continued focus on innovations around our marketplace strategy resulted in a record number of 10,070 domain sales in Q4 and helped solidify our position as the most successful global marketplace for domains in the secondary market.

The 2009 Market Study shows Sedo’s strong growth in sales through our global platform in 2009, versus 2008. Sedo represented 64 percent of the top 100 public sales in the domain industry, with the next closest competitor coming in at 8 percent. This growth was also fueled by impressive quarter over quarter results, with a 5 percent increase in domain sales in Q4 of 2009. In addition, Sedo accounted for 11 of the top 20 biggest sales industry-wide, compared to only 5 of the top 20 sales in 2008. This included a surge in geographical and descriptive domains, including the sale of Fly.com for $1.6 million, Russia.com for $1.5 million, Call.com for $1.1 million, and Brazil.com for $500,000.

Which extensions are the most successful ones?

The study reveals that the .com extension continues to be the most popular generic top level domain (gTLD), accounting for 44 percent of all domain sales on the Sedo marketplace in 2009. In looking at its place among other gTLDs, the .com displays an even greater lead. The extension accounted for 72 percent of all Q4 2009 gTLD sales and 74 percent of 2009 gTLD sales. In contrast, the second most popular gTLD, the .net extension generated 11 percent of 2009 gTLD sales, and only 6 percent of all domains sold on the Sedo marketplace last year.

In terms of the best-performing extensions for average sales price, Sedo’s study saw the sharpest rise in .biz domains. This growth can be attributed in part to the growth in sales of one character .biz domains, which first became available through the .biz registrar in September 2009.

Fixed price names represent a strong growth sector of the market

We’ve seen a significant four percent growth in the number of fixed price domains changing hands in 2009, as compared with 2008. This figure will continue to grow this year, as domain owners apply fixed prices to appeal to more buyers.

What are the top selling categories?

The top selling domain categories of 2009 included software, employment, services, regions, country and cities, tobacco, insurance, three-character domains, hardware and casinos.

Read the complete 2009 Market Study

What’s coming up in 2010

Looking forward into 2010, we expect to see ongoing demand for premium virtual real estate, with geo, descriptive, .org and .com domains leading the charge. Sedo is unique in it’s ability to actively reach out to domain investors and more importantly to end user buyers representing organizations of all sizes to leverage domains to meet their business goals. Our ongoing monthly GreatDomains auctions, our monthly changing Industry Spotlight features (check out sedo.com/tech) and our quarterly vertical promotions and auctions (see sedo.com/travel) will help us push these numbers even higher in 2010. If you want to be a part of these, feel free to reach out to me anytime!

If you have any questions, feel free to email Simonetta – simonetta at sedo.com.

Idearc Making Play for “Super” Domain Names?

Elliot Silver
-
14

Idearc SupermediaIt appears like the marketing and Internet Yellow Pages company formerly known as Idearc, and now known as SuperMedia, may have recently made a strong play for “Super” domain names.

In this week’s sales report on DNJournal, it was reported that SuperElectricians.com, SuperMechanics.com and SuperPainters.com each sold for $10,000 apiece. All three of these are currently registered in the name of Sedo’s Escrow account, presumably awaiting transfer.

This morning, Eric Borgos of Impulse Communications announced (in a comment on my blog) that his company recently sold several Super domain names. The names his company sold were SuperMortgages.com for $7,500, SuperFlorists.com for $3,000, SuperMoving.com for $7,500, and SuperPrinting.com for $4,000. All of these domain names are registered to Idearc  Media, which is now known as SuperMedia.

The company also owns SuperExterminators.com and SuperCarRepair.com. In addition, SuperPlumbing.com looks to be at Sedo Escrow as well. There may be others, but I only checked a handful of names I thought would make sense for them to own.

Does this mean that “Super” names have more value now than before? Probably not. I wouldn’t advise going out to buy these names unless you can get great prices. It’s more than likely the company already went after the domain names they wanted, and if you buy them with the hopes of flipping them, you might be stuck.

Barack Obama on Twitter: Using Libya ccTLD for URL Shortener

Elliot Silver
-
8

Barack Obama on Twitter

I am not someone who is interested in politics or discussing politics. In fact, I strongly dislike political conversations with polarizing topics – it’s just not my thing. That being said, I came across President Obama’s Twitter page this afternoon and saw something that I think is pretty ironic.

Just about all of the URLs that are linked to from the President’s page use Bitly to shorten the URL. Although Bitly owns Bitly.com, it primarily uses Bit.LY for its shortened URLs, and .LY is the ccTLD for the country of Libya. For instance, http://bit.ly/bROnKn, http://www.bit.ly/9-l, and http://bit.ly/a-r were all recently used on President Obama’s Twitter page.

As you are may be aware, the country of Libya, along with Cuba and Syria was described by John Bolton as “Beyond the Axis of Evil.”   The government of Libya isn’t exactly on the friendliest of terms with the US government, so it’s somewhat humorous in an ironic way that the President’s Twitter staff would choose to use Bitly to shorten URLs.

From what I understand, it’s fairly simple to create a URL shortener on any domain name. There are plenty of short .US domain names that would make the perfect URL shortener for our President. Just some food for thought.

Holocaust Related Domain Names

Elliot Silver
-
0

Simon Wiesenthal CenterIn 2008, I was browsing through some names owned by Buy Domains and I saw a domain name that was related to the Holocaust. It wasn’t exactly an obvious Holocaust domain name, but when the term was Googled, the relationship was more than clear. I informed Pete Lamson (GM of Buy Domains at the time) about the domain name, and the company dropped it.

It was unfortunate that they dropped it, but I am sure they wanted nothing to do with this domain name once they realized its meaning. The unfortunate aspect was that it went to auction at Snapnames, and it had a number of bidders. After a few days, I came out on top and owned the domain name.

For a while, I just killed the DNS since I didn’t want to send the traffic to a Holocaust awareness website without their permission. I forgot about the domain name until a couple of days ago when I got a renewal notice. I did a bit of research on other domain names, and I saw that the Simon  Wiesenthal  Center owns Holocaust.com.

I reached out the the Whois contact and she mentioned that someone was kind enough to donate Holocaust.com to their Center. I then offered to give them the domain name I own for free, and they are happy to take it. I am very happy that this domain name will get a permanent home with an organization like the Wiesenthal Center.

If you have domain names that are hurtful or hateful, consider donating them to a non-profit group. Whether you ask for a tax write-off or not, I am sure they will appreciate your generosity.

DomainState to be Sold via Auction

Elliot Silver
-
3

I just received an email from the administrators of DomainState.com, a domain forum that is now for sale. The owners have decided to sell it via auction on the site, which will be held January 13 – 15, 2010, starting with a $10,000 bid. My bet is the auction will result in a sale between $20-30,000.

Here’s the email I received:

=====

Thanks for your interest in the site, please note the following information about the sale,

General site info:

Started: 12th Sept 2002
Vbulletin Version: 2.2.7
Total members: 12238 registered and confirmed
Total posts: 480,595
Domains included: domainstate.com, domainstate.net, domainstate.org.

Revenue: currently unmonetized

Traffic stats: We haven’t kept stats as that wasn’t something of use to us how we ran it at the time but that as several people have asked for them we are adding in Google analytics. Obviously the amount of stats available before the sale will only be around a weeks worth.
Note also we currently block google from crawling the site via robots.txt.

User registrations:

Dec 2009 – 127
Nov 2009 – 109
Oct 2009 – 110
Sep 2009 – 116

Post numbers:

Dec 2009 – 1490
Nov 2009 – 1940
Oct 2009 – 2192
Sep 2009 – 1859

Other details: Vbulletin has been modified with some hacks (whois, showcase etc). You may or may not want to keep those features.

Bandwidth usage:

September 09 – 1.25gb / 10.02gb (In/Out)
October 09 – 1.21gb / 9.07gb
November 09 – 1.32gb / 9.92gb
December 09 – 1.01gb / 8.01gb

Method of sale:

Due to a fairly large number of inquiries we have decided to sell the site via auction. The auction will be on site but will not be publicly viewable and bidders will be asked to provide contact details. It will be held in a private section of the site that only bidders will be given access to. Bidders will be screened and we reserve the right to refuse any potential bidder.

A list of the usernames and real names of each bidder (but not contact details) will be available to other bidders in an effort to make the bidding process as transparent as possible.

The auction will take place from Wednesday the 13th to Friday the 15th of January 2010 (48hours) starting at 12pm EST (eastern standard time) ending at 12pm EST on the 15th.

If any prospective bidder is not a current member of the site they will need to join.

The starting bid will be $10,000 USD and increments need to be $500 or larger. Bids under $500 will be deemed invalid. There will be no reserve.

If a bid is received within the last 10 minutes of the auction the auction will continue until 10 minutes after the last bid. (example if a 2nd bid is received that will extend the auction for 10 minutes after the time of that bid).

We reserve the right to extend the period of the auction if the site experiences downtime during the running of the auction.

Other terms:

Posts in the administrators section of the site will be removed before transfer. (approx 17,000 posts).

Payment needs to be made within 3 business days of the conclusion of the auction.

Method of transfer:

The successful bidder will be required to move the site to their own server/hosting account within 2 weeks of receipt of payment.

After receiving payment we will immediately work with the buyer to transfer the domain names and the site.

We will do everything we can to make sure a stress free transfer is achieved from our end but the purchaser is responsible for the setup of the site on their end. We suggest bidders become familiar with the method of transferring a vbulletin forum.

http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/moving_servers

Please note also the site is currently administrated and moderated by the three owners and we won’t be continuing in that role after the sale.

Please respond to this email stating you domainstate username, real name and company name (if applicable) and contact details and we will setup access to the bidding thread for you.

For any further questions please email us,

Best regards

Paul Cotton
Paul Shaw
Matt Purtell

Domainstate Admins

1...141142143...154Page 142 of 154