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Sedo Gets Memory.com and Wood.com Exclusivity

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SedoI’ve noticed that quite a bit of the higher value sales reported in DNJournal of late have been made by Sedo. Earlier this week, I wrote about Sedo getting exclusivity on a great gambling domain name, Gambling.com. It seems like the company is on quite a roll.

Today, I’ve learned that Sedo has gotten the domain names Memory.com and Wood.com under exclusive contract to sell.

I think Memory.com is a great domain name because computer memory is very easy to sell online. I don’t know what the margins are like, but I know a company like Crucial.com makes it simple for people to order memory upgrades. The physical product is small, so inventory expenses are probably light compared to other products.

I wouldn’t be surprised if a company like Micron (owners of Crucial) make an offer to buy Memory.com. Not only would an acquisition like Memory.com make its brand more intuitive, but it would also prevent a startup or competitor from making a big impact on its offering.

Ryan Colby is the broker for both of these domain names and you can be in touch with him by emailing Ryan.Colby at Sedo. Another domain name of interest may be Karate.com, which I understand has seen a price drop since the DomainFest auction where the reserve was $500k-750k.

Update: WikiLeaks.org Not Online, Neither is WikiLeaks.com

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First it appeared that Godaddy (or Wikia, Inc.) was monetizing WikiLeaks.com traffic that was intended for WikiLeaks.org website by placing sponsored links on the standard coming soon landing page.

Next, it appeared that Godaddy had taken down all of the sponsored links on the WikiLeaks.com landing page, perhaps in response to complaints about it monetizing the traffic. Some people still felt this wasn’t the right thing to do and thought that Godaddy should not have WikiLeaks.com resolve at all.

Now, the day after the DNS was removed from WikiLeaks.org, effectively taking it offline (until it moved offshore to WikiLeaks.ch), it appears that WikiLeaks.com has nothing on its website. The current WikiLeaks.com website says “Sorry this site is not currently available.”

gTLD Applicants Should Keep Eye on .LA & Other ccTLD Marketing

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Did you know there is a .LA domain extension? Similar to .TV being for Tuvalu, .CO being for Colombia, and .ME being for  Montenegro, .LA is the country code for the southeast Asian country of Laos.

If you’ve heard of .LA or seen .LA domain names advertised, it’s most likely by a domain registrar marketing it as the Los Angeles extension (like the Register.com email that spurred my post). It is probably being marketed in a similar fashion to how the .NYC, .Paris, and other geographic areas intend to market their own gTLDs once ICANN approves them.

Anyone who intends to bid on and win a gTLD should look at the efforts ccTLD registries are making to sell their domain names. They should analyze what is working and what isn’t working. They can monitor the amount of domain registrations along with the ups and downs in registration cycle to see how marketing efforts are paying off.

gTLD registries are going to have to pay a lot of money to manage a registry. I’ve seen a number of extensions that I think will be successful with a strong marketing effort (such as the geos mentioned above), but I’ve also seen a number of head scratchers that just don’t seem to make sense, no matter what the marketing effort will be.

I do think there’s a place for gTLD domain names, and I also think anyone who is pining to manage a registry should pay close attention to what’s working and what isn’t working.

WikiLeaks.com Update: GoDaddy Does The Right Thing

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I wrote an article last Sunday  about the WikiLeaks.com domain name. It’s owned by a company called Wikia, Inc. and it recently had a coming soon landing page with pay per click advertising links. Every time someone clicked on one of the Sponsored Links, Godaddy would earn some revenue (and possibly Wikia, too, if they were parking the domain name with Godaddy).

Apparently someone at Wikia, Inc. or Godaddy decided to change this landing page, and there are no more PPC links showing.

Bob Parsons is known to be a proud patriotic American. He is also a very, very wealthy man, and as the owner of one of the largest and most generous companies in the state of Arizona (maybe even the US), I don’t think the money that was being generated was substantial to Godaddy’s bottom line.

Kudos to Parsons, Godaddy, and/or Wikia for opting to not monetize traffic that was looking for the WikiLeaks.org website, which has certainly damaged the reputation of the US and others in the world.

Sedo Nabs Exclusivity on Gambling.com

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SedoI recently read that Gambling.com was going to be placed for sale by its owners, and a press release from Sedo confirms the news. The release announces that Sedo has been granted exclusive brokerage rights to the domain name.

It’s not clear what the reserve price is on the domain name, but I personally can’t imagine it selling for more than Slots.com, which was sold to Bodog for $5,500,000 earlier in 2010.

I think Gambling.com is a very good name, but I think people would be more apt to search for other keywords more – for instance, Slots, Blackjack, Poker, or Sports Bets. If an online gaming company is going to build its brand around a generic domain name, I think they would probably prefer to spend the money on one of those .com terms.

Among other large sales this year, Sedo recently found a buyer for Sex.com, which sold for $13,000,000, the highest publicly recorded all-cash deal.

Consider Adding Simply Hired’s Jobamatic on Your Website

These days, it seems that a lot of people are out of work and looking for jobs, no matter where you live or in what the profession. On my geodomain names, I have been using Simply Hired’s Jobamatic platform for quite some time, and it is earning a couple hundred dollars a month in incremental revenue.

Take a look at http://jobs.lowell.com for example. There are job listings all over the Greater Lowell area, and I earn revenue when someone clicks on a job listing, and I earn even more revenue when someone posts a job listing (which doesn’t happen as much as I wish).

As you can see, the landing page integrates well within my website. My developer used the CSS and design from my site and plugged it into the back end of Jobamatic, so it fits nearly seamlessly. The one thing I couldn’t do is have a rotating banner on the Job board because it wouldn’t let me install an ad rotator, but that’s not such a big deal to me. I was also able to create a subdomain (jobs) and use a CNAME record so the url looks like you’re still on Lowell.com, when in fact, you’re on the Jobamatic site.

On the homepage of Lowell.com, I also added a widget that shows several job listings in the area, and when people click on those, I get paid, too. I think this is key with the economy in the tank because people are looking for work, and I am giving them work opportunities – it’s a win/win situation.

Because of the benefit to site visitors and financial benefit, I am looking at integrating Jobamatic into my non-geodomain names as well. For example, I am going to do it on DogWalker.com pretty soon, since there seem to be a lot of people looking for dog walking jobs.

If you haven’t checked out Jobamatic, you might want to do it, especially with the economy in the crapper.

This is not a paid post (I don’t do paid posts) nor is there any affiliate link.

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