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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.

HomeownersInsurance.com Bought for a Reported $570,000 (All Cash)

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I just received a press release from HomeInsurance.com announcing that the company has acquired HomeownersInsurance.com for over half a million dollars.

According to the press release:

HomeInsurance.com has purchased the domain name  HomeownersInsurance.com for a reported  $570,000  in an all-cash deal. As America’s number one online home insurance shopping agency, executives at  HomeInsurance.com project this purchase will grow their online home insurance shopping visitors to 100,000 consumers each month.

Prior to the acquisition, HomeownersInsurance.com had been owned for quite some time by Homeowners Insurance Online Services, S. A., a Costa Rican company.

In my opinion, this is a smart acquisition for the company. According to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, the term “homeowners insurance” gets 33,100 exact match local searches a month, while the primary keyword “home insurance” is only a bit higher at 40,500.

By having two different websites ranking well in Google for these two terms, they should drive considerably more traffic to the site.

One thing I really like about this purchase is that it shows that a company that knows its market can make projections on how a similar (but different) domain name will do once it’s indexed and well-ranked in search engines. It can then use those projections to model how long it would take to break even on a domain acquisition and can determine an acceptable price to pay.

It may seem silly, but I don’t think a lot of companies look at domain names in this way. Acquiring a great domain name like this is one way a company can reinvest in its business and increase its reach.

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