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Ringtones.com Changes Hands for $750k

Elliot Silver
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11

SedoIt was just announced that the domain name Ringtones.com has been sold for $750,000. Dave Evanson from Sedo was the domain broker for this transaction.

Prior to the sale, Ringtones.com was owned by Mobile Streams Ltd, a company trading publicly on the London Stock Exchange. Currently (now and prior to the sale), the domain name has been used as what appears to be an affiliate portal, allowing visitors to download ringtones to their mobile phones.

According to a news release on  Stock Market Wire, Mobile Streams’ CEO  Simon  Buckingham  commented that the company chose to sell Ringtones.com to use the proceeds for another line of business.  “We want to ensure that the company has the appropriate financial resources necessary to take full advantage of the rapidly growing apps market,” said Buckingham.

An old news release from Mobile Streams noted that  Ringtones.com was originally launched by the company in 1999.

The domain name is still in the Sedo escrow account, and the name of the buyer is not yet public.

Many Trademark Holders Don’t Protect Their Brand in Today’s TLDs

Elliot Silver
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7

There have been a whole lot of complaints from trademark owners that new TLDs could potentially cause massive amounts of cybersquatting.

Similarly, it could cost them tens of thousands of dollars or maybe much more to protect their brands in a variety of new TLDs when ICANN releases them. This whole debate sounds pretty interesting and the trademark owner contingent makes a good point about this.

Well, it would be a better point if they actually owned all of their brand names in existing TLDs, or if the ones they didn’t own were being cybersquatted in different TLDs.

I thought it would be interesting to take a look at some leading brands to see if their brand names were sitting unregistered, which I believe is what will happen for many new gTLD domain names. For instance, Xerox.sport hardly seems to be a domain name that would be coveted by cybersquatters.

Here are some unregistered brand names in various ccTLD and TLD extensions:

  • HewlettPackard.tv
  • NewYorkTimes.travel
  • McDonalds.aero
  • Intel.ac
  • MercedesBenz.sc
  • Gucci.jobs
  • MorganStanley.im
  • Xerox.fm
  • Danone.la
  • Motorola.name
  • Disney.mn
  • Budweiser.vc
  • Accenture.bz
  • Hyatt.ac

TextBroker.com: My Secret Weapon

Elliot Silver
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33

The biggest problem with owning a number of websites is writing content for them. Content is what drives traffic, and traffic is generally the key driver for advertising, and you need to have fresh content for SEO and to continue to drive additional traffic to your website.

I’ve used Elance for copy writers before, and I’ve also hired them in private from posts on Craigslist and on forums, but I have been MUCH more satisfied with the work from TextBroker.com. They are fast, they aren’t too expensive, and most importantly, they are proficient. You also don’t have to worry about hearing excuses from copywriters about why their work won’t be on time.

I’ve probably had about 300 articles written by TextBroker writers for my websites, and I’ve only needed to have two re-written. One of those articles was because I had a fairly lengthy article request on a topic that was pretty small, and the writer rambled…  I can’t say that I really blame him for that though.

The only time I won’t use TextBroker.com is on my blog. It would be difficult for a copywriter to have expertise on something specific like domain names, and I think if I posted an article that was written by someone else, the grammar and tone might give it away. I suppose that’s because my blog is more personal than my other sites, and it has readers know me personally.

TextBroker.com charges somewhere between $5.00 – $10.00 for average size articles of about 200-350 words that are written proficiently. It’s a privately funded, venture-backed company that TechCrunch recently covered.

If you need website articles written, I would recommend TextBroker.com. In fact, I had 10 articles written for SlipperyElm.com in less time than it’s taken for the domain name to be transferred to Moniker.

Would gTLDs Survive and Thrive Without Domain Investor Support?

Elliot Silver
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15

It’s widely believed that one of the reasons that the .CO Registry launch was so successful was due to the financial “support” of domain investors who purchased a great deal of .CO domain names.

Some investors bought domain names for development, and others bought them for speculative reasons. I’ve discussed at length the reasons I think .CO makes sense, so I will spare you those details, but I think the money that domain investors spent was a big reason for the very successful launch of .CO.

That brings me to ask this question: Would new gTLD registries survive and thrive without the support of domain investors?

I am sure companies that want to run registries will look at the .CO launch and maybe even .MOBI launch results to model out the potential for their own registry. Should domain investors not heavily invest in every new gTLD, one can assume these modeled numbers will be way off. If that’s the case, the ability to survive on much less cash flow could be compromised.

My gut says that with the considerable costs of applying for a gTLD, cost of legal defense related to trademark holders, and the expense of marketing the gTLD to a non-domain proficient audience (businesses in the local markets of geographic gTLDs), it will be difficult for new gTLDs to thrive without significant investment from domain investors.

Do you think a new gTLD would survive and thrive without investment from domain investors?

Recent Purchases… How About You?

Elliot Silver
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375

I haven’t hand registered many new domain names lately, but I’ve been bidding on quite a few at NameJet as well as buying in private. I want to share some of my recent acquisitions and would be interested in hearing about yours.

Some of the names have been sold already, some have been purchased to flip, and at least one is going to be developed by me.

  • DogGroomers.com (almost launched)
  • SlipperyElm.com (Google it)
  • BootWarmer.com
  • AlpacaFurs.com
  • AntiqueCollections.com (1996 registration date, predates Antiques.com)
  • VegetableGarden.com
  • DogWasteDisposal.com
  • NashuaJobs.com
  • LimestoneTile.com
  • OffshoreWebHosting.com
  • VineyardEquipment.com
  • SchoolPsychologist.com
  • VisitSaoPaulo.com
  • HorseCorrals.com

I don’t really have a specific interest as you can see, but looking more for aged, exact match product or service domain names in .com only.

What have you bought recently?

Smart Marketing for Stowe Vacation Home

Elliot Silver
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2

Every year, I try to plan an annual meeting. It’s smallish because I have a small company with only one employee, but I like to hold it to get away and take a few friends to brainstorm some new ideas for the upcoming year.

I decided to hold the February meeting for an extra long weekend at Stowe Mountain’s Stonybrook Resort in Stowe, Vermont. I searched for a vacation home to rent on HomeAway.com and VRBO.com, two vacation rental websites I hadn’t used before.

I also searched Google for vacation homes in Stowe. As it turns out, the owners of the home that I chose have a website specifically to market the home:  StoweVacationHome.com. The home was also listed on VRBO.com, which I used to facilitate the agreement.

I can’t say that the only reason I chose this home was because of the domain name, but there were three I was considering, and the generic domain name was the deciding factor for me.

It also spurred me to hand register KillingtonVacationHome.com, SquawValleyVacationHome, SnowmassVacationHome.com, and WhistlerVacationHome.com. Not sure if I will get into that business, but I do know that HomeAway owns names like VailVacationHome.com and DestinVacationHome.com.

Maybe some day, I will trade each of those domain names for a week’s vacation!

Photo: Flickr

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