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Saturday News & Updates

Elliot Silver
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Looks like it’s going to be a relaxing weekend for me. Hope you have a nice weekend, too. Here are some news updates that might be of interest to you.

If you are owed money by Snapnames as a result of the “Halvarez” shill bidding situation, this is a reminder that the deadline to accept their rebate offer is Friday, November 5, 2010, which is less than a month away. You will need to sign and return the agreement to collect the money owed to you.

I received a news release from a new domain registrar, NameSilo.com, that is scheduled to be released on Monday. According to the co-founder Michael Goldfarb, “Our basic concept is to offer the cheapest everyday domain prices on the Internet, simple and straightforward processes, powerful domain management tools and extremely high levels of domain security.” I visited the site and it looks like their pricing is $8.39 for .com names with privacy.

A couple of TRAFFIC-related news bytes from this week. Legendary boxing promoter, Don King, will be making an appearance at TRAFFIC. I am interested to see how it will tie into the conference. Also, Rick announced via email that the ticket price of TRAFFIC will be $1,495 on Monday only. If you haven’t booked your conference ticket yet, Monday is the day to do it.

Lots of news reports about the FaceMash.com domain name going up for sale, including articles on non-domain related blogs like PerezHilton.com. I do understand why owning a domain name with “history” like this would be appealing, but I don’t see the high value. Once this hit movie is an afterthought, it probably won’t get much traffic, and it’s doubtful the winning bidder would be able to flip it for more with all the publicity.

If you have any pet related mini-sites and you want to make a little bit more money with them, drop me a note in the comment section. I might have an offer for you to pay you to add an article for me.

Millions of Dollars in Publicity for a $1,000 Reward to Find Tiger Woods Cigar Guy

Elliot Silver
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By now, you have likely seen the famous Tiger Woods Ryder Cup photograph, with the ball in mid-air heading right for the photographer, and an interesting-looking guy smoking a cigar in the background. In case you haven’t seen it, the image is above for your viewing pleasure.

Despite the shot looking cool, as the ball was headed directly for the camera, the real story became the hunt for the guy smoking the cigar. Dubbed “Cigar Guy,” the Be Frugal blog (BeFrugal.com) offered a $1,000 reward to whomever is the first person identify the person smoking the cigar. They are holding a contest because they want this guy to be their next spokesman.

The contest and $1,000 reward have generated millions of dollars in publicity. News outlets including Huffington Post, NBC Sports, ABC, Wall Street Journal, and CNN are covering this special offer with news articles and reports, all linking to the BeFrugal.com website. What would essentially cost the company $1,000 has brought them priceless coverage.

This is great viral marketing!

Self Financing Domain Deals

Elliot Silver
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6

Sometimes to complete a domain sale, you need to offer a payment plan to the buyer, allowing him to pay over time. It might not seem advantageous to do a no-interest deal like this, but sometimes it’s necessary to close a deal.

I’ve bought a couple names using payment plans simply because it was offered. My thinking was why the hell not take a payment plan when it would cost me nothing to stretch payments out, and I could pay a lump sum if/when I sold the domain name. If you’re offered a no-interest payment plan when buying a domain name you want at the right price, it’s a no-brainer.

When you’re selling a domain name on a payment plan, here are some things that you might want to consider (these things may be different if you’re the buyer):

Keep the domain name in your portfolio or put it in escrow (like Moniker escrow) until all payments are made. If the buyer has your name and you have no money, you have less leverage when you want to be paid the outstanding balance. Legal costs to get it back could be more than the remaining payments.

Do not change the DNS unless absolutely necessary. If the buyer uses it in a way that infringes upon someone else’s trademark or does something else that would reflect poorly upon you, it wouldn’t be very good and may cost you the domain name. If you do need to change the DNS, monitor the content and make sure you let the buyer know there are restrictions.

Make sure the buyer knows if all payments aren’t made, the seller keeps the domain name and payments that have been made up until that point. You don’t want to keep the domain name in limbo if payments aren’t all made but the buyer thinks he still has rights to it. It’s your call about whether to cancel the deal if the buyer is a day, two days, a week…etc late with payments. This is a personal choice and I guess it would be dependent upon your relationship with the buyer.

Have all details spelled out in a sales agreement or clearly put in an email.   Don’t make assumptions on something like this, especially if the amount to be transacted is significant.

Be assured that the buyer isn’t going to try and sell the domain name before it’s paid off. It would suck to have a 3 letter domain name be subject to a UDRP because the buyer (before paying for it in full) tried to sell it to a company that believed it had rights to the domain name.

The payments should be divided fairly evenly. You don’t want to have small upfront payments because there is less incentive for the buyer to keep the deal if he has to make very large payments at the end. If he’s only paid a small % of the price during most of the term, it may be more likely that he would back out knowing that he hasn’t lost much.

Never, ever back out of a deal if you receive a better offer during the course of payments. I don’t care if you sell a name for $10,000 and you get a $100,000 offer.   If you are willing and able to finance a deal like this, I am sure your reputation is worth much more than the money you would forgo by keeping the deal. You could pass the offer along to the buyer and work something out, but that’s between the two of you.

In today’s market, self-financing deals with a payment plan is a decent way to close a deal.

NameJet General Manager Steve Brown Departs

Elliot Silver
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I recently heard from a few different industry sources that Steve Brown, General Manager of Demand Media’s auction platform, NameJet, was no longer with the company. Late this evening, the news of Brown’s departure was confirmed to some clients in an email.

Taking over Brown’s former GM position will be Matt Overman. Prior to this promotion, Overman served in the position of Director of Domain Sales at Demand Media. According to his LinkedIn page, Overman was previously Business Development Manager at HotKeys, which was acquired by Demand Media in 2006.

I sent emails to two company officials asking for comment, and I will post those when and if I hear back (Demand Media is currently in its quiet period after filing for an IPO).

Successful Website Launched by Domain Investor Receives Lots of Press

Elliot Silver
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8

I was reading a news aggregation website this morning, and it linked to an article in the BBC about a friend rental website (yes, you can rent “friends.” It looked like an interesting lead-in, so I checked out the article about RentAFriend.com, and I recognized the name of the founder.

A few years back, I had sold a number of domain names to Scott Rosenbaum. I don’t think we did a great deal of business, but it was enough that I recognized his name when I read it, and I confirmed that it’s his website by comparing the Whois on my previously owned domain names to his company name in the website’s T&C.

RentAFriend.com has received quite a bit of good publicity recently. In addition to today’s BBC article, other articles and news stories have been written on or appeared in MSNBC, Fox News, CBS, CNN, USA Today, CW, and other media outlets.

It’s an interesting concept that’s getting some great press. Congrats to Scott and his marketing/PR team.

Risks in Buying ccTLD Domains: Example of .LY Domain Name Taken by Registry

Elliot Silver
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ccTLD investing is probably most interesting to me because of my travels, not because I am a ccTLD investor, or because I use ccTLD domain names regularly. Businesses in many countries outside of the USA favor local ccTLD domain names over .com, although there are still a number of countries whose citizens prefer non-ccTLD domain names.

One of my biggest fears with ccTLD domain names is that the country in charge of the registry can set rules and regulations that wouldn’t be expected in the US. It’s one thing if you live there and are accustomed to those local laws, but it’s another thing if you’re a US citizen and you use a ccTLD in the US, but your domain name is governed by a foreign entity.

Internet consultant, Ben Metcalfe, reported about a situation his company is facing with regards to VB.LY, an important .LY domain name his company owns – well owned.   According to a post on Ben’s blog,

The domain was seized by the Libyan domain registry for reasons which seemed to be kept obscure until we escalated the issue. We eventually discovered that the domain has been seized because the content of our website, in their opinion, fell outside of Libyan Islamic/Sharia Law.

It seems odd that a domain registrar is taking over a domain name based on its content, since the content is hosted on servers that reside outside of Libya. When I reported an instance of copy theft to Godaddy, they told me it was out of their scope since the domain name is only registered at their company, and the actual website is hosted elsewhere.

This is something every ccTLD investor and web developer MUST consider when buying ccTLD domain names. I wrote an article about how domain hacks can lead to confusion in the market place, but I think this is a far more important consideration. A company like Bitly, whose primary domain name operates on Bit.LY, needs to be mindful, especially when Bitly has very little (or no) control over the content to which they are linking.

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