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Domain Intelligence: Domain Registrations Can Reveal Plans & Strategy

Elliot Silver
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One of the bigger news stories this morning in the mobile and social media space was that the popular Farmville game may be coming to the iPhone, iPad, and/or Android sometime in the near future. The impetus for these news stories? Apparently the company where Farmville gamemaker Zynga registers its domain name became the owner of farmvilleandroid.com, farmvilleipad.com, farmvilleiphone.com and farmvillesms.com.

Although it’s quite reasonable to think the domain registrations could simply be defensive in nature so cybersquatters don’t purchase them (like the parked and privately registered iphonefarmville.com appears to be), these domain registrations could give away valuable strategic intelligence to competitors. Likewise, it could also contribute to cybersquatters speculating further on a company’s online strategy, leading to speculative typo domain registrations even prior to launch.

With Domain monitoring tools from companies like Domain Tools, it’s getting more difficult for large companies to keep upcoming launches and product upgrades top secret. Instead of sticking to corporate domain regulations that many companies have that require them to register domain names at a particular domain registrar, it would be smart to buy them with privacy guard at other popular registrars like Name.com, Godaddy, or Register.com, where they would be lost amongst the millions of other domain names.

That is… unless they want the publicity and leaks for “top secret” plans and strategies.

Yahoo Buys Me.Me for MeMe.Yahoo.com

Elliot Silver
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Meme.yahoo.com

According to a press release that hit the wires this morning, Yahoo has acquired the domain name Me.me from the country of Montenegro’s .me ccTLD domain registry. The terms of the sale weren’t disclosed, but Sedo handled the transaction through its domain broker Jeff Gabriel.

Yahoo plans to use Me.me to enhance the brand and brand recognition of its social networking site meme.yahoo.com. Yahoo has been making a bit of news in the domain space of late, with some recent sales of domain names like MusicVideos.com, LookUp.com, and FreeComputers.com. In addition, Yahoo also sold Contests.com at a domain auction several months ago.

Yahoo does not own the domain name Meme.com, a domain name owned by a software company called The Meme Factory. Only time will tell if Yahoo decides to rebrand as Me.me instead of meme.yahoo.com, which could then make the Meme.com domain name all the more valuable. That would also seem to be good news for domain owners who have invested in good .me domain names (disclaimer: my companies do not own any .me domain names).

Yahoo does seem to have a tendency to use its primary Yahoo.com domain name for its projects like Kickstart, Shine, HotJobs, and others that all redirect to their own Yahoo subdomains.

Not All “Generic” Domain Names are Generic

Elliot Silver
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When I first started buying domain names in around 2003, I didn’t understand the legalities of registering domain names that contained trademarks. In fact, I registered a few domain names that were infringing on the marks of other companies. After getting a cease and desist letter from one company and giving the registration fee domain name to them, I decided I didn’t want to take a chance with this type of name.

In going through my portfolio to try and sell some names to end users, I realized that I have a few names that aren’t as generic as I once thought.

I own a number of city-keyword domain names, and I started looking through them to sell a few to end user buyers. I own quite a few cityMortgage.com and cityMortgages.com domain names. One is a city in Texas with somewhere around 100,000 people, and I am sure many of the city’s homeowners have mortgages, and there are a number of companies offering mortgages in this city.

In doing some research, I found that there is a bank in Maryland that uses the Texas city name + Bank (I don’t want to draw attention to the name I own, so I am leaving the bank name out). Without getting into legalities since I am not a legal expert, it would probably be okay to sell this City Mortgages.com name to a mortgage company in Texas, but if I pitched it to the Bank in Maryland, they could very well claim trademark infringement. I suppose they could do that anyway, but having an email from me offering to sell the name would make their case stronger.

Point of this post is that when you do reach out to end users to sell generic domain names, you need to be sure that the domain name is actually generic. I almost sent this bank an email assuming they were located in the city rather than using the name as their trademark, and had I not seen the Maryland area code on the site, I probably would have sent it.

There are many generic terms that are used by companies to form distinctive trademarks, and there is a whole lot of gray area, so use caution.

Some Sunday Updates

Elliot Silver
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Hope you’re having a nice Sunday. I am off for a long bike ride today… just a couple weeks until my 5 Boro Bike Tour, and my wife and I are just a few hundred dollars away from our goal for the Ronald McDonald House.

Lowell.com was finally relaunched a few days ago, and a number of bugs have been fixed and/or are being fixed. One thing I did to find errors was put out a request on Twitter and Facebook. I got quite a lot of feedback from people who are interested in the site (including the information that my current logo was liked and another logo wasn’t favored). In addition, a number of people have signed up to post articles.

Here is some information about the new Lowell.com website so you can be inspired or be helped with your own development projects:

  • People can sign up and post articles, events, and/or comments. This will add content to the site and hopefully increase traffic and pageviews. It’s also helpful to people in the community who are now more easily able to promote their news and events to an audience of over 10,000 visitors per month.
  • My developer used a plugin called “The Events Calendar” which is fantastic! The only issue I am having now is that events seem to fall off the home page before they start. I’ve checked the server clock and WordPress clock on site, and all are working fine. This is something I need to fix.
  • I also need to fix the Yet Another Related Post Plugin, as it’s not showing up on Pages.
  • Advertisers will be able to sign up for business listings in the same way dog walkers can on DogWalker.com. Listings will automatically renew in a year, and their Paypal account will auto-pay in a year. This is so I don’t need a representative in the area.
  • Banners, hotel listings, and restaurant listings will all be manually managed by me. The Lowell Courtyard by Marriott. has agreed to continue with a monthly banner, and the Radisson Hotel signed up last week, so things are off to a pretty good start (no, I didn’t offer them a discount rate or freebie to get them on site).
  • I am using Adsense in the top banner spot and one of the side banners, although these can easily be replaced by local advertisers if/when they are interested. The Adsense banners are earning somewhere around $5/day right now despite the fact that traffic has gone done in the last few weeks.
  • This is obvious, but make sure you test your newly developed websites with all commonly used Internet browsers. Make sure you test all parts of the site, especially if you use different plugins.
  • One of the nicest thing about this site is that I can now basically replicate the platform on Newburyport.com for relatively little expense since I paid for the foundation with Lowell.com’s development. Since Newburyport is about 45 minutes from Lowell and is a tourist locale in the summer, I think these two sites will work well together. The only issue is the time commitment required to run another site like this… I might finally have to relent and hire someone full time to work with me.
  • I ran into some major issues with hosting, the htaccess file, and assorted other related bugs. Ultimately, things worked out after quite a bit of time troubleshooting with Liquid Web and my developer, but it was still a challenge none the less. I think this is probably the biggest hurdle I faced since I am not really knowledgeable about these technical issues.
  • As with most of my other development projects, I used Six One Five Design for the development work. Mike is still working on a few things, but I think it’s nearly finished.

Free Domain Sales Agreement?

Elliot Silver
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I’ve seen a few posts on domain forums where people are asking for a free boiler plate domain sales agreement to use. In my opinion, if you feel you need to use a sales agreement in the first place, you should probably contact a domain attorney or other local IP lawyer and pay for one. It’s likely the cost will be less than you think since most will be able to customize a standard agreement based on your needs.

So why do I think you should have a custom agreement drafted? The primary reason is that different countries and even states have different regulations when it comes to contracts and possibly even the parameters of your sale. In addition, your sale may have special circumstances (using Escrow.com, paying via wire transfer, Paypal payment) or it may have other non-standard issues that need to be considered.

If you use a boiler plate agreement and run into troubles, it would probably be fairly easy for an opposing lawyer to pick that apart, which could cause complications for you. If you have an issue with an agreement that you purchased from a lawyer, you should at least have support from that lawyer to help fend off any dispute.

At least in my opinion, if you are concerned enough about a domain sale that you want to use a sales agreement/contract (I recommend using one unless there’s a good reason not to use one), you should pay the few hundred dollars to have it created for you and specially tailored for your company’s needs. It would be a shame to have a false sense of security to save a couple hundred dollars.

Things to Look for When Finding End User Buyers

Elliot Silver
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I’ve discussed at length methods I’ve used to sell domain names to end users. Sometimes my efforts are successful and pay off, and other times, they do not. Here are a few things I’ve learned which may help you the next time you try and sell a great domain name to an end user buyer:

Many competing companies: In industries where there is a lot of competition, having a good domain name can make a company stand out from its peers. Whether it’s because of the SEO or because the company wants to “own the brand,” there will always be at least one company that wants the category defining domain name, even if the category is somewhat small. As long as there are many competitors, at least one company will want your exact match keyword .com domain name.

Small and large companies within target: I have found that there should be a good mix of small and large companies in a vertical to best sell a non-ultra premium, but category defining, domain name.   It’s difficult to get to the decision maker with a huge corporation, but it’s quicker with smaller companies – especially when it comes to decision making.   Boiled down, it would be tough to sell a soda domain name when you are only pitching Coke, Pepsi, Dr. Pepper…etc rather than an industry with a mix of companies.

Generic domain names are owned by companies: One thing I noticed when I made the successful end user sale I wrote about was that many of these companies didn’t use their brand names in their website urls. They used descriptive terms such as their area + their industry. When I saw that and had an industry keyword, I knew at least one company would want it, and I was right.

Companies selling that product or service: If you have the exact match domain name of a product or service, it’s likely one of the companies would want to buy it. Although a lot of companies aren’t completely knowledgeable about SEO and/or Internet marketing, many will recognize that this particular type of name would have value to them. It’s your job to convince them of this.

High profit margin on product or service: Similar to above, if that product or service is profitable, it’s more likely they will be interested in the domain name. If a company makes $1 profit per customer and they don’t sell many of these products (and it isn’t considered a loss leader) they probably won’t (or can’t afford to) spend a lot of money for the related domain name. If a new customer will net them big bucks, they can and will be able to justify a higher expenditure.

Own the same domain name in another extension: If a company owns the exact same domain name as you, just in a subpar extension (.net, .info maybe .org), it’s likely they would have wanted the .com if they could have bought it. Maybe the .com wasn’t for sale and the company didn’t know how to inquire about it or maybe they couldn’t afford the .com in the aftermarket when they bought the other extension. Whatever the case is, you know they like this term, and will probably want the .com. Just be cautious if the other extension is developed and there is a potential that the term isn’t generic enough. They may use your solicitation email as a sign of bad faith in a UDRP proceeding.

What else do you look for when selling domain names to end users?

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