Data mining could identify problem registrars before it’s too late.
It’s always a headache when an ICANN-accredited domain name registrar loses its accreditation. But often times that’s just the beginning, as customers of Parava Networks learned last year.
Parava was allegedly bilking its customers by accepting payments for multi-year renewals, and then only renewing the domain names a year at a time.
This becomes fairly evident when you look at VeriSign’s monthly registrar reports. Without doing a statistical analysis, you’ll still see that Parava has an higher percentage of one year renewals vs. longer term renewals when compared to other registrars.
In order to prevent the next Parava, RegisterFly, etc., ICANN should mine these reports for anomalies. Of course, you need to take into consideration some registrars that are owned by domain investors. They’re likely to renew a year at a time.
But retail registrars should have a fairly consistent percentage across all type of registrations. If not, ICANN should flag the registrars and see if it can understand why. Is it because the registrar doesn’t promote multi-year renewals, or doesn’t offer a price break?
Either way, I’d love to see a statistician analyze this information for any red flags. It would save a lot of heartache in the future.
Companies claim Sex.com owner in debt over $10 million.
Three creditors filed an involuntary bankruptcy petition against Sex.com owner Escom, LLC today in U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Central District of California.
The petition, obtained by Domain Name Wire (pdf), lists three creditors, all of which appear to have investor and BuyDomains founder Mike Mann as the chairman. All three entities have the same address in Potamac, Maryland:
Washington Technology Associates, claiming $6,607,803.66
iEntertainment, Inc. claiming $3,476,515.02
AccountingMatters.com, LLC $7,800.00
The total claims are $10,092,118.68
This should mean that Thursday’s planned auction of Sex.com will be postponed.
In earlier comments to Domain Name Wire, Mann said “I am merely an investor who got completely railroaded by other investors with big guns, bad practices, and bad attitudes.”
Mann had said he was going to take legal action to prevent the auction, but this was certainly last minute.
As the case moves forward, more details about what went wrong will likely become public.
Measured by the largest number of domains registered in the first month of public door opening at a domain registry, the closest retail competitor was US based Go-Daddy, some 36% behind Domainmonster.com.
It may come as a surprise that a relatively unknown domain name registrar topped Go Daddy by such a large margin. I think we should run this one through analysis like those political fact-checking sites.
There have basically been two gTLD launches in the past two years: .asia and .tel. The first gotcha is that Go Daddy doesn’t offer .tel domain names, so that gives DomainMonster a leg up to begin with. The second is that the data is limited to just one month after the launch of the new domains.
I can’t get my numbers to match up with the company’s 36% lead over Go Daddy, but looking into the numbers shows that the stat is misleading.
First for .Tel. As I said, Go Daddy doesn’t offer .tel, so it’s number is 0. I’m not sure which month DomainMonster used for its .tel data. But in April 2009, which I believe is the first month after general availability of .tel, its parent company Mesh Digital registered 3,675 .tel domain names. In March they registered 10,938. (I’m assuming the company only has one accredited registrar.)
For the other gTLD launch, .asia, Go Daddy outsold DomainMonster 2 or 3x each month around the launch. In April 2008, Go Daddy sold 10,728 .asia domain names through GoDaddy.com and its reseller program, compared to 4,051 for DomainMonster. March and May numbers have a similar ratio between the two companies.
If you look at how many .asia domains the companies sold during the first calendar year, Go Daddy outsold Domain Monster 3-to-1.
So from a fact-check standpoint, the press release lands somewhere in the middle: technically true, but misleading.
That’s not to say DomainMonster.com is a bad company. On the contrary, they have done a great job teaming up with registries as they launch new TLDs. You may have seen their booth at one of the many domain conferences.
But if you want to know which company will sell more of a new TLD head-to-head, put your money on those guys in Scottsdale.
I’ve never understood the lure of a brand owning .brand. Yesterday Canon announced that it will launch .canon when new top level domain names are allowed. Why? I’d really like to understand everyone’s opinion on this, but let me first clear the air of common claims I hear.
If I own my .brand, I don’t need to register all of my products/services in .com. So if you’re Verizon, you won’t care anymore if someone owns VerizonFios.com, VerizonDSL.com, etc? That’s the logic a number of people espouse.
If top level domain names were freely registrable when domains first became popular, I could buy that argument. But instead we are programed to navigate based primarily on the second level domain name. Could this change? Yes, over the very long term. It will take more than just a few large brands promoting their .brand. Many years and many, many brands. Eventually the cost of registering a TLD will have to go down significantly in order for it to work. So why get your TLD now if you can wait until the typical web user catches up?
Until the typical web user understands it, .brand owners will need to alias all of their URLs to .com. If Canon runs a TV ad that says “go to www.canon”, how many people do you think will actually type in www.canon.com? For now, most people will. Eventually that will change. But lets say in 10 years 80% of people know to not type in .com at the end. It’s still a poor user experience for the 20% who still type in .com.
Aliasing/forwarding every second level domain to the top — such as usa.canon to usa.canon.com — will be a major yet necessary undertaking.
Owning .brand will eliminate phishing. Hmm. Most phishing I see is done at domain names completely unrelated to the brand’s name. So unless everyone who gets duped from those scams suddenly wakes up, I don’t see this helping phishing.
I want to stop promoting VeriSign’s brand. Getting past the fact that VeriSign doesn’t own the .com brand, I don’t think web users think of .com as a brand. They look at it like the @ sign in an email address. It’s just what goes at the end of a web address. When I see Nike.com, I think Nike, not .com.
And I have to ask, if this is such a concern then why do we see so many ads for “visit us on Facebook at Facebook.com/brand?”
It’s easier than .com. One of Canon’s reasons for launching .canon is:
“Canon hopes to globally integrate open communication policies that are intuitive and easier to remember compared with existing domain names such as “canon.com.”
Sounds like Canon’s domain name consultants wrote that. I guess this means remembering to put .com is difficult to remember, because I don’t see another reason it would be easier to remember or more intuitive. Granted, Canon is an international brand and perhaps uses a number of country code top level domains. But if people are used to using those ccTLDs, it will be similar to the transition from .com to .brand — a long and winding road.
I’m also confused and have a genuine question on how the lack of a second level domain would work. Can you tell people to go to .canon? Can you have email addresses name@.canon? I suspect you’d need it to be name@usa.canon or some other second level since wildcarding is (likely) not permitted, and most software expects a second level domain. Again, expect to alias all of those email addresses to canon.com.
Incidentally, Canon ads today can say “go to Canon.com”. In the future they’ll need to say “go to www.canon” so that people understand it’s a URL. That actually takes longer to say than Canon.com.
I need to register .brand before someone else does. There are a lot of protections in the applicant guidebook to protect against this. No one other than Verizon is going to be able to get .verizon. If you have a generic name, such as .apple, or perhaps even .att, you might consider it. But many brands don’t fall into this category.
I can do something with my own TLD that I can’t do with .com. Please give an example. Really, I want to see some innovative way a brand owner could do something with .brand they can’t do with brand.com. I just haven’t heard of anything yet.
Look, I have nothing against a brand spending $500,000 to create .brand. The more, the merrier. I just don’t understand why anyone would do it during this coming round of new TLDs. If the idea ever takes off, it will be in future rounds when thousands of companies (everyone?) registers top level domain names at much lower prices.
That said, I predict a lot of brands will jump on the bandwagon. The cost is small potatoes in case they ever decide to use the TLD.
iPad-friendly sites are a reminder of mobile-friendly web sites.
In January I wrote about how the iPad could be bad for domainers because it will change the way some people navigate the web. Today news of a different sort regarding the iPad and web sites has surfaced: NPR and The Wall Street Journal will show different versions of their web sites to iPad users.
At issue here is the iPad’s lack of support for flash, which both NPR and WSJ apparently use heavily on their sites.
When mobile web browsing picked up, the web split in two as sites were made for mobile or desktop browsing. Hence the idea of .mobi, a top level domain name that would only contain web content optimized for small screens. Web enthusiasts screamed that the idea fragments the web, and instead the focus should be on creating web sites that work well on both small and large screens.
Many years later its apparent that .mobi wasn’t needed because of device and browser recognition. If I visit an optimized site with my phone, it will serve up a mobile version of the site. I don’t need .mobi.
That’s the approach NPR and WSJ are taking. Do we need a .ipad domain? Of course not. Web sites can just serve a different page to someone visiting from an iPad.
It’s still not ideal — web designers shouldn’t need to optimize for several devices. And ‘app’ on the iPad will be like creating new web site for a different platform. Yet the hindsight of what happened with .mobi and the mobile web helps us see the path forward.
