Zimbabwe.com sells for a fraction of what it sold for in 2007.

We always hear stories about people who bought domains and flipped them for many times their purchase price. But the opposite also happens.

Take the case of Zimbabwe.com, which just sold for $42,500 at Sedo.

The last time this domain (reported) sold was in 2007. Purchase price: $130,000.

It’s possible the domain also changed hands in 2008. Regardless of if it has changed hands since 2007, the domain took a total haircut of $87,500 during that period.

Not pretty.

There’s not a whole lot you can do with Zimbabwe.com from a commerce perspective other than offer elephant hunting trips.

Ideally a buyer would use the domain to help shed more light on Robert Mugabe’s atrocities.

Tags: domain auctions, sedo, zimbabwe.com

Registering a domain name might become a lot more time intensive in the future.

Negotiations between ICANN and registrars to amend the registrar accreditation agreement are ongoing, and law enforcement agencies are asking for some pretty big changes to how domains are registered today.

Law enforcement proposals relate to verifying whois information and tracking more information about registrants. Law enforcement agencies that have been involved in consultations include:

Australian Federal Police
Department of Justice (US)
Federal Bureau of Investigation (US)
New Zealand Police
Royal Canadian Mounted Police
Serious Organised Crime Agency (UK)

The latest recommendations from law enforcement agencies are:

* In order to register a domain name you’ll need to phone and email verify. First you’ll receive an email with a link to a verification page. When you go to the page you’ll enter more information including verifying your phone number. You will then get an SMS code or voice message to your phone with a PIN, which you will then need to enter at the registrar’s web site before your domain is added to the zone.

* Law enforcement wants your IP address recorded at time of registration/verification.

* For annual whois updates, registrants will have to take action by completing some sort of verification. If you don’t verify/confirm your details, your domain might be suspended. This verification step will also record the registrant’s IP address.

* An alternative suggestion from law enforcement agencies is for ICANN to run a central verification system.

The silly thing about all of this is it won’t stop a criminal from doing what he or she does today. Sidestepping these systems is very easy. Just ask anyone who has created a phone verification system how many bogus requests they get from Google Voice phone numbers.

Adding these verification steps will certainly increase the cost of domain registrations and lead to massive cart abandonment at domain registrars.

Of course, this is merely a wish list from law enforcement. We’ll see what happens. You can follow the RAA negotiations here.

Tags: icann

Meyerson lands at eNom.

Once people discover the domain industry and all it has to offer, it’s hard to move to any other industry.

The latest move comes courtesy of Bari Meyerson. Meyerson left her long-time post at Moniker as it was being sold to Key Drive. Today eNom announced that it has hired Meyerson to work with domainers.

Here are some other people who have recently (some more recently than others) changed jobs within the industry:

Jim Grace – from DomainSponsor to Domain Holdings

Frank Aiello – from Sedo to Domain Holdings

Peter Dengate Thrush – from ICANN’s board to Top Level Domain Holdings (sure, we’ll call the board position a job)

Kamila Sekiewicz – from Sedo to NameDrive

Tessa Holcomb – from Sedo to PPX

Jeff Gabriel – from Sedo to PPX

Lisa Box – from iREIT to Oversee.net (now Moniker:SnapNames)

Who else have I missed?

Tags: bari meyerson

A great way to boost your social presence, but light on analytics.

I have a confession to make: I’ve been buying Twitter followers. 87 of them to date.

It all started when I saw a promotional tweet from American Express offering $100 in Twitter advertising credits to small business owners that wanted to try out Twitter’s new self-serve tool. Never one to turn down free advertising, I followed Amex and responded to the offer.

Twitter’s self serve advertising tool offers two ways to boost your social presence: Promoted Accounts (pay-per-follower) and Promoted Tweets (pay-per-click).

With Promoted Accounts, Twitter features your account under the “Who to Follow” section. You pay each time someone follows you, but only if they follow you because you showed up as a Promoted Account.

Here’s how Twitter support described it to me:

You are only charged when someone clicks the Follow button from the Ad itself. Your Promoted Account will appear in the ‘Who to Follow’ section, and if someone follows you from this location, you will be charged.

If a user finds you by other means, or if your account is displayed in ‘Who to Follow’, but not as an Ad, you won’t be charged for Follows.

I guess the big question is if Twitter highlights you as a promoted account in “Who to Follow” when your account would have shown up anyway. That would mean you’re paying for followers you could have gotten anyway.

Stats are quite limited, too. You can’t see which followers were paid versus free. You can’t change the date range of your stats, either. Basically, this is what you get:

At a minimum of 50 cents per follower, Promoted Accounts makes sense for some types of Twitter users. Frankly, it would even be worth it to me if it attracted good followers. But I don’t know who I’m paying for and who is following me organically, so it’s hard to evaluate the results.

The other advertising option is the Promoted Tweet. You’ve undoubtedly seen promoted tweets in your twitter stream from time to time.

These are pay-per-click. But here’s the rub: advertisers don’t get to pick which of their tweets get promoted. Instead, Twitter picks “5 of your most engaging, recent Tweets”. You have the option to block tweets from the list, but this requires quite a bit of management.

It’s not a problem for companies trying to promote their products if they don’t also tweet about other things. In my case, I frequently tweet links to other interesting domain articles. I don’t want to pay 50 cents per click to send traffic to these other sites.

I think Twitter advertising will be a gold mine for certain companies. I’ll continue to play around with it as well, but until Twitter offers more analytics it will be difficult to determine an ROI.

In the mean time, feel free to follow me (for free) @DomainNameWire

Tags: promoted accounts, promoted tweets, twitter advertising

IPC questions ICANN’s ability to execute digital archery.

Digital archery is doomed.

The clever way ICANN plans to “batch” applications for new top level domains will either be killed, or it will be subject to accusations and lawsuits.

Shortly after the bug in ICANN’s new TLD application system was revealed I wrote about how this was going to cast a shadow of doubt on digital archery.

Then, as the number of applications slowly trickled out and delays mounted, I mentioned it again.

Now ICANN’s Intellectual Property Constituency (IPC) is sharing the same concern:

The “digital archery” batching method announced by the ICANN Board on March 28 is complex, untried, and readily subject to gaming. The paralysis of ICANN’s new gTLD application system (TAS), resulting from a so-called “glitch” that ICANN failed to detect in testing the TAS, has now persisted for nearly a month, with no defined end in sight. This episode inescapably casts doubt on ICANN’s capacity to implement another technically complex system for batching evaluation of applications. Another such “glitch” in the earliest stages of the most ambitious and far-reaching project ICANN has ever undertaken would permanently damage the organization’s credibility, and likely call into question its continued viability as the steward of the domain name system.

Now, I understand that the IPC comes up with a lot of stuff to complain about. But it’s right in this case.

If ICANN goes forward with digital archery, applicants who end up in later batches will rightfully distrust the system after what happened with TAS.

The only way to make digital archery work is to have someone like PWC manage it. It simply cannot be done in house at ICANN.

My recommendation: find a creative economic way to persuade some applicants to wait for a later batch. With over 2,000 applications and $350 million in the bank, there’s plenty of money in the war chest.