According to an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, a lawsuit was filed by a company that said it agreed to purchase Sex.com for $11.4M. According to the lawsuit, they paid a $500,000 deposit and then the deal fell through. Apparently the deal was being completed through a broker that allegedly made “repeated untruths regarding the domain name Sex.Com, about other competing offers for the domain name Sex.Com, and various other material and relevant exaggerations and untruths.” The whole thing seems hairy to me, including whether the owner actually agreed to sell. I’m sure more about this will come out in the coming days.

You may recall that Sex.com was a disputed name for many years after a conman bilked Network Solutions into transferring the name to him. The rightful owner of the domain won a $65M settlement against the conman. Last I heard the conman skipped the States and hasn’t paid a dime.

According to DNJournal, Business.us sold for $50,000-$70,000 at GreatDomains. This makes if the biggest .us sale of the year, and perhaps the highest reported sale ever! As you recall, Business.com sold for $7.5M in the highest ever reported domain name sale. (This was, of course, during the dot.com bubble).

Last week also included the big VIP.com sale. I reported earlier that the price tag was $1.4M, but DNJournal dug a little deeper. The deal was actually for $600,000 cash and $800,000 in stock. Still, not too shabby.

Domain brokerage powerhouse Sedo had a stellar week. They sold eBaby.com for $60,000, Join.com for $40,000, SecureConnect.com for $25,000, and a number of other domains for over $10,000. See the full list here. Sedo also sold Vegas.cc for $4,500, a high price for a .cc domain.

In addition to the business.us sale, eShop.us sold for $525. That’s the highest I’ve seen a eName.us sell for in a while. Apparently there’s another good .us sale in the pipeline that will be reported next week.

I know what I’m advocating is controversial. But I have a good reason for the US to retain “control” of the internet.

In today’s Washington Times there’s a story about the US again stating that it intends to keep control of the internet. It wants to fight giving control to the United Nations or another entity:

“We want to make sure the private sector leads and the Internet continues to be a reservoir of great innovation, and that governments continue to focus on enabling the growth of the Internet, and not of controlling its use,” Ambassador David A. Gross told The Washington Times in an interview.

Let’s face it: the internet works right now. Sure, it isn’t perfect, but it has been responsible for a large part of the world’s growth over the past decade. Putting the internet into the hands of a dysfunctional group like the UN would put this in jeopardy. I’m not saying the US government isn’t also dysfunctional, but so far it has managed the internet well.

Beyond the internet “working” now, the bigger issue is what might happen if a country like China has a say in how the internet is operated. The Washington Times article quotes an ambassador from China, Sha Zukang, saying “This situation is very undemocratic, unfair and unreasonable.” Um, OK. Just this week China announced that it was issuing new rules for what news its citizens can read online. In other words, anything critical of the Chinese government or its beliefs will be censored.

We’ll all be in trouble if backward-looking governments like China get more say in how the internet is run.

Communicate.com (OTCBB: CMNN.ob) said on its blog that the next high profile domain it will develop is Body.com. A number of Communicate.com’s high profile domains are still parking pages like you see at Body.com right now. As they are developed the revenue from the domains goes nowhere but up.

I’ve been promising a review of Adam Dicker’s Parkingsite.com parking service for quite some time. After initial excitement my revenue dropped, and so did my satisfaction. But I decided to give the service a chance before writing my initial review.

Let’s start with the good stuff. Parkingsite.com offers the most attractive templates of any parking service to date. You can choose header graphics from a number of categories, and each category has many different header themes to select. The landing pages offer direct ad links as well as other related terms. Clicking on the related terms opens a new page with direct ad links. The service also lets you add a “for sale” sign to your site to receive offers on domains. ParkingSite uses Google ads.

Now, for the not-so-good stuff. All domains have to be approved before going live. This isn’t a big deal because it usually takes just a couple hours. Keyword optimization is still an issue. At first you could submit a keyword along with your domain, and these keywords would be optimized within a week. But it appears the keyword suggestions were ignored, and you had to go to DNForum and make a post to request keyword optimization. That’s a lot of work to get optimized. Also, stats are sometimes not updated for a few days. I understand that some of the delay is due to Google, but my favorite parking service TrafficClub has managed to consistently offer Google stats the next day. ParkingSite doesn’t tell you how many clicks you received, which isn’t a big deal since what really matters is your revenue per thousand impressions (RPM). It seems that ParkingSite’s impression stats are non-unique, so they will report more impressions than some other services (which deflates RPMs).

OK, so what really matters is the payout. I consistently get about $23 RPM on TrafficClub. I’m not getting close to that on Parkingsite.com, with my RPM well below $10. Take a few examples. (Note that I purposely moved my lower RPM domains to ParkingSite to see if I could do better).

StlNews.com: My RPM at Sedo was $10.25. My RPM at ParkingSite as measured by ParkingSite’s impressions is $6.14. However, if I use the same number of impressions that Sedo reported in an average month, ParkingSite’s RPM was $15.28, so ParkingSite wins.

BoyGeorgeDJ: My RPM at TrafficClub was $9.68. At ParkingSite using the same monthly impressions as TrafficClub the RPM was just $1.70

BaseballCardShows.com: My RPM at Sedo was $23.54. ParkingSite using the same number of impressions was $7.50.

So far about 75% of my domains have performed worse at ParkingSite than TrafficClub and Sedo. To be fair, all of these domains have fairly low traffic, which can sometimes skew results, and I only moved about 10 domains to ParkingSite.

There’s also an issue about how much ParkingSite pays out. In an early post after ParkingSite.com came out of beta Adam Dicker said that they were paying out 95% of what they received. This is an extraordinarily high number and got me really excited. But a couple weeks ago ParkingSite started an affiliate program offering 10% of whatever your referrals earn. Now do the math on this. If you refer someone who makes $95.00, ParkingSite would payout a total of $104.50. According to the 95% payout rule, that would mean ParkingSite is losing $4.50. That can’t be the case. I posted a question about this and an admin came back with an incomplete answer. After asking for a clarification, I haven’t heard back. Just today someone posted a followup on the DNForum thread, saying they want to try out ParkingSite but are waiting for this critical question to be answered.

The bottom line: Parkingsite.com has great potential and is setting the bar for parking templates. RPMs seem low. Try out a few domains to compare it to other services, and move underperforming domains from other services to ParkingSite to give it a shot.

I hope Parkingsite.com improves, and I will update my review over time.

Links relevant to this article:
Parkingsite.com
-TrafficClub
-Sedo
-DNForum