I sold 3 of my 11 Featured Listings on Afternic. Wait a minute…just 1?

A month ago I listed 11 of my domain names in the Featured Listings section of Afternic. These domains get great exposure because they rotate through the home page and show up in bold in all category and search results (each of my Featured Listings received 200+ visits). Within a couple weeks I received offers high enough to meet the reserve price on three of the domains. I was pumped.

But then excitement turned to dissapointment. Of the three domains I sold, two of the bidders turned out to be deadbeats. The only sale that went through was Decay.com for $2,900. The first domain I “sold”, YouSubmit.com, attracted many bids and ended at $180, but the bidder never paid. This was a slap in the face for a couple reasons. First, this is the same domain I had a deadbeat on a year ago. Second, with so many bidders I wasn’t able to offer the domain to the second highest bidder. The second highest bidder isn’t even aware this domain is now available again. The other domain that sold was eDropShippers.com which received a bid for $950. The bidder is nowhere to be found.

I hope that my experience with deadbeats was just a fluke. There’s not much Afternic can do about this, short of requiring buyers to prepay. But this is almost impossible because most transactions aren’t done via credit card.

Despite my misfortune with deadbeat bidders, I still think Afternic’s Featured Listings can be worth the money. I was able to sell a four figure domain that hadn’t received any offers prior to my upgraded listing. Furthermore, another one of my domains received a four figure offer, although not enough to trigger the reserve. Additionally, I had much more success getting offers and selling with Afternic’s Featured Listings compared to Sedo’s upgrade options.

Bottom line: you can sell your domains quickly if you place a compelling price on your domains and make them stand out in front of the right audience.

Domain name development company sold name, gets it back.

Communicate.com (OTC: CMNN.ob) is known for owning some of the world’s best domain names, including Perfume.com, Body.com, Cricket.com, and Brazil.com. A while back they sold several of their premium domains including Makeup.com, Automobile.com, Exercise.com, and Call.com. Part of the agreement called for the buyer to pay modest royalties on all future earnings from the domains.

Communicate.com announced today that it has “reacquired” call.com in return for eliminating future royalties on the other three domains. The company will release a 10-QSB in August that will have more details about this acquisition. Hopefully it will discuss the estimated future royalties on the other domains so that we can assign a value to the Call.com acquisition.

The company is known for developing premium domains into real web sites, including Importers.com. It also develops a number of inventory-free, dropship e-commerce sites like Perfume.com.

Associated Cities has an interview with Larry Milton, who bought Branson.com for $1.6M.

You would think that million dollar sales of city domain names would be for huge cities like Houston, L.A., New York, and Chicago. That’s why the domain industry was shocked about the $1.6M sale of Branson.com, a town of just 6,500 permanent residents. Of course that’s not the entire story. Branson is a major tourist destination with 7M visitors annually.

Milton is a commercial real estate broker. He owns about 200 domain names, many of them related to Branson.

Milton had a good answer to Associated Cities’ question about the strengths and weaknesses of the GeoDomain subindustry:

Our industry is in very interesting times. One of our strengths individually are the “natural” visits we currently receive to our city dot-com sites from direct type-in traffic.

Collectively, we can and will be the source for city dot-com sites and offer value to national advertisers at many levels. We must continue to rally behind this effort while the opportunity exists. Our weakness is the “individualistic” thinking of some GeoDomain sites that have not yet joined forces with the 100 current Associated Cities members.

You can read the interview here.

eNom has completed its purchase of BulkRegistrar, making it the world’s second largest registrar.

eNom’s acquisition of BulkRegistrar comes after eNom itself was purchased by Demand Media earlier this year. Demand Media is a recently formed domain acquisition company headed by a former MySpace founder. It competes with the like of iREIT, Internet Real Estate Group, and BuyDomains.

After the acquisition eNom has 6.8M domains under management. The acquisition gives eNom access to a number of corproate clients that use BulkRegistrar’s portfolio management tools. BulkRegistrar has an exclusive expiring domain contract with Snapnames…it will be interested to see if eNom tries to cancel this contract so it can offer the domains through its own ClubDrop. Contracts frequently have cancellation provisions in the event of an acquisition.

Now, if eNom can just shake these allegations of aiding a terrorist organization

I’ve seen some crazy articles about domain names, but this one tops the list.

The New York-based Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has written a letter to US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson asking him to take action against domain registrar eNom. The reason? Terrorist organization Hezbollah’s TV station, Al-Manar TV, registered its domain name at eNom. The ADL claims that by allowing Al-Manar to register a domain and by allowing it to “quickly move its site from one host computer to another”, eNom is aiding a terrorist organization. In other words, letting one of its customers change the DNS server on a domain repeatedly is apparently aiding a terrorist organization.

I wonder if ADL even thought to contact eNom before writing this letter to see if eNom was aware it had allowed Al-Manar to register the domain. Even if eNom was aware, it would place eNom between a rock and a hard place. Registrars can’t play censor to what customers register and certainly can’t censor the content of web sites not hosted on their servers. Besides, with 5 million domains registered, eNom probably had no idea about the domain.

The article about the issue on SeattlePI.com doesn’t do justice for Enom, making it sound to the lay reader as if Enom physically took action to register the domain and help the terrorist organization move the name servers. A few choice lines:

“ENom Inc. in June 2000 registered the Web-site address www.manartv.com for Al-Manar TV of Lebanon, an arm of Hezbollah, said the New York-based Anti-Defamation League.”

“Lately, as the site’s registrar, eNom has allowed Al-Manar to quickly move its site from one host computer to another, the ADL said.”

“ENom, which was bought in late April by Demand Media Inc. of Los Angeles but still operates under its own name, has renewed Al-Manar’s registration of its domain name every year since 2000, Marcus said.”

Is it just me, or do these statements make it seem like eNom is physically taking action on behalf of Al-Manar? By saying “Enom…has reneweed Al-Manar’s registration” it sounds like eNom has been a friend and renewed the domain on Al-Manar’s behalf.