The Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse (CADNA) released its first news release today, which also identifies members.

CADNA, a non-profit whose web site sparked interest a few months ago with its vague language, mission, and lack of disclosure about its backers, has released its first press release and identified its founding members.

According to the release:

The Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse (CADNA) is announcing the launch of its national campaign against Internet fraud. A non-profit organization based in Washington D.C., CADNA is leading the way in confronting cybersquatting — the fraudulent abuse of domain name registration that threatens the future viability of Internet commerce.

The group’s membership includes multinationals like AIG, Dell, Verizon (which has sued iREIT over cybersquatting), Wyndham, Eli Lilly, Marriot, and Yahoo!.

CADNA makes a number of assertions in its release. First, it says there are over 1 million kited domains re-registered daily, bringing in $100M-$125M annually to “criminals and profiteers”. Second, it says cybersquatting is costing brand owners $1B every year as a result of diverted sales, loss of “hard earned trust”, and increased enforcement expenses.

In the release, CADNA uses the terms “profiteers”, “cybersquatters”, “assualt”, “counterfeit”, “phising”, “fraud”, and “spyware”. Clearly, very few domain name owners participate in the negative side of the business. The danger is having all domainers shoved into one bucket.

Although few disagree that domain kiting and typosquatting/cybersquatting are problems, many of these large brands would like the pendulum to swing completely to their side, which would unfairly target legitimate domain name owners. With the resources these companies have to throw at this issue, the domain name community needs to rally together to combat unfair actions that large brand holders frequently bring upon domain name owners (such as reverse domain name hijacking.) If CADNA gets Congress’ ear (and shoves money in its pocket), you never know what types of laws they’ll pass.

One way for the domain community to come together and combat any overreaching by CADNA is to support its proposition to end kiting. Very few domain owners participate in this activity, and cracking down will help legitimize the industry and give organizations like CADNA one less issue to bring to the press’ attention.

Domain parking companies tuning up services in time for fall traffic increase.

It’s the doldrums of summer and that historically means a drop in internet traffic and domain parking revenue. My revenue is holding strong this summer, in part because the parking companies are doing a good job adding new features and optimization techniques in time for the fall. Here’s an update on the parking services I use:

Parked – Parked continues to impress. I’ll publish an interview with Parked.com’s Donny Simonton in the next couple weeks. Right now I’m earning about a $95 RPM with the service, and the landing pages continue to impress. Furthermore, Parked lets users participate in arbitrage by buying relevant ads at Google and Yahoo! to send traffic to parking pages.

DomainSponsor – DomainSponsor is updating some of its landers with new and better designs. The parking company switched to a new payment platform this past month, which caused some (non financial) errors with its payments, but the company says these problems have been fixed. I’m currently running a $369.40 RPM, but most of that is from one high traffic domain that pulls in a $538.59 RPM.

TrafficClub – Long time readers of Domain Name Wire recall that I used to provide monthly updates with my stats from TrafficClub. TrafficClub is an aggregator from Moniker that auto-optimizes your domains across many parking providers. But this February TrafficClub lost its DomainSponsor and Google Adsense for Domains relationships, so now all traffic is monetized through Skenzo. Skenzo is performing nicely; I’m earning a $59.84 RPM.

I ran into the Skenzo team at TRAFFIC last month, and complained that all of my domains on TrafficClub had the same Skenzo landing page. The Skenzo reps assured me that all domains were auto-optimized across various landers. I found it strange that one lander worked best for 99% of my domains. Over the past few weeks I’ve noticed a change to different landing page designs for my TrafficClub domains. Also, rumor has it that TrafficClub will announce new parking company partners soon. Parked.com might be among those.

Sedo – I moved about 50 geo domains to Sedo a few weeks ago. Within a week they started getting picked up by Google. One domain is ranked fourth for the terms in the domain, which is delivering a trickle of traffic. The SedoPro program continues to deliver solid click prices. Now if only they hired a user interface expert to make navigating its parking dashboard easier…

Dotzup – Dotzup is a smaller and “family-friendly” parking service. No adult names, gambling, and trademark typos are accepted. I’m running a $35.86 RPM, but many of my domains are earning solid RPMs.

NameDrive – NameDrive continues to innovate beyond domain name parking. You can now list domaisn for sale on the service. It has also opened up “Park & Sell” to all buyers. (For more on changes to Park & Sell, please read this article).

Company that owns Autos.com and Loan.com files for IPO.

Internet Brands, Inc. has filed for a $100M initial public offering, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The company started its life as CarsDirect, but then switched to the generic “Internet Brands” name when it diversified. Internet Brands focuses on big ticket purchases including autos, homes and home improvement, and travel.

Although far more than just a domain name company, Internet Brands has parlayed good domain names into successful businesses. Interestingly, their form S-1 filing doesn’t mention direct navigation as one of its marketing approaches:

More than 95% of our Internet audience during the twelve months ended June 30, 2007 was generated through non-paid sources, such as repeat visitation, word-of-mouth, natural search, and public relations.

With names like Autos.com and Loan.com, natural type-in traffic is certainly one of its strengths.

Internet Brands doesn’t always follow the “buy good domain, build web site” approach. It frequently acquires existing web sites in its three core verticals and makes them more efficient by bringing them on to a common platform and cross marketing the properties.

The company currently carries intangible assets of domain names on the books at close to $10M.

Interestingly, some might say Internet Brands has a cybersquatting problem. It runs the web sites AudiWorld.com, Ford-Trucks.com, and CorvetteForum.com. If it owned these domain names and put parking pages on them they would receive cease & desist letters. However, the sites contain good content and reinforce customer loyalty for the trademark holders. Internet Brands does not have licenses to these trademarks, although one trademark holder offered to provide a free license to one trademark it uses.

Internet Brands had 2006 revenues of $85M.

Bidding for top names is fierce; few reserves met

Sedo’s first live domain auction at GreatDomains is under way and is off to a great start. Among the domains grabbing attention are Gibralter.com at $75,000, StockQuotes.com at $150,000, and Whisky.com at $125,000 (owned by the Castello brothers).

Only two domains — Territory.com ($4,101) and Tai.com ($21,500) — have met their reserves as of Friday morning.

Due to publicity from one of the sellers, the reserves on 15 domains are known:

Debit.com – $100k
Sweatpants.com – $25k
Spinalcord.com – $15k
CIS.com – $50k
LicensePlates.com – $25k
ReportCards.com – $25k
Discus.com – $15k
Measurements.com – $20k
USCitizen.com – $30k
Tai.com – $20k
Yoyos.com – $20k
Kristina.com – $15k
ComputerClass.com – $25k
HouseLenders.com – $20k
MedicalRecord.com – $50k

As the auction gets under way, it’s becoming more clear that Sedo purchased GreatDomains for, well, its great domain. Bidding for the domains in this auction actually takes place at Sedo. Many owners of generic domains that haven’t been active in the domain industry since earlier this decade think of GreatDomains.com when it comes to domain sales.

The current auction runs through July 26. A complete inventory can be found at GreatDomains.com.

Sale is highest ever reported for .info domain.

Domain aftermarket Sedo has brokered the sale of Travel.info for $116,000, the highest amount ever reported for a .info domain name sale. The buyer of the domain is using Moniker’s whois privacy service. A notice on the web page states that it is being redesigned.

The domain hopped around between a couple sellers over the past few months, but the owner who made the record breaking sale is Jian Wang of East Star Corp. Ltd.

Other notable .info sales in the past two years include:
- Credit.info – reported at $36,000, although the domain is currently in Sedo’s hands
- Casino.info – $35,127, currently an online casino portal
- Christian.info – $35,000, a Christian site owned by Adam Woeger
- CreditCard.info – $25,500, a credit card portal

.Info made a splash when it was one of two “new” TLDs several years ago, debuting about the same time as .biz. Compared to .biz, .info is been very successful. However, .info is also a favorite domain of spammers and other blackhats because the domains are frequently offered at discounts by registrars. This may affect the search engine rank of .info domains.

Sedo represents a number of other .info domain names that may make headlines when they sell, such as Laptops.info, Fat.info, NewYork.info (New-York.info sold for $22,864 last year), and Apartment.info.