Here’s a look at some interesting domain news around the web.

When a news story falls through the cracks, we don’t call on Lewis Black. We do it ourselves. Here’s a look at some domain stories from around the web…

Entrepreneur Magazine publishes “Imminent Domaining“. The article includes interviews with Howard Hoffman (ppcincome.com) and Ron Jackson (DNJournal). It’s a good article, but I disagree with its assertion that “While the real-world real estate market has taken a nosedive, the domain name market is hotter than ever.” Hot, but not hotter than ever. I long for 12 months ago.

Domainer’s Gazette writer Peter Askew writes about the (non) use of .mobi by the top 100 web sites on the web. Askew used to own .mobi domains but bailed out several months ago. Here’s the bottom line: of the 38 random sites he checked (mostly counterparts to the top 100 web sites on the web), 47% didn’t resolve at all, 18% were parked, and 29% forwarded to .com. Only one is actually hosting a site on .mobi.

Conceptualist, Sahar Sarid’s blog, has news about new products at Bido. One is PortfolioHelp, a product that helps you get a higher revenue share on domain parking by negotiating en masse with providers. Your portfolio must earn $10,000 or more a month to qualify.

A look back at smart domain name company acquisitions.

There’s been a lot of consolidation in the domain name industry over the past couple years. Here are five acquisitions that have (or will) payoff handsomely for the acquirer.

Thought Convergence acquires Name Intelligence. Thought Convergence runs the TrafficZ domain parking network, LeaseThis.com, and the soon-to-be-launched Aftermarket.com. Name Intelligence runs the popular Domain Tools site, owns a registrar and hosting business, and the Domain Roundtable conference. For Thought Convergence, they instantly added hundreds of thousands of registered users to cross market other products too. They also get access to Domain Tools’ treasure trove of data for business purposes, a contract with Google for whois data sharing, and a well known domain conference. Running a domain conference will probably prove more beneficial than just paying big sponsorship fees.

Marchex acquires Name Development (UltSearch). This famous transaction started consolidation of domain portfolios and gave Marchex (NASDAQ: MCHX) a headstart to building out a massive destination network. It now owns both advertiser relationships and its own traffic. UltSearch came with some trademark headaches, but overall it was a winner.

Name Media acquires Afternic. Name Media bought exchange Afternic for $3.7 million in 2006 (with possible bonuses of up to $1.55 million.) This gave Name Media inroads into the domainer community to cross market its parking services and boost its inventory available to sell to small and mid-sized business.

VeriSign acquires Network Solutions. But wait! Didn’t they take a bath on this and later spin out the registrar business? Yes, but this gave them the lucrative monopoly on managing the .com and .net registries. (Disclaimer: this deal happened way back in 2000).

Demand Media acquires Enom. Why start your own registrar when you can buy the second biggest in the world? Demand Media bought a huge crowd of resellers to push its other products, including .tv domains (for which it has a marketing agreement).

Long time employee leaving, will retain consulting role.

Sedo Chief Strategy Officer Matt Bentley is leaving the company, Sedo announced today. The move is effective the end of this month.

Bentley joined Sedo in 2002 as Director of International Operations. He was one of the first dozen people at the company and was CEO of Sedo.com (the U.S. subsidiary) for two years.

Bentley was a familiar face at domain conferences, and it will be interesting to see if he hangs around the industry. He also served as a liaison to tangential industries, often writing articles about the value of domain names for non-domain industry publications, speaking on panels, and educating companies about the value of generic domain names.

In less than a decade, Sedo has grown to a dominant force in the domain industry and has a virtual lock on the European domain aftermarket. The company has over 11 million domains listed and sold about $75 million USD in domains last year.

No word yet on if Sedo plans to fill the Chief Strategy Officer position.

Photo courtesy DNJournal.

Registrar adds Canadian country code domains to offerings.

The world’s largest registrar now offers .ca domain names through its newly formed Canadian registrar (but purchased directly on GoDaddy.com). .Ca is the country code domain name for Canada. Registration fees are $12.99 per year.

The .ca domain name is one of the more popular country code domain names in terms of adoption by its country. You must be a resident of Canada or meet other presence requirements in order to register a .ca domain.

Last month the .ca registry made changes to whois to automatically make whois information private for individuals. However, GoDaddy still offers whois privacy as an option on .ca domains during check-out. [update: I was offered whois privacy because I had a .com domain in my shopping cart from a previous visit. GoDaddy does not offer whois privacy on .ca domains.]

Other registrars accredited by Canadian Internet Registry Authority to register .ca domains include Tucows, Register.com, DotCa.ca, and a handful of other companies listed on CIRA’s web site. Based on a cursory check, it appears Godaddy’s pricing is aggressive and should inject competition into the .ca name space.

Examples of .ca domain name aftermarket sales (from NameBio.com) include:

Jobs.ca $600,000
CV.ca $54,977
Banks.ca $41,000
Savings.ca $36,050
Cruise.ca $33,363
Interview.ca $30,933

Another strong week for Sedo sales.

Sedo finalized the sale of InsuranceLeads.com last week for $50,000. The leads business is huge, and insurance leads are one of the most popular categories. Leads companies gather leads from search engine marketing (including PPC) and affiliate networks and resell these to insurance agents, repair companies, real estate agents, etc. I think this will be a solid buy for ITSOL, a California-based leads company. An example of a big lead generation site is LendingTree.com.

I have a number of “leads.com” domains, although none are as good as InsuranceLeads.com. Over the past few years I’ve registered 529planleads.com, AirConditioningLeads.com, CarpetCleaningLeads.com, CounselorLeads.com, DWIleads.com, ExterminatorLeads.com, LimosineLeads.com, NutritionistLeads.com, and about a dozen others.

Other notable Sedo sales for the week include:

mutuelle.com 23,600 EUR Mutual in French
rewardsdirect.com 17,500 USD
converttube.com website 16,350 EUR
purecasino.com 13,000 USD
umx.com 10,100 USD
plume.com 10,000 EUR
gujam.com website 10,000 EUR
regtool.com 10,000 USD
onlinesavingsaccount.com 9,988 USD
ljl.com 9,300 USD
usb-sticks.com 7,777 EUR
nevermore.com 7,500 USD
pinz.com 7,000 USD
rlu.com 6,600 EUR
iquotes.com 6,500 EUR
zqx.com 6,100 USD
sonicunion.com 6,000 USD
urbanhomesteading.com 5,700 USD
gameplayer.com 5,600 USD
gmx.ca 20,000 EUR
flirtexpress.de website 13,000 EUR
petrolprices.co.uk 8,600 GBP
snows.co.uk 5,500 GBP
farbtoner.de 5,100 EUR