Furniture company tries its luck at UDRP but loses.

I’ve seen it happen many times: a company starts filing UDRP arbitrations for a number of obvious trademarks. After winning a handful, it gets bold and goes after a generic domain.

That’s exactly what happened with Ashley Furniture Industries, Inc. The company has won over a dozen UDRP cases over the past year for domains such as AshleyFurnitureStore.com, AshleyBeds.com, and FurnitureAshley.com. So it set its sights on a bigger prize: the valuable generic domain name Ashley.com.

The domain was registered in 1995 by Hardy Koester for his associated Ashley Computer Systems Inc. company. He later changed the company name to Ashley Consulting Group.

The arbitration panel found that Koester had legitimate interest in the domain name and didn’t register it in bad faith. It shouldn’t have taken an arbitration panel to figure that out.

Ashley Furniture made a number of allegations, including that the domain had a parking page that included links to Ashley Furniture competitors. Ashley was correct; for a period of time there was a parking page with links to furniture companies. But it didn’t bother to include a printout of a parking page as proof. That’s probably because those links haven’t been on the site for a while. Koester currently uses the domain name for e-mail rather than a web site, and the web site resolves to a generic parking page.

Ashley Furniture’s lawyer Terrence J. Madden, of Kostner, Koslo & Brovold LLC, even tripped up on one of his assertions, “on information and belief Respondent is not known by the domain name, ashley.com, but by the name “Ashley Consulting Group”. The panel pointed out that, while meant as an argument for the complainant, this is actually an argument on behalf of the respondent:

Clearly, Respondent’s name, “Ashley Consulting Group,” gives more than a hint that Respondent might very well be known as “Ashley,” especially since the other two words in the name, “Consulting Group” are elements which are not as distinguishing as the first.

The panel didn’t find Ashley Furniture guilty of reverse domain name hijacking. The panel said that it had to be clear that the “complaint brought in an attempt at Reverse Domain Name Hijacking or primarily to harass the domain-name holder”. Apparently, since the respondent merely claimed that Ashley Furniture was negligent in its due diligence and didn’t claim intent, that wasn’t enough to find the company guilty.

Traffic to cedar allergy domains spikes from December to February.

A nice Austin view, if it weren’t
for the cedar trees.

Most domain names get relatively even traffic throughout the year. Some are more seasonal in nature, such as holiday domains (some even spike for just one day). Last year I wrote about another type of seasonal domain name, those related to seasonal allergies.

It’s cedar allergy time in Austin. Locals call it “Cedar Fever”, and it afflicts a large chunk of the population, including the Governor. The culprit is the cedar tree (technically juniper). From December to February, male cedar trees disperse their lovely pollen into the air.

Cedar pollen is particularly bad in Austin right now because there hasn’t been any rain to wash it away. A tree pollen count of 90 or higher is considered “high”. A count of 1,500 or more is considered “very high”. On Sunday the count was over 18,000! Yesterday it settled down to a more bearable 6,810. As much as I feel sorry for the person who has to count all of those pollen spores, I feel worse for the hundreds of thousands of people who suffer from the allergies (including me).

After my article last year, the owner of CedarFever.com launched a forum on his web site. It’s difficult to get a forum going when people only think about your subject matter for a couple months a year. CedarAllergies.com is still parked at Parked.com. Neither of these sites have significant traffic, but one web site sees a measurable increase in traffic this time of year: PeopleAgainstCedars.com. A quick look at their Compete.com stats shows a big uptick in traffic during cedar season.

It may be difficult to capitalize on seasonal domains, but they can get enough traffic in a couple months to make them worth your while.

360.org domain was purchased for only $2,000 a year ago.

Sedo has completed the sale of 360.org for $25,500. The seller is likely to be familiar to people on DNForum, as active member “Acro” (Theo Develegas) flipped this domain for about a dozen times what he paid for it.

On his blog Acro.net, he details the negotiation process and how he’s thankful he didn’t sell the domain earlier. He listed the domain with a $6,000 reserve at a TRAFFIC auction, but the domain didn’t sell. Then he turned down a $10,000 offer:

Right before Christmas, the second inquiry started with a low offer of $2,000 via Sedo and ended at $10,000 with the bidder withdrawing their bid when I asked for more. Now, I am not one who shuns ten grand easily, as it represents a considerable amount of money; after the bidder canceled their round of offers I had that clutching feeling in my stomach thinking, “Did I just throw $10,000 in the garbage?”

By working with Sedo, he was able to get the buyer to place another bid. After a bit of negotiation they settled on the $25,500 number. The domain is still in Sedo’s hands so the buyer’s name isn’t in the whois database yet.

Here are Sedo’s other big sales for the week:

boutiquehotel.com 40,000 USD
captchacreator.com 30,000 USD
season.com 28,302 USD
pokerpals.com 25,000 USD
pornphone.com 13,000 USD
ontopic.com 10,000 USD
dimotoo.com 7,000 EUR
prickie.com 6,600 USD
osrl.com 6,500 USD
grouphotels.com 6,055 USD
planbar.com 5,900 USD
h-online.com 5,500 EUR
p-a-g.com 5,000 USD
sedas.com 5,000 USD (silk in Spanish)
dubaiemirate.com 4,990 EUR
slots.eu 24,000 EUR
kos.co.uk 15,000 GBP
photo-libre.fr 11,100 EUR (photo book in French)
ebooking.fr 10,500 EUR
roentgen.de 10,000 EUR
olx.com.au 7,000 USD
camiones.com.mx 5,000 USD
jb.eu 4,975 EUR
wy.net 7,100 USD
wrecker.net 6,300 USD
medica.net 5,288 USD (medical in Italian)

Amazon Mechanical Turk is an affordable way to create content for your web site.

If you’re trying to jumpstart a review web site, moderate a forum, or get the contact information for potential web site advertisers, Amazon Mechanical Turk can help you do it cheap and fast.

Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) Turk has been around for a while, but I finally had a chance to use it today. Amazon Turk is a “marketplace for work”, and enables a community of users to complete tasks for you.

Today I had a list of 340 companies in the Lakeway area that I want to add to my Lakeway directory. But I needed addresses for each company. In less than an hour, the Turk community delivered addresses for all 340 companies at a total cost of $37.40.

Here’s how I used Turk. First, I created a template for Turk users to fill out for each company. Turk provides some samples, and I edited one to fit my needs. Then I decided how much to pay people for each company they completed (10 cents). Next, I saved my spreadsheet of 340 companies as a CSV. After uploading the CSV file to Turk, I verified that everything uploaded correctly. Then I hit the submit button.

Within minutes people started fulfilling my request, company-by-company. As a stats junky, I got a kick out of the Turk data that instantly popped up on my screen:

The screenshot shows how many responses have been submitted, the average time it takes someone to complete the request, and the effective hourly rate I’m paying people for my project ($6.67).

Here are some ways you can use Amazon Turk to help you build and manage web sites:

-Get reviews for your new review web site.

-Review posts on your forum for compliance with terms of service.

-Take a list of fishing companies in Yahoo and get the contact information for each company so you can try to sell them advertising on your fishing web site.

-Jump start a forum by paying people to post in it

-Pay people to submit your web site to various directories

-Analyze a list of domain names in a way that requires human involvement

Will we see domain name companies go bust in 2009?

It’s capitalism at its best. Circuit City is being liquidated after failing to find a buyer. Linens ‘n Things is finishing up the liquidation process (I wonder when they’ll sell the LNT.com domain?).

And that’s how it’s supposed to be. Weak companies fail, strong ones thrive. Thank goodness the government didn’t step in to bailout Circuit City. Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) offers a superior shopping experience. Even though it is facing hard times, it has knocked a competitor out and should reap the rewards.

Will we see similar failures and consolidation in the domain industry this year?

Domain Parking Companies
At last count there are about 20 well known domain parking companies.

Companies go bankrupt when they can’t service their debt. The startup costs of running a domain parking company are minimal. So parking companies rarely carry long term debt, unless it is for another part of its business. Advanced parking companies, such as DomainSponsor, have higher costs of doing business because they hire mathematicians and optimizers. But the point is that most domain parking companies could survive even if they scale back to a couple people managing the system.

We could see some consolidation in domain parking, but there’s not much benefit in buying a competitor’s parking business. Customers are usually under no obligation to keep their domains there, and can flee to another service the day after the company is acquired. Sometimes buying a parking company for its technology or advertising contract makes sense.

Domain Name Registrars
There are huge economies of scale for domain registrars and consolidation makes sense. I think we’ll see a lot of consolidation in this space over the next year or two. Domain registrars may have taken on some debt to get going (or to buy an existing registrar), but it’s still limited compared to other types of businesses. But the benefits of combining operations may be compelling.

Other Domain Businesses
We might see failures at other domain related businesses. Banks.com is essentially dead thanks to its heavy debt load (backed in part by IRS.com). One other company to keep an eye on is Live Current Media (OTCBB: livc.ob), which is scrambling to raise cash. Although debt-light, it technically owes its cricket partners lots of money this year (although they have forgiven some those payments in the past). Other debt-laden companies include NameMedia, but NameMedia is doing a good job extracting case from its assets.