Registry to take additional measures against buyers who haven’t developed domain names.

It’s taken a long time, but buyers of premium .mobi domain names appear to finally be developing their domain names. dotMobi says it will take additional measures against those who have not taken this step as required in their purchase agreement.

I’ve written several times about lack of enforcement of dotMobi’s premium domain buyer rules, but the registry finally started taking action last September.

A Domain Name Wire analysis shows that 72% of the top 25 domain sales from the first Sedo .mobi auction are now compliant, although few of them are anything to write home about. Several of the non-compliant domains are owned by the same person.

The registry will now take additional steps against non-compliant registrants:

We are now taking additional measures against the small percentage of registrants who have not complied with the Auction Agreement. Our registrars have also been busy updating their .mobi Registration End User Agreements to further enable dotMobi to take back a domain where necessary.

The sad thing is that some people haven’t created sites on their .mobi domain names despite how easy it has become. It takes about 10 minutes to create a site on MobiSiteGalore. There’s even software to convert a full scale web site into a mobile one.

Sedo has acquired RevenueDirect, Dotster’s domain name parking service.

Sedo has acquired domain name parking company RevenueDirect.

For established domain parking companies, acquiring another domain parking company usually doesn’t make sense. Parking companies rarely have long term contracts with customers, so the acquirer risks seeing acquired customers leaving the ship after a takeover. But this acquisition makes sense for a couple reasons:

U.S. Dominance: For a long time, Sedo has been known as the dominant domain parking company and Google partner outside the United States, while DomainSponsor has the Google lock inside the United States. With this purchase Sedo will bolster its position in the United States.

Higher Revenue Share: By acquiring more customers, Sedo can increase its revenue share rate with Google. This will put it in a position to offer more to domainers, improving its overall positioning. Further, Google domain parking contracts include tiers with different revenue share rates. This acquisition may push it into a higher tier.

Registrar Affiliation: Call it a bonus, but Sedo’s domain parking purchase comes with a new deal with the affiliated registrar, Dotster. It will send Dotster customers to Sedo for both domain parking and domain purchases.

According to RegistrarStats, Dotster is the 15th largest domain name registrar with over 1 million domains under management. The domain server ns1.revenuedirect.com has over 225,000 domains according to DomainTools.

This may not be Sedo’s last domain parking company acquisition…

The new era of domain tasting starts in April.

“The end of domain tasting”

“Domain tasting is dead”

“ICANN shuts down domain tasting”

You’ve heard it all before. But as I’ve pointed out, new rules designed to kill domain tasting starting in April won’t kill it. Curtail it, yes. But not kill it.

In some ways, the new era of domain tasting parallels to other changes in the domain industry. What used to be very easy will now become difficult.

Domain Tasting 1.0 didn’t require many brains. Just register everything and see what was profitable.

Domain Tasting 2.0 will require sophisticated calculations. To make it profitable, companies will have to predict a high likelihood of a domain paying off before tasting it.

The rate of domain tasting has already decreased significantly since ICANN introduced a stop-gap budget measure to curtail it. In October, about 1.5 million .com domain names were deleted during the 5 day add-grace period. (Not all domains deleted in add-grace are tasted; the purpose of the period is to allow registrars to get a refund for errant for fraudulent domain registrations). In January 2008 nearly 19 million domain names were deleted during the grace period.

How will domain tasters make it in the new world? Data and good calculations. Data from ISPs, registrars, search engines, etc. will all be required. And a PhD will help.

The results are in…

Last Friday at Domainer Mardi Gras I presented some of the results from the 2009 Domain Name Wire survey. Over the next couple weeks I’ll be tabulating and disclosing more results here on Domain Name Wire.

This year 401 people participated in the survey. This was less than in prior years, but that’s for a reason. I only promoted the survey on this site and to the newsletter rather than taking out ads in forums and search engines. I found that placing those ads tended to expand the audience to include many people who participated just for prizes and didn’t know much about domaining. The survey captures all levels of domainers, but I don’t want responses from people who ask “what’s domain parking”?

Speaking of prizes, here are this year’s randomly selected winners. Thanks for participating, and I’ll be in touch with you soon.

Grand Prize: $100 credit at the registrar of your choice: T. Miller, United States

First Prize: Copy of David Kesmodel’s “The Domain Game” or equivalent gift certificate
R Canfield, United States
R Hosman, United States
M Sumner, United States
P Cusack, Ireland
E Delmazzo, United States

Famed domain name sells for $5,459.

The domain name that brought down Bido.com — FixedLoans.com — has helped the auction service get back on the radar. Just moments ago the domain name sold for $5,459.

FixedLoans.com attracted a lot of attention in August of last year, and the auction eventually caused Bido’s servers to crash. The company decided to take some time off to make the platform more scalable. In previous auctions bidding topped $5,000 before crashing. The auction today wasn’t without a few glitches, as some visitors to Bido’s chat room stated auction information wasn’t refreshing in their browsers. (It worked fine in my FireFox browser).

Today’s auction looked like it might end for $3,629 before two bids were made in the final minute, pushing the price up to $4,078 and extending the auction for another five minutes. I suspect the final bidders didn’t realize the auction would be automatically extended, or they would have placed their bids with closer to five minutes remaining. The auction was extended several more times.

Upcoming auctions on the platform probably won’t top today’s prices, but should help Bido get back in a groove. Tomorrow DressOrganic.com goes on the block, followed by HipHopPhotography.com on Wednesday and MyAstrologist.com on Thursday. The week ends with an auction for BuyCheaply.com.