Live Current sells Call.com domain name for seven figures.

Live Current Media has sold the domain name Call.com for $1.1 million through domain brokerage Sedo.

The domain has a storied history. Live Current, when it was known as Communicate.com, sold the domain name as part of a package including Makeup.com, Automobile.com, and Exercise.com. Part of the sale included lifetime royalties on all earnings for these domains. Communicate.com reacquired Call.com in 2006 in exchange for eliminating the royalty provision. The company valued this future royalty stream at $250,000. In other words, it traded in $250,000 in future revenue in 2006 for a $1.1M sale in 2009.

Call.com was surely one of the two domains Live Current announced in a press release last week that it had sold for a total $1.6M. The other domain was likely Brazil.com for $500,000.

That press release also mentioned the company’s sale of Cricket.com for $1M cash plus $750,000 in other consideration.

Sedo brokered many other high profile domain name sales in the past week, including Editor.com for $225,000, Alternate.com for $90,000, and Games.eu for 67,500 EUR.

A busy month for domain news.

August is usually a slow news month. But not this year, at least in the domain business. Domain Name Wire once again topped 100k page views on site (and at least as much through RSS). Here are the top five stories according to page views, as well as the top clicks.

1. Yahoo Buys OMG.com Domain Name for $80,000 – Yahoo picks up domain name for its popular celebrity site. A nice domain to use in addition to a sub domain.

2. Ad.com Sale Falls Through, Lawsuit Filed – The $1.4M ad.com sale has fallen through, no thanks to AOL’s over-reaching trademark claims.

3. Server.com Sells for $770,000, Jesus.net for $124,000 – The sale of Server.com gets the major media attention. But Jesus, that’s a lot for a .net!

4. Oversee.net Sues Skenzo, Oversee and Guillen Explain Their Sides – More about the Ad.com fallout. For the sake of the entire industry, let’s hope this gets resolved soon.

5. “Assumed Name Squatter” Gets Squatted Herself – this story has a sad ending. Comments are off.

Here are the top 6 clicks from Domain Name Wire to other sites, not including the paid ads in the columns:

1. Sedo
2. PlayingTheAngles.com
3. Epik
4. Conceptualist
5. FreshDrop
6. Domaining

And finally, here are the top 6 referrers of traffic to Domain Name Wire for the month:

1. Google
2. Domaining
3. TechCrunch
4. NameBee
5. TechMeme
6. Twitter

Many thanks to everyone for reading and supporting the site.

ICANN posts job listing for VP of Government Affairs.

When then-ICANN CEO Paul Twomey got grilled by Congress in June, I wondered how ICANN didn’t think to do a bit of lobbying before the hearing. ICANN spends a little money on lobbying, but not much. Now that it’s clear the organization can’t just run away from government control, the company is revving up its lobbying engine.

First step: hire a Vice President of Government Affairs. According to the job posting:

He/she must have extensive leadership and political experience as well as the ability to successfully organize and execute ICANN’s policy, political and business objectives at the federal and international levels.

The successful candidate will lead the design and execution of government affairs strategies to advise and educate Members of Congress, Congressional staffers, key policy makers, and federal regulatory officials about ICANN.

The Vice President will be required to develop and implement an aggressive strategic plan for successfully achieving specific legislative and policy results that are favorable to ICANN. The successful candidate must possess significant political acumen and have established bi-partisan contact with Members of Congress, Congressional staff, agency legislative affairs offices, and have contacts in the Administration specifically in the Department of Commerce and at The White House. He/She must have a proven ability to build strong internal working relationships while serving as an advocate for Government Affairs and supporting ICANN’s business objectives.

Company’s portfolio still profitable, but challenges abound.

Dark Blue Sea has reported its annual results for the period ending June, and it isn’t pretty.

The company reported profits plunged 74.38% to only $695,955 AUD for the year. This is well below the company’s guidance just a couple months ago. In the prior year the company earned $2.72M. Revenue fell 14.9% to $26.65M. Working capital fell from $5.18M at the beginning of the period to $4.1M at the end.

Although profits are down, the company is still eking out profits thanks to its domain portfolio. The company currently owns 420,000 domain names which get about 190,000 unique visitors per day. This generated $2.46M in revenue last year, which, when combined with $3.55M in domain sales revenue, generates a profit. The company owned over 550,000 domains at the beginning of the year, so it has dropped about 130,000 domains.

Dark Blue Sea runs the Fabulous registrar and domain name parking service.

The full annual report is available on the company’s web site.

One more example of the .com truism.

From Florida this weekend comes another example of why you should never, ever, ever* use anything but .com for an important web site, such as your main business web site.

A Florida High School, Pace High School, operates the web site PaceHighSchool.net. But someone else owns PaceHighSchool.com, and it is splattered with hard core porn. So when junior logs on to check out the school’s football schedule, he might see something that’s exciting to him but distressing to his parents.

*Now, notice I didn’t say never, ever, ever, ever use anything but a .com. There’s a very limited circumstance in which a non .com makes sense, and that’s with country code domains. But that’s still iffy. When companies get big, they end up deciding the .com is necessary. Another caveat is that if you want to use a .org or something else, that’s fine as long as you also own the .com.