800.com domain sells at bankruptcy auction.

The liquidation of Circuit City’s assets has resulted in a big sale of the 800.com domain name. Although the final auction price is not yet known, Domain Name Wire has learned that starting bids quickly escalated to $250,000.

According to court documents, the auction was to be held on August 18 at the New York offices of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, LLP (Filing, large pdf). The auction was run in part by StreamBank, LLC. A representative of StreamBank declined to say how much the domain sold for, but did say the auction was “well attended”.

A source tells Domain Name Wire that most of the bidders were apparently end users, which is not surprising given that information about the auction was not reported in the domain name media.

However, one familiar face in the domain world is involved: Loren Stocker. Stocker filed an objection to the auction procedures, citing an existing “first right of refusal” he says he has for the domain name (Objection filing, pdf). Stocker was not immediately available for comment.

Prior to being owned by Circuit City, 800.com was a dot com startup that raised millions in funding.

StreamBank told Domain Name Wire that the results of the auction will be filed with the bankruptcy court tomorrow. This story will be updated as more information becomes available.

Google Adsense shows off its platform.

Google Adsense is not an ad network. It’s an advertising platform, and Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) is taking steps to open it up.

Adsense is taking its next step to opening up the platform by allowing other display advertising companies to place ads on Adsense Publishers’ sites.

For example, Google may be able to offer you a $1 CPM on display ads on your site, while another ad network can offer $2. The other ad network’s ad would show on your site, resulting in more money in your pocket.

I foresee Google becoming an ad optimization system, similar to the parking systems that used automate which parking company to send your traffic to.

So isn’t this great news? It seems so on the surface. It should mean more money and convenience for publishers in the short term. Small publishers will win the most, as they don’t have the clout or time to shop around to different display advertising networks.

In the long run, competing ad networks may become more reliant on Google. Google will provide easy ad inventory to them, which will result in ad networks taking their eye off the ball on acquiring more ad inventory. You may even see ad networks pop up that have no inventory and focus solely on getting high-paying advertisers.

A dead simple way to find qualified end users to buy your domains.

End users, end users, end users. Everyone in the domain name industry wants to be focus on selling domains to the “end user”. This is essentially anyone other than a domain investor. But finding these elusive end users can be a challenge. Fortunately, the easiest way to find them is sitting right under your nose: people who have registered your .com domains in other TLDs.

I recently scanned my list of domains to find any .coms for which someone else registered a .net or .org after I registered the .com. To my surprise, a good number of domains I registered in just the past few years now have corresponding domains registered in other TLDs.

I decided to e-mail five of the registrants of .net domains for which I have a corresponding .com. I let them know that I registered the .com several years ago, which is probably why they settled for the .net. I offered to sell the domain to them for a reasonable amount. Of the five emails I sent, one has resulted in a sale and another one is under negotiation. The other three didn’t respond.

Be smart about who you try this with. If your domain sounds like a company name, you might get a nasty letter back from the company you approach (even though they have no legal standing). I’d do this only with clearly generic domains. In my case, most of the domains were geo-related.

To find out which of your domains are registered in other TLDs, use a bulk domain checker at your favorite registrar. First you’ll first have to strip the .com off all of your domains. There are plenty of tools out there to strip everything but domains out of a list, but this is a bit different. I pasted my portfolio into Excel and then did a search and replace, searching for “.com” and replacing with “”. This stripped all of the .com’s off. Then it was as simple as cutting and pasting the list into a bulk checker and checking for .net and .org domains that weren’t available.

Software company fails to snag USU.com domain. But where’s the beef?

A three person panel at WIPO has ruled in favor of the current registrant of USU.com in a domain dispute. However, in a brief opinion, it failed to consider the issue of reverse domain name hijacking.

The domain name arbitration case was brought by software company USU AG of Germany, which was represented by Hössle Kudlek & Partner, Patentanwälte, Germany. The respondent was represented by domain name lawyer John Berryhill.

Although USU AG was founded prior to the domain being registered, the software company had not established rights to the mark in the United States at that time. Furthermore, the domain’s owner created a legitimate business at the domain. Even if the software company had established rights to the mark in the United States and the owner hadn’t used the domain, it would still be a long shot to prove that a generic, three character domain was registered in bad faith.

USU AG tried to convince the panel that the domain was registered in bad faith because the domain’s owner entered into negotiations to sell the domain to the software company. But the panel didn’t buy it:

Nor can the Panel find anything justifying a finding of bad faith registration and use from the unfulfilled negotiations between the parties over the sale and purchase of the disputed domain name. A 3-letter domain name is a valuable asset and the Respondent was quite at liberty to attempt to sell this asset especially in view of the Panel’s finding of Respondent’s use of the domain name in connection with its business.

But the question remains, why didn’t the panel consider finding reverse domain name hijacking in light of USU AG’s week case? The panel’s decision is particularly brief. Perhaps time was of the essence?

Categorization tools saves time and increases odds of sale.

Sedo announced its new auto categorization tool last week. The most painful part of adding domains to Sedo (or Afternic, for that matter) is taking the time to categorize them. But since categorized domains are more likely to sell, this is an important step. Sedo’s expansion to over 2,000 categories means more targeted searches, but more of a headache submitting domains — if it weren’t for it’s nifty new tool.

I decided to give it for a spin today and added four domain names to my Sedo account:

1. GalleryAlbum.com – a good name for an online photo gallery, art galleries, etc.
2. MarbleLake.com – an 800 acre lake in Michigan
3. TinDoll.com – collectible tin dolls
4. TrueAudience.com – a generic with so many uses…audience measurement, social networking etc.

I submitted all four domains to Sedo using its auto categorization tool to see if it worked well. Here are the results:

GalleryAlbum.com – Arts > Visual Arts > Galleries
MarbleLake.com – Recreation > Outdoors > Other
TinDoll.com – Recreation > Collecting > Toys
TrueAudience.com – Society > Crime

All of these seem like good categorizations. TrueAudience.com is tricky as it is a brandable name.

If you aren’t satisfied with any of the categories the tool picks for you, it’s really easy to change them. Just click the category to open up a picker table: