Epik moves into auctions with acquisition of DNKO platform.

Domain company Epik has acquired domain auction platform DNKO.com, and is launching its first auction as Epik tomorrow.

Epik is Rob Monster’s new domain name venture that was launched around the time of Domain Roundtable.

DNKO is a relatively new auction platform. The platform launched a couple months ago after being discovered on NamePros. Always interested in the domain auction space, Monster saw an opportunity to pick it up and rebrand it as Epik Auctions.

“I have long been fascinated by the domain auction business,” said Monster. “Many people know that I led an investment partnership to acquire Snapnames. While we did not prevail there, the passion for the domain auction market never went away.”

Monster believes the domain auction market is dominated by a practice of charging full-service commissions while providing Craigslist-level service.

“We hope to bring innovation and leadership to the domain auction market, particularly in the mid-market which we believe is under-served,” said Monster.

Epik Auctions will be tightly integrated into Epik’s domain platform, allowing domainers who monetize domains on Epik to submit their domains to auction with the click of a button.

Friday’s auction will include 45 domain names including anonymize.com, industryforecasts.com, and a handful of three character .me domains. Each auction lasts only 60 seconds, but are extended by bids.

Car rental company gets greedy with domain arbitration.

Vanguard Trademark Holdings USA LLC, the trademark affiliate of National Car Rental, has been busy filing domain arbitration cases lately. One of those caught my eye today: GreenMeansGo.com, filed with World Intellectual Property Forum.

It caught my eye because “Green Means Go” is a common and generic phrase. Alas, that doesn’t keep a trademark holder from trying to grab the domain.

The company actually does have a trademark for “Green Means Go.”, which it filed in 1994. But this trademark doesn’t give the company exclusive rights to “Green Means Go”, a common phrase. A Google search for the phrase in quotes returns only generic uses of the term with nothing related to the car company.

The trademark is for goods and services related to “automobile rental and reservation services”. I looked up the parked domain GreenMeansGo.com and looked at its historical thumbnails in DomainTools. Nowhere can I find any sort of link for car rental.

Right now there are links on the page for “Online Traffic School”, “Traffic Ticket”, and “Car Insurance Quote”. This makes sense, as I usually associate the phrase with driving. But it stops there. Unless there’s some sort of damning evidence that shows the current owner registered this domain way back when with National Car Insurance in mind, Vanguard’s case should be denied.

Sedo releases new domain parking features to boost revenue.

As domain parking revenue falls, parking companies have to focus on what they can control. They can’t control algorithm changes at Google and Yahoo, but they can improve optimization. This week Sedo rolled out major changes to its parking platform, designed to boost overall revenue.

2 Click Landers – Sedo now offers two-click landers for each of its templates. This means the first page will not have any ads; it will only include keywords. When visitors click these keywords they are then shown a page full of relevant ads. Two-click landers offer a couple benefits over one-click for certain domains. First, they help drive the visitor to a relevant page. If you have a domain with a low click through rate, it’s probable that the ads you’re showing aren’t what the visitor is looking for. A two-click lander shows many more possible topics. Second, a two click lander will probably result in more search network clicks compared to content network clicks…which could result in more revenue.

Related Links Auto Optimization – the system will start to optimize related links on your domain based on performance. Most parking platforms already do this.

Content Matching/Filtering – Sedo has implemented changes that will ensure more relevant results. This will also prevent adult ads from showing up on non-adult domains.

Improved Optimizer – the workflow of optimizer has been improved.

These are good improvements and Sedo is already reporting increased revenue. Hopefully the company’s next project will be a user interface overhaul.

Car company wants Boxter.com (typo) domain name.

Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG has filed a complaint with World Intellectual Property Organization to get the domain name Boxter.com.

Boxster is one of the company’s popular cars. I remember back in the bubble days earlier this decade it seemed like most cars pulling out of tech company garages in Austin were Boxsters. A couple years later you could buy them on the cheap.

Boxter.com is currently a parked page showing links for “Porsche Car”, “Porsche Boxster for Sale Used”, and “2003 Porsche Boxster”. But the page probably isn’t converting well since the main graphic on the page is about the polar opposite of a Boxster: a Smart Car (or something similar). It looks like the secondary photo might be a Ferrari, but it’s hard to tell.

Porsche has filed a number of domain arbitration cases this year including porscheclassics.nl, porsche-design.nl, and porscheguides.com.

Google tweaks to hit Adsense network next week.

Google is rolling out upgrades next week to how it contextually targets ads in its Google Adsense program. According to a post on the company’s Inside Adsense blog:

Our machines are very good at the matching process, but there are still a few cases where their definition of relevance differs from our human definition of relevance. In these few cases, the system might end up serving ads that don’t seem immediately relevant to users. We understand that increased ad relevance contributes to a positive experience for users, publishers, and advertisers, so we’re continuously working on ways to improve the relevance and quality of ads that appear on your sites.

I’m excited to let you know that this week, we’ll be rolling out a series of enhancements to AdSense’s contextual targeting capabilities, which will more accurately match relevant ads to webpages.

Based on this description, the changes may not affect parked pages. But one thing we know is that when Google makes changes like this, it usually means the company expects increased earnings from the changes, not to mention an improved user experience.