2009 Domain Dunce Award: .CM Launch
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009
A controversial “relaunch” goes awry.
.CM, the country code top level domain name for The Republic of Cameroon, has a storied history amongst domainers. Kevin Ham struck a deal to wildcard the domain name, sending lots of typo traffic of .com domain names his way. Ham, including his deal with Cameroon, was the subject of a cover story in the late Business 2.0 magazine.
This year Cameroon decided to open up .cm and offer it to individual registrants, and opted to auction off the best names, such as Sex.cm. What followed was an unqualified disaster.
First, it took longer than expected to get the registry set up due to a host of technical problems. As the go-live date neared, Council of Country Code Administrators Incorporated (CoCCA), which was to run the registry for .cm, continued to be concerned with .cm’s DNS. The DNS was to be run by Cameroon’s telecom company rather than an established player. Without CoCCA’s blessing to go live, Cameroon decided to run its own copy of the registry software.
Then the auctions occurred on NameJet. It looked like a big success as Sex.cm auctioned for $51,300 and Free.cm for $17,800. But then the bottom fell out. Bidders got cold feet as they lost confidence in .cm typo traffic as well as the registry as a whole. They backed out of their bids. Sex.cm ended up trading hands for only $21,700 (see comments, it actually sold for less) and Free.cm went for a dismal $310. Ouch.
With the delays and auction behind it, how’s .cm looking? I’m not confident. Your confidence erodes when a registry neglects to backup important billing files.
Further Reading:
Good pick for the 2009 Dunce award! I thought .cm had a lot of hope – amazing how terrible management can ruin what was the opportunity of a lifetime!
It will take a lot now to win-back investor confidence.
Andrew
It was actually worse than that.
Sex.cm didn’t close at $21K either.
It actually got passed by everyone down the line, and went back up for sale with a starting price of $350, don’t know what happened after that.
Agree with your classification of this whole rollout being one of the worst domain moves of the year.
Thanks for the update Michael.
Nigerian scam 2.0…
The start was bumpy and lots of domainers backed out, which was good for me. I got plenty of good domains making reg fee in less than a week.
what does it say about the domainer community, bidding and not paying. Plenty of scammers in this industry.
looks like all due to bad administation of registry