Integrating your ads over content can have negative consequences.

On Thursday, a deranged man flew his plane into an office building housing IRS employees.

In my search for updates and details on the crash, which was in a cluster of buildings housing a number of high tech companies where my friends work, I realized how dangerous it is to place your ads over content. You never know how it will look.

Here’s the first example, from Statesman.com:

Like many publications, Statesman has “flyover” ads on top of its home page. On Thursday, the ad happened to be for the rodeo. I watched as a man literally walked across the crash site and fire on the page, looking up at a headline reading “Huge Fireball erupted after crash, unknown number of people hurt”. I doubt that’s content the rodeo wants to associated with.

Here’s another example, an ad overlayed on a USTREAM video of the crash site:

Ah, yes. Jump for joy! You just made 3,000%! Wait, what’s that? Someone just died? Oh.

That’s part of the reason name brand advertisers shy away from video-overlays, and you end up with ads for penny stocks instead.

As media continues to try to find a way to monetize online content, it’s no wonder that advertisers miss the traditional placement control of days gone by.

.Com registry to participate remotely.

The world’s biggest registrar, Go Daddy, has already announced it is not sending anyone to the ICANN meeting in Nairobi due to security concerns. Now you can add the biggest registry, VeriSign, to the list.

The company confirmed to me today via e-mail that it will not be sending anyone to participate in-person at the event:

VeriSign has decided to participate virtually in the upcoming ICANN meetings in Nairobi. We made this decision after a thorough review of the ongoing security concerns in the region, and join numerous other registrar and industry partners who have made a similar decision. Our full contingent of people will attend remotely – in as many meetings that are available. ICANN is working to ensure adequate capabilities for remote participation, and VeriSign will take full advantage of the tools that ICANN makes available.

Hopefully ICANN’s remote participate tools will be able to handle the added online load.

Simplicity helps end user buy domain name.

In October I wrote about GoDaddy’s service that lets you place your domains for sale within the registration path, called Premium Domain Names. Using a “Premium Listing”, your domain shows up in the GoDaddy domain marketplace. But the real value is that they also show up prominently when someone is searching for that exact domain name:

To test the system, I transferred about 75 domain names to GoDaddy and listed them as Premium, with a median price of about $1,000. It’s a small sample size, and I didn’t expect much to happen. But a few days ago I received this email:

Curious, I called up the person who bought the domain name, who told me his thought process and how he came across the domain. (He requested his name not be used in this article.)

“Most of the names I was looking up were taken,” he told me. “But the others didn’t come up as ‘premium names’”.

He said that if some of the other names he tried were listed as available as a premium domain, he may have bought one of the others.

This brings up a good point: most end users don’t know how to find out if a domain name is for sale. Even if they do, they don’t want to bother with the traditional process of negotiation, escrow, etc. Part of the selling point to this buyer was that it was simple and instantaneous:

“It was super simple,” he explained. “It was really no different than buying another domain on GoDaddy.”

Premium domain sales are automatically transferred to the buyer’s account upon purchase.

GoDaddy has the greatest retail reach in the domain name business. Domainers are starting to take advantage of that.

Market happy with results at two domain name companies.

Two publicly traded domain name companies have seen a nice bounce in their stock prices after reporting earnings.

Tucows reported net income of 3 cents per share for the fourth quarter of 2009 on February 16 after the market closed. It also reported $2.88 million of cashflow from operations. Shares of Tucows bounced 15% the following day to $.77, and then another 21% the following day to close at $.93. That’s a two day gain of nearly 40%. (Shares are off in early trading today.)

Marchex reported earnings after the bell yesterday that exceeded analyst’s expectations. Excluding one-time charges, the company earned 4 cents per share last quarter. Analysts had predicted three cents per share. The company also announced first quarter revenue guidance slightly higher than analysts were expecting. Shares of Marchex are up 6% in early trading today.

Disclosure: I own shares in a number of domain name company stocks.

Sex.com investor tells his side of the story.

Mike Mann, who founded BuyDomains, is always one to speak his mind. So when news broke yesterday that Sex.com, in which he was a part investor, was going into foreclosure, he didn’t hesitate to speak up.

“I am merely an investor who got completely railroaded by other investors with big guns, bad practices, and bad attitudes,” Mann wrote via e-mail. “I am always up for a good fight since any money I would make was already predesignated to innovative charities. I represent those charitable recipients always, I socked away enough for myself a long time ago, and I was never concerned about material wealth anyhow, the charitable works came first. I like to be clear about what I’m doing here.”

Mann is well known for his charitable activities, especially since selling BuyDomains. He’s perhaps best known for Grassroots.org, which offers free web services to charities.

The entities listed on the Sex.com foreclosure notice are not all debtors, but there are common links. The actual debtor is Escom, LLC.

Andrew Miller, co-founder of Internet Real Estate Group (IREG), continues to deny that the company had any involvement with Sex.com. Reached by phone yesterday to comment about Sex.com, Miller said, “I know nothing about it. Zero.” He called back a few minutes later to note that there may be some common investors between IREG and Escom, but that IREG itself is not involved.

So what does Mann think about Sex.com’s prospects at auction?

“This is clearly the best domain in the world that is for sale, the type in traffic is worth like 20M for the life of the asset at least, then add branding, uniqueness, shortness, global ubiquity, and someone building a real viral asset and brand development on top of all that, if I had access to 25M I’d easily be a buyer, someone will build it and exit for 50-100M Im sure.”

We’ll find out if anyone else agrees when the auction takes place next month.