Domain parking company to launch Japanese parking platform.

Domain name parking company NameDrive will launch a Japanese-language parking platform tomorrow.

NameDrive has partnered with ICANN-accredited and .JP-accredited domain registrar WIXI to provide the parking program for the Japanese market. It is designed for owners of domain names in Japan or domains using the Japanese language.

Founded in 2005, NameDrive has been one of the major parking companies to embrace Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs), which will be important in the Japanese market. The company says the platform will be the first parking program with full support in an Asian language. The company manages over 1 million parked domains.

When the platform is launched overnight/tomorrow, customers can access the system by selecting the Japanese language option on NameDrive’s home page, or at park.wixi.jp.

77% of whois data rubbish? More like 8%.

If you just read the headlines, you’d assume most domain name whois records are bogus. Here are a couple headlines from today:

“77% of domain registrations stuffed with rubbish” – TheRegister
“ICANN fails to control Internet, 77% of domains have no valid information” – Ecommerce Journal

Indeed, the numbers from ICANN’s recent whois study show there are problems. But you can pick your numbers as you wish.

The 77% number is derived by noting that only 23% of the domain records studied met the most stringent requirements for accuracy: a deliverable address, the owner’s name linked to that address, and the registrant confirmed ownership and correctness of all details during interview.

Another quarter of whois records resulted in either a minor flaw noted by the owner when being interviewed, or the examiners not being able to publicly link the registrant’s name to the address, but they were able to reach the registrant and confirm the whois information.

In another quarter of the records, the mailing address was deliverable and the registrant’s name was publicly linked to the address, but they weren’t able to reach the domain owner to interview them.

Then you have about 20% where the address was wrong or, if it was deliverable, the examiners couldn’t link it to the registrant or get a response for an interview.

That leaves 8% where the whois information was flat out wrong.

So I propose a new headline: “92% of whois records basically accurate”.

Method helps brand managers prioritize cybersquatting disputes.

Yahoo has filed a patent application (pdf) for a method for prioritizing which cybersquatted domain names to pursue.

The application describes a system that generates a list of domain names related to a trademark (“seed” term), then runs calculations based on probable traffic to those domain names to determine which ones a trademark owner should pursue.

For example, if one of the domains generated is YahooMail.com, the system can use a variety of traffic data sources (search volume, ISP date, etc.) to determine how many type-ins the domain probably gets.

This can be helpful for companies that have thousands of domain names that infringe their mark, and need to prioritize their UDRP and lawsuits to focus on the bigger traffic domains. Even though UDRP is efficient and fairly affordable, it still usually costs a complainant thousands of dollars to file. Many of the domain names recovered may not be worth the cost.

This method seems similar to tools used by CitizenHawk, a typosquatting recovery firm. CitizenHawk takes all of the risk in UDRPs it files, receiving payment by basically monetizing domains it wins on behalf of clients for a set period of time. It therefore needs methods to determine how much revenue a domain can generate over that period of time.

The patent application was filed August 14, 2008, and published today. The inventor is Jonathan Matkowsky, who is Yahoo’s Legal Director, Global Brand Protection.

Study says typosquatting money big. But there may be a conflict of interest.

A new study suggests that Google may earn $497 million a year from typosquatters targeting the 100,000 most popular .com sites on the web.

Although I question some of the logic in the report and its appendices, and it is tainted by one of the authors being involved in a lawsuit against Google for typosquatting, the data is still fascinating.

First, for the claim of $497 million in revenue from typosquatting each year. That’s based on some assumptions that are weak at best:

-The study reviewed the top 3,264 .COM web sites, and found that 0.7% of their traffic was from typos. It then extrapolated this to the top 100,000 .com sites, assuming that much typo traffic to those sites as well. The truth is, typosquatters rarely target these less popular sites, meaning that less of their traffic is typosquatted.

-The authors concluded that domain revenue per search is the same as that of searches at Google. This is based on a vary narrow Efficient Frontier case study.

On the other hand, the authors may have under-counted traffic in other ways. For example, the report doesn’t take into consideration Google and Yahoo’s error redirect services, in which ISPs and computer makers hijack typos and send them to pages full of ads. It also doesn’t take into consideration typos such as .cm.

But the report is certainly fascinating. The authors found the most popular Google advertiser IDs on typo domains. They feature common names such as GoDaddy (probably through auto-parked pages on customers’ domains) and Sedo.

For domain servers with over 100,000 domains, the report found that dnsnameserver.org (FirstLook) had the highest ratio of typo domains at 4.75%, followed by trellian.com at 4.47% and hitfarm.com at 3.76%. When you look at nameservers over 25,000 domains, the top two are 365.com at 8.89% and ParkLogic.com at 8.19%.

Of course, not all typos are used inappropriately. CitizenHawk shows up as having 32% of its domains as typos, but the company is holding these on behalf of the trademark holders.

The report also found a number of extraordinarily “clean” nameservers. One of those is Michael Berken’s MostWantedDomains.com.

Another interesting finding is the domains that are most typosquatted by competitors to send traffic to their sites. It names the competitor that is receiving the traffic, too.

One final point. The authors found their crawlers blocked after hitting domain parking company’s nameservers excessively. They suggest the parking companies were trying to thwart the authors’ efforts. My guess is their click fraud and DDOS systems just kicked in.

At any rate, the research is worth reviewing.

[Via New Scientist]

.Co domain name to go worldwide this year; Pool.com to manage sunrise and landrush auctions.

[Update: See guide to pricing and registrars for .co launch.]

Anyone who attended one of the three domain name industry events so far this year has heard about the .co domain name launch. The domain’s registry, .CO Internet S.A.S., has been aggressively getting its name out with a big marketing splash at all three events.

It’s not another TLD typo
It’s natural for the typical domainer to think of .co in terms of the recent .cm launch, which was geared toward typo traffic of .com. But that couldn’t be further from the goals of .Co.

“Unlike other extensions that may have launched in the past, we know ours is something very unique,” said .CO Internet Director of Marketing Lori Anne Wardi. “Before we even launched this extension we did a lot of research in the market to get an understanding of what the perception of the public to .co would be.”

Indeed, whereas .cm doesn’t really stand for anything, .co is nearly universally recognized. After surveying thousands of consumers and interviewing 600 of them, the company found that 75% of them equated .co with “company”, “corporation,” or “commerce”. It is a popular abbreviation in the United States, but also abroad. In fact, over 20 countries use .co as a second level domain name (i.e. co.uk, co.jp) because of this.

.Co Internet CEO Juan Diego Calle said that typo fans need not apply. “If you are a person that knows the difference between a cctld and gtld, if you are a person that knows what typo traffic is, then you’re not our target customer,” he explained. “The reality is the potential of the space goes way beyond anything a domainer who’s looking at it from the point of view of traffic” considers.

In today’s world, that goes beyond “company”, to collaborate, content, and community.

History
.Co is the country code domain for Colombia. It was originally delegated to University of The Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. For many years, the University has run tight controls on the domain name. Registration was mostly limited to Colombian companies who could register their trade name or company name as an exact match at the third level, such as name.com.co. As a result, there are only about 28,000 .co domains registered.

About ten years ago, University of The Andes started to look at opening up registration of the domain name. Colombia’s Ministry of Information Technologies and Communications got involved, and went through a painstaking process of figuring out the best way to open up the domain. Arcelandia S.A. and domain registry Neustar formed a partnership to respond to Colombia’s RFP, and was awarded a contract to run the domain for 10 years.

Ready for Launch
.Co will be launched later this year through a familiar process, beginning with a sunrise period for trademark holders, a land rush, and general registration. But some things will be different.

First, there’s the matter of the 28,000 existing third level domain registrations. Any registrant who registered a third level domain prior to July 30, 2008, will get first dibs on the same domain at the second level (i.e. name.co). That’s the date when the new .co policy was set, and about 21,000 domains were registered prior to then. Because of the registration restrictions, few of these domains would be considered “generic” in nature. Calle said that only about 1,000-1,500 grandfathered names could be considered as possible generics.

Second, only ten registrars will have a direct relationship with .Co when it launches. This includes heavyweights such as GoDaddy and eNom. Other registrars can offer the domain through reseller agreements with the ten registrars.

“When evaluating new models by which a new registry should operate, [Ministry of Information Technologies and Communications] felt it was in the best interest of the space to limit the number of registrars,” explained Calle. The reason is to make sure the ones who are involved are aligned with the goal of the registry.

Third, in an effort to protect trademark holders, .Co will create an IP clearinghouse and Globally Protected Marks List of the top trademarks.

As far as the traditional process is concerned, the sunrise and landrush will be managed by Deloitte / Laga, who also managed the sunrise periods for .Asia and .Tel. If more than one entity submits an application for the same domain name in either period, the domain will be auctioned at Pool. Pool has handled previous sunrise and landrush auctions for other registries. A number of premium domains will be held back by the registry for auctions, likely run at some of the popular domain auction houses.

A Matter of National Pride
Unlike the recent bungled re-launch of .cm, Colombia is clearly taking a different approach. “[Colombia] wanted to make sure this was done the right way,” explained Calle. “It’s a real issue of national pride.”

The pillars for .co are global, recognizable, and credible. Given the thought and planning that is going into the .co launch, it looks like .CO Internet isn’t wavering from these principles.

Sunrise is scheduled for April, with the landrush beginning at the end of June.