How do whois privacy services respond to requests to reveal owner information?

The Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) has asked ICANN to consider the cost and feasibility of extended whois studies. ICANN has already undertaken studies to determine what percentage of whois records are accurate. The next study is to see how whois privacy and whois proxy services respond to requests to reveal the actual owner of domain names.

The study would involve working with individuals, businesses, first responders, complaint centers, and law enforcement that have made requests to whois services to reveal or relay information to the actual registrant.

For each submitted request, researchers will then solicit secondary input from the associated Privacy/Proxy service provider and Registrar to determine if the request was received, relayed, responded to, or otherwise acted upon.

This may be a challenge. I suspect the services that easily hand information over to requesters will cooperate; those that don’t want respond to the query from the researchers.

How to sell your established web site — and how much you can get for it.

One of the more interesting sessions during the recent Epik Developers Conference was about selling developed web sites. David Fairley, who operates a web site brokerage, explained the fundamentals of buying and selling established sites.

A discussion at Elliot Silver’s blog yesterday reminded me that I needed to follow up with Fairley for a story.

Fairley has had a lot of success buying, building, and selling web sites for himself and clients. One of his early successes was Hammocks.com. He had an online hammock web site, but then had the opportunity to buy the Hammocks.com domain for about $11,000. He bought it, enjoyed the SEO benefits of the domain, and sold the site to NetShops in 2002 for just shy of $1 million.

Another big success was Strollers.com, which he sold for six figures.

In his presentation at DevCon, Fairley laid out seven fundamentals that developed web site buyers care about:

1. Cash flow the site produces (net profit or EBITDA)
2. Organic SEO rankings
3. Traffic stats
4. Cash flow and traffic trends (is it growing?)
5. Business model (ecommerce, dropshipping, affiliate, ppc)
6. Domain name (high quality generics add some value)
7. Average sale on your site

Fairley’s clients are mostly sophisticated buyers such as high net worth investors and people from the private equity world. They’re looking for cash flow businesses, and the typical sale is for 2.5-3 times the trailing 12 months EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation & amortization). Multiples can go higher, especially if the site is growing. Fairley said that most of the sites he sells have been around for 3 or 4 years or more.

His brokerage only deals with sites making at least $20k profit over the trailing twelve months. However, he is relaunching his web site with the ability for people to self-list web sites they have for sale. This may give owners of smaller sites a way to reach buyers.

Proxy battle doesn’t give shareholders a great choice.

Live Current Media shareholders are being asked to make a choice ahead of next month’s shareholder meeting: gold or white.

The current CEO Geoffrey Hampson and his board want shareholders to vote with their gold proxy card, which would mean they get to stay at the helm of the company.

Former company president David Jeffs is asking shareholders to fill out the white proxy card, which would replace Hampson and the board with David Jeffs and a slate of new directors.

Unfortunately for shareholders, neither option is rosy.

In the gold corner you have a CEO who is also CEO of other companies. Yes, he invested $1.5 million of his own money in Live Current. But he seems to have left the building — literally. He has relocated to Chicago where another one of his companies is located. Hampson raised a lot of money for the company. But he also entered into a disastrous cricket media deal despite knowing little about the sport and made a stupid, unrelated acquisition of an auction software company. Partly because of this the company was forced to sell some of its prized domain names.

In the white proxy corner you have David Jeffs, who used to run the company. The company held its own under his leadership, but it was also involved in a number of questionable transactions involving Jeffs’ family. Jeffs also was the one who brought in Hampson to run the company.

So gold or white? Which will it be? Neither looks particularly promising for the future of the company. But I suppose it can’t get much worse. Shares are currently trading for 8 cents a piece, compared to $3.00 in May of 2008.

Clothing company says you can’t use the term “gap” in your social media web site.

Clothing company The Gap has sued GapNote.com and its founder for trademark infringement. GapNote.com is a new site that helps people chronicle their past, present, and future, and the gaps in between.

The lawsuit claims that the site should not be able to use the term “gap” anywhere in its name because the clothing company owns rights to the domain name.

The Gap claims:

Defendant promotes and operates a web site with the domain name gapnote.com that services as a social media and networking web page, much like those on which The Gap expends significant time, effort and money to advertise and maintain a significant presence.

So The Gap apparently thinks that if you have a social media site that includes a generic, three letter term and a trademark holder markets itself on social media sites then you’re infringing its mark.

The one thing I will give to The Gap on this is that the site’s logo does use a font similar to The Gap’s old lower case logo. (It now uses an all upper case logo.) Before reading the lawsuit I went to GapNote.com and thought “wow, that logo font is similar”, and assumed the lawsuit was about the logo. But it’s not — The Gap is claiming a lot more.

You can read The Gap’s complaint here (pdf).

Four character domain name appears to go from end user to end user.

NameMedia, which operates Afternic and BuyDomains, has brokered the sale of VSAT.com for $61,600. Historical whois records show the seller is Metro Communications Company, Inc of Illinois. The buyer is using whois privacy, but VSAT.com is now forwarding to VSAT.eu, the site of Elektrikom Satellite Services.

Other notable .com sales include:

lakegeorgehotels.com $18,000.00
collectionsagency.com $10,000.00
impure.com $8,800.00
modernbath.com $7,500.00
wholesaletile.com $7,500.00
glaven.com $7,088.00
amei.com $7,000.00
connecthealth.com $7,000.00
columbiamd.com $5,839.00
MagneticCalendars.com $5,600.00
visionize.com $5,400.00
smartteam.com $5,188.00
internationalmobile.com $5,140.00
secdata.com $4,888.00
sierrawest.com $4,788.00
kaese.com $4,750.00
taxfast.com $4,000.00
stylingstudio.com $3,988.00
utrackit.com $3,807.00
teleshow.com $3,670.00
alphabit.com $3,500.00
embryodonation.com $3,500.00
SolarSkimmer.com $3,500.00
ltue.com $3,404.00
globalreports.com $3,300.00
recoverygroup.com $3,190.00
theconflict.com $3,188.00
intaxi.com $3,000.00

The company also brokered diaspora.net along with Tucows’ YummyNames for $11,000. Other .net/.org sales include:

heaters.net $4,900.00
medilink.net $4,188.00
theconflict.net $3,988.00
nbha.org $2,889.00
airmattress.net $2,188.00
handblender.net $2,160.00
karisma.net $2,088.00
tandf.net $2,088.00
menergy.net $2,088.00
gazo.net $2,027.00