Listing level and commission changes at domain marketplace.

Afternic has revamped its web site and made changes to listing options and commissions.

Afternic previously had three listing options, one of which merely listed domains on Afternic. Now there will be two options: Afternic DLS Network and Afternic DSL Premium.

DLS Network gets your domains listed on 20 domain reseller sites, reaching 25 million prospective buyers monthly. DLS Premium gets you two more resellers, but they’re big ones: Network Solutions and Register.com. Premium also enables “instant transfer” for sales, and domains must be priced and registered at one of the Premium registrars. Afternic says the average selling price on Premium is 33% higher than DLS Network.

The basic listing level at Afternic will be grandfathered for existing domains until the end of the year.

Commissions for DLS Network are 15%, with 5% back if your domain is parked with Afternic/SmartName (so net 10%). DLS Premium commissions are 20% with the same 5% back option for parking, making it only 15% for parked domains. Minimum sales commissions are $120. The median sales price at Afternic historically has been about $1,200, so the minimum commission will rarely apply.

Influential political web site discusses domain name industry involvement in politics.

The popular political site TheHill.com — which gets well over a million unique visitors a month — has published a post about Rep. Cliff Stearns’ (R-Fla.) visit to the TRAFFIC conference in Florida next week. The story mentions the types of people that will attend next week’s conference (including an optimistic 500+ attendee figure), as well as Stearns’ political ambitions.

The article also covers the domain name industry’s lobbying contributions, citing Go Daddy as particularly active. Although Go Daddy spends more on lobbying than any other registrar, domain registry VeriSign spends much more.

The TRAFFIC show starts Sunday evening at the Loews in South Beach. Show co-founder Rick Schwartz estimates that 300-400 people will attend.

Blog network enables bloggers to syndicate their content across Demand Media web sites.

Demand Media, which owns domain name registrar eNom, has launched a blog distribution network.

Bloggers are able to syndicate their content across Demand Media’s properties including eHow.com and LiveStrong.com. Each syndicated article will include a backlink to the author’s blog. Bloggers will also share in the revenue Demand Media generates from ads alongside the syndicated content.

At one time Demand Media had a distribution network through its Pluck subsidiary, but it was very limited.

The Demand Media Blog Distribution Network could offer valuable SEO benefits as well as extra cash. But be aware that your syndicated content might outrank the content on your own page. Often times I’ll see an article syndicated from TechCrunch on a partner site that ranks higher in Google than the same article on TechCrunch.com.

Everything’s lined up for TRAFFIC Miami. It seems that it will deliver.

I’ve been a vocal critic of some of the TRAFFIC shows in recent years. They seemed to have gone a bit stale and attendance had dwindled.

That will not be the case with TRAFFIC Miami, which starts Sunday evening at the South Beach Loews. Perhaps Rick Schwartz and Howard Neu had something to prove. It doesn’t hurt that this is the only event they’re planning for this year (Rick Latona did the rest), so they have the time to focus on this event.

But it doesn’t really matter why this is shaping up to be a good event. The truth is Rick and Howard have booked some great speakers. How will Don King be as a speaker? I have no idea, but I still want to see it. Myself and the 300+ expected attendees.

Here are other things that should make this show interesting:

-Congressman Cliff Stearns, who is a member of the Telecommunications and Internet Sub-committee. Nice to have someone to hear the domain investor’s side of the story.

-New technology for networking

-Rob Monster’s successful swap event returns for an encore

If you’re going to TRAFFIC and want to start networking in advance, feel free to leave a comment.

AOL’s lawyers didn’t provide enough evidence of common law rights.

AOL owns the web site Patch.com, yet it has failed to obtain the typo wwwPatch.com through a National Arbitration Forum proceeding.

How is this possible? It seems that AOL’s lawyers may have taken this case for granted and not supplied enough evidence.

The panel found that wwwPatch.com is confusingly similar to AOL’s PATCH mark, and that the respondent doesn’t have any rights or legitimate interests in the domain name.

Proving registration and use in bad faith is where AOL tripped up. AOL got the Patch.com domain name on February 4, 2009. The typo was registered 8 days later. After the typo was registered AOL filed for trademarks. So the panelist looked to any sort of common law rights before wwwPatch.com was registered on February 12:

…Complainant has failed to provide sufficient evidence of common law rights in the PATCH.COM that would effectively predate Respondent’s registration of the wwwpatch.com domain name. Therefore, the Panel concludes that Respondent could not have registered the disputed domain name with the requisite bad faith under Policy.

I must say I’m somewhat surprised by this decision. Even if AOL didn’t provide the necessary information, 9 out of 10 panelists would have transferred the domain.