Will Domain Madness be as “mad” as last year?

Domain Madness has just released the catalog for its third annual domain auction. The auction will start on March 29 with a live auction finale April 5 at 4pm CDT.

The auction starts all domains out at their reserve price, with prices ranging from $1,000 to $200,000.

Last year’s auction is best known for the sale of CamRoulette.com.

The highest priced domain in the catalog is FinancialPlanners.com for $200,000. I’m not sure on the price, but this is a killer name. Financial planners often work on commission only and pay a lot for leads. This domain could be used for a lead generation site or a paid directory.

Some of the more interesting domains priced under $10,000 include DrugDeal.com, Gyrate.com, MagicSpell.com, Uncoordinated.com, and Singalongs.com.

As always, this year’s auction will include a contest for picking the domains that will sell.

Domain name news and thoughts.

It’s been a busy day, so I’m going to summarize some of the things I haven’t gotten to yet…

- There were a lot of UDRP cases published today in which the domain owner won, including Fulltime.com, CanDoBetter.com, and intertekqeshm.com. There was also an interesting case about cult leader Christopher Marc Nemelka, who lost a claim for chrisnemelka.com. This case is interesting because the respondent managed to remain anonymous and the panel found that accepting donations didn’t show bad faith. John Berryhill handled the case.

- I’ve made a lot of good friends in the domain industry. Today I want to give a shout out to Elliot Silver. He went out of his way in the middle of the day to take care of something for me that could only be handled in NYC. Thanks Elliot!

- I wrote a guest article about .xxx for TechCrunch over the weekend. You can read it here.

- We have a bit of a drought between domain conferences now. The next “major” conference I know of is DOMAINfest coming this June in Barcelona.

Take advantage of one of the best domain sales channels.

I was quick to jump on the bandwagon when Afternic announced its new instant transfer partners for Premium Promotion last year.

With Premium Promotion you can list a domain name that you have at, say Moniker, directly in the sales path at other partner registrars such as eNom. When someone searches for the domain name at eNom they can add it to their shopping cart and buy it instantly.

That’s exactly what happened last week. I received an email saying I sold MyLaunchpad.com for $6,800.

I had the domain at Moniker and someone bought it through eNom.

The other nice thing about selling an instant transfer domain like this is that I didn’t have to lift a finger to complete the transfer. It all happened instantaneously in the background.

Afternic Premium already has four of the top ten domain registrars in its network and recently expanded with a number of European registrars. It’s great news for domainers as this list gets bigger.

Here are some other sales from Afternic over the past week. I’m sure some of them were purchased in the same way.

sincerely.com $20,000
tview.com $19,550
funlink.com $16,000
fearnoevil.com $6,500
VMed.com $6,300
amnion.com $6,000
mountainholidays.com $5,995
trat.com $5,900
marketsmarts.com $5,500
onedesk.com $5,000
Greenchat.com $5,000
webtrack.com $5,000

In case you’re wondering, I bought the domain in an uncontested drop a couple years ago. I found the name through the drop lists at FreshDrop.

Domain name registrar files two patent applications for promoting newly registered domain names.

The Go Daddy Group, parent company of domain name registrar GoDaddy, has filed a pair of patent applications related to announcing a new domain registration on social networking sites such as Facebook.

The patent applications are 12/561408 for “Social Website Domain Registration Announcement” and 12/561439 for “Social Website Domain Registration Search Engine Feed”.

The basic idea is that customers who register a domain name can announce the registration on social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn. The customer would allow the registration to be published after a set period of time (perhaps giving the registrant time to get a web site up at the address). When it is published on the social network the traffic from the link would be tracked and the domain name registrar might suggest another product to boost traffic.

The registration announcements could be posted to a Go Daddy page and/or the customers page on a social networking site.

Interestingly, the patent application suggests that one use of this would be to drive visitors to a parked domain name:

If a domain name registrant chooses an option on the control panel to immediately generate traffic, via the published link, for the parked domain page (illustrated in FIG. 4 and described in detail below), a metric, such as a pay-per-click model or click-through traffic based on 301 redirects, described below, or any other metric for measuring additional traffic may be monitored to gauge the success of the parked domain page. A registrant may have the option of keeping the domain a parked domain page to generate traffic and revenue, or may keep the domain a parked page only prior to completion of the final hosted website.

I suspect Google would frown upon that.

Company reports preliminary numbers for 2010.

Sedo Holding, parent company of domain parking and sales company Sedo, saw its revenue drop significantly in the 2010 financial year. It also took an earnings hit thanks to a devaluation of its own domain portfolio.

Revenue fell from EUR 135.3 to EUR 116.1 million in FY 2010. But this drop was expected because of a changed contractual relationship with a large affiliate marketing customer. (Sedo Holding has two main businesses – domain names and affiliate marketing.) If you exclude that one customer then sales increased EUR 6.9 million.

On the domain name side Sedo took a hit due to “unscheduled valuation adjustments” of its own portfolio of domain names totaling a whopping EUR 2.7 million in the fourth quarter of 2010.

The future looks better, though. Sedo Holding management expects to increase sales in 2011 at least 10% and to at least double earnings before taxes.