Domain broker sells Fiver.com for $70,000.

Fiverr.com — a site where people offer to do a bunch of different things for $5 each — may have just upgraded its domain name for 14,000 $5 bills.

The popular site has a cool idea but a bad domain name, Fiverr.com with two ‘r’s. But someone just bought Fiver.com with one ‘r’ through domain broker Sedo for $70,000.

The new owner’s information is protected by whois proxy and the domain name is just pulling up a Go Daddy landing page when you visit, so I can’t confirm that Fiverr.com bought the domain name. But who else would? A bold competitor?

Here are some other top sales at Sedo over the past week.

.com
instyler.com 50000 EUR
b3.com 25500 USD
goutattack.com 15500 USD
takeon.com 10000 USD
enfore.com 10000 EUR
jl-i.com 10000 USD
lifecity.com 8500 USD
freewebstore.com 7500 USD
kidar.com 6500 USD
cash-back.com 6500 EUR
somit.com 6050 USD
instigate.com 6000 USD
safeonlinecasino.com 5500 USD
mobileimpact.com 5010 USD

ccTLDs
carinsurance.tv 8000 GBP
einfachanders.de 7500 EUR
mobilewebsites.co.uk 5500 GBP
sportsmemorabilia.co.uk 4477 USD
tower.me 3500 USD

Other
makemetaller.info 12500 USD
carpet.info 8500 EUR
kansascity.net 6600 USD
chatten.eu 3990 EUR
buysoma.net 3500 USD
men.info 3300 EUR

Facebook gets its deals on, but without FacebookDeals.com.

Facebook formally launched its new deals offering today in five test cities (including my home town of Austin, Texas.) Here’s what I see when I go to Facebook.com/deals:

One thing the social networking behemoth doesn’t have is the domain name FacebookDeals.com. That domain was registered way back in 2006 and has been protected by a whois proxy ever since.

Not having this domain isn’t a bit loss for the company. People come to Facebook.com anyway, and I suspect most awareness of the Deals offering will come through social interaction while users are logged in to Facebook.

The caveat is that the domain name could be used in a way that damages Facebook’s brand, such as an online sweepstakes that looks like it’s part of Facebook. Or a phishing attempt.

For now the domain name resolves to a simple 1&1 “coming soon” page.

Company mad about having to pay for domain name. Files a lawsuit instead.

NameMedia — the company behind BuyDomains and Afternic — has been sued by a small business that’s upset it needs to pay to get the domain name it wants.

New World Solutions, Inc. filed suit (pdf) against NameMedia over the domain name NewWorldSolutions.com. The company claims to own a “copyright” for the “New World Solutions” with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

It has been in business since 2005 but didn’t contact NameMedia about the domain name until 2010.

I tried to research and find out more about the plaintiff. But there are at least three different companies at the top of a Google search for “New World Solutions”. None of the three match up directly to the addresses/information provided by the plaintiff in the case.

This isn’t the first time NameMedia has been sued by someone claiming the company is cybersquatting. I guess it comes with the territory when you own about a million domain names.

Yet I suspect New World Solutions didn’t do the math when it decided to file this claim. Even if it wins the case, it will spend a lot more money doing so than just buying the name.

Company files statement with SEC.

I haven’t seen many SEC filings from Live Current Media in a while, so I went poking around yesterday to figure out what’s going on.

That’s when I came across this SEC filing that shows that Live Current Media had only 143 holders of record as of March 21, 2011. Because it has less than 300 holders of record, the company is no longer required to file typical public company reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

(You’ll note that the filing appears to be copied from 3Com corporation, as it states “3Com Corporation has caused this certification/notice to be signed on its behalf by the undersigned duly authorized person” at the end.)

So the long, sad saga of a company that (once) owned some of the world’s greatest domain names won’t be as public any more.

(Thanks to George K for helping me understand the SEC filing.)

Small sites and big sites both have drawbacks for search traffic.

It’s been a rough couple months for web publishers with massive content libraries.

Google’s “Panda” update put a huge dent in these sites’ traffic metrics. With lost traffic comes lost ad revenue. With that layoffs will follow.

And it’s not just the “evil content farms” that got hit. I’ve spoken to many brand name publishers with solid, well-sourced, professionally-written articles that have been dinged (albeit not as hard).

So what does this mean for publishers that want stability in the future?

They should take the Goldilocks approach: not too small…not too large…just right.

Let’s start with too small. A lot of domainers fall into this category. They develop minisites with 5-10 pages of content. They have to do SEO work for each and every one of these sites. The work required to get some inbound links doesn’t justify the amount of traffic possible on the small sites.

These sites are too small.

Then there’s the mega content hub, like Demand Media’s eHow. These span hundreds of thousands of pages (I think that’s the number. I tried Googling “how many pages does eHow have?”. There was no eHow article about it.) Mega hubs like this attract a lot of search engine juice and newly published articles get indexed with authority quickly.

Or at least they did.

The problem is they span such a large topic base that they start to flood the search engines. Any bad content on the hub gets ridiculed. People start to hate the site. Then the uproar becomes big enough that people complain to Google. Google creates a tool for people to block sites, and then that blocking data is used in future algorithm changes. Poof.

These sites are too big.

So what sites are just right? That’s a tough question. Like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, this is a case where you need to try out all three sizes to find the one that’s just right.