Are DNW videos valuable content?

Last month I posted a handful of instructional videos to Domain Name Wire and YouTube:

How to submit an invalid WHOIS complaint

How to set up and use two-factor authentication at GoDaddy.com

How to learn more about your buyer on Sedo

How to use Watch My Domains Pro

Spend just 60 seconds and never get a $60 offer on Sedo again

Each of the videos got roughly 100-200 views on YouTube.

So here’s my question to you: are these videos valuable? Would you like to see more?

They take a bit of time to create, but if readers like them I will certainly continue to product them.

Please let me know your thoughts.

Milestone shows that Escrow.com is growing very fast.

I seems like just last year that I was writing about Escrow.com topping the $1 billion mark. And that’s because it was just last year that the company announced it had crossed the $1 billion transaction milestone.

Now, about 16 months later, Escrow.com says it has already hit $1.5 billion in transactions.

It took the company 11 years to hit the first $1 billion and just over a year to hit $1.5 billion, so the company is clearly firing on all-cylinders.

A lot of it has to do with the partnerships Escrow.com has formed with the domain industry, and especially brokers. The company’s broker offering, released one year ago this month, allows domain brokers to initiate transactions and then Escrow.com sends the broker its commission directly from the escrow proceeds. Prior to the new broker tool, brokered transactions at Escrow.com would require the domain seller to send a separate payment to the broker.

Deal settles antitrust lawsuit and countersuit between adult site operator and .xxx domain registry.

.XXX domain name registry ICM Registry and adult site operator Manwin have settled their legal battle, the companies announced today.

As part of the deal, ICM will offer significantly discounted .xxx domain registrations in May and will offer similar promotions in the future.

The wholesale cost for .xxx domains will be $7.85 in May, the same price as .com. Registrars will be able to mark the price up, but you should be able to register the domains for under $10. The regular wholesale price is $62.00

ICM will also start paying $2.00 per registration to a fund designated by Manwin that supports the adult entertainment industry.

This is in addition to the amount ICM gives to non-profit IFFOR for each registration. With the discounted pricing, IFFOR stands to receive a lot less money. It previously received about $10 per registration, or 15% of the wholesale cost. With wholesale prices of $7.85 it will receive a little over $1 per registration during the promotional pricing periods.

Manwin had forbidden sites using .xxx domains from participating in its affiliate programs and showing up on its sites. It is dropping that ban.

.Com registry awarded patent for using registry data to trigger web crawling.

With Verisign analyzing how to profit from its patent portfolio, competitors should pay close attention to the company’s new patents.

Today Verisign was awarded U.S. Patent 8,433,700 (pdf) for “Method and system for triggering web crawling based on registry data”.

The patent describes ways in which a registry can provide data to other companies, such as search engines, that may help them determine when to crawl a domain name’s content.

For example, a registry can provide information about new domain registrations, registrar transfers, and deletions that can be used by search engines to initiate crawling. A domain transfer may indicate a change in ownership and a site’s use, and thus a need to recrawl the domain.

The service could also use resolution request data to indicate active web sites that should be crawled. In one example explained in the patent, increased traffic to a blog could also suggest new comments are being left on a blog post. This could warrant speedier recrawling.

In Verisign’s case with .com, it operates a thin registry so it’s zone file doesn’t include much information about each domain. The patent allows that additional data resources could be included to provide even more triggers:

Other data sources include data received from registrars such as information that registrant has changed hands, that a registrant has changed hosting companies, data received from hosting companies related to changes to the hosted websites such as file uploading data. These data feeds may be free and publicly available or may be purchased and then integrated into the systems described herein. Therefore, the quality of the data used to trigger crawls may be improved by supplementing the data discussed herein, e.g., changes to the registry database, with additional data useful to the entity performing the crawling.

New site claims to generate short domain names that can be pronounced and are available for registration.

A new site says it can help entrepreneurs find short, pronounceable, and unregistered .com domain names that they can brand for their business.

Pronouncey.com, which just launched (and itself was recently hand registered) it pretty simple. You just select the number of characters, hit generate, and then it randomly creates a domain name that it claims is pronounceable.

Does it work? I’ll let you be the judge.

Here are the first three randomly produced domain names it gave me this morning at varying lengths:

5 Characters:
Dwors.com
Ctful.com
Ypari.com

6 Characters:
zouses.com
ychers.com
bosess.com

7 Characters:
eepting.com
nuresse.com
chhings.com