Domain Name Wire

Zimbabwe.com seller takes huge loss

Andrew Allemann — Wed, 16 May 2012 01:10:59 +0000

Zimbabwe.com sells for a fraction of what it sold for in 2007.

We always hear stories about people who bought domains and flipped them for many times their purchase price. But the opposite also happens.

Take the case of Zimbabwe.com, which just sold for $42,500 at Sedo.

The last time this domain (reported) sold was in 2007. Purchase price: $130,000.

It’s possible the domain also changed hands in 2008. Regardless of if it has changed hands since 2007, the domain took a total haircut of $87,500 during that period.

Not pretty.

There’s not a whole lot you can do with Zimbabwe.com from a commerce perspective other than offer elephant hunting trips.

Ideally a buyer would use the domain to help shed more light on Robert Mugabe’s atrocities.

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Here’s what law enforcement wants you to do before registering a domain…

Andrew Allemann — Tue, 15 May 2012 19:27:34 +0000

Registering a domain name might become a lot more time intensive in the future.

Negotiations between ICANN and registrars to amend the registrar accreditation agreement are ongoing, and law enforcement agencies are asking for some pretty big changes to how domains are registered today.

Law enforcement proposals relate to verifying whois information and tracking more information about registrants. Law enforcement agencies that have been involved in consultations include:

Australian Federal Police
Department of Justice (US)
Federal Bureau of Investigation (US)
New Zealand Police
Royal Canadian Mounted Police
Serious Organised Crime Agency (UK)

The latest recommendations from law enforcement agencies are:

* In order to register a domain name you’ll need to phone and email verify. First you’ll receive an email with a link to a verification page. When you go to the page you’ll enter more information including verifying your phone number. You will then get an SMS code or voice message to your phone with a PIN, which you will then need to enter at the registrar’s web site before your domain is added to the zone.

* Law enforcement wants your IP address recorded at time of registration/verification.

* For annual whois updates, registrants will have to take action by completing some sort of verification. If you don’t verify/confirm your details, your domain might be suspended. This verification step will also record the registrant’s IP address.

* An alternative suggestion from law enforcement agencies is for ICANN to run a central verification system.

The silly thing about all of this is it won’t stop a criminal from doing what he or she does today. Sidestepping these systems is very easy. Just ask anyone who has created a phone verification system how many bogus requests they get from Google Voice phone numbers.

Adding these verification steps will certainly increase the cost of domain registrations and lead to massive cart abandonment at domain registrars.

Of course, this is merely a wish list from law enforcement. We’ll see what happens. You can follow the RAA negotiations here.

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Bari Meyerson latest to change jobs within domain industry

Andrew Allemann — Tue, 15 May 2012 19:05:11 +0000

Meyerson lands at eNom.

Once people discover the domain industry and all it has to offer, it’s hard to move to any other industry.

The latest move comes courtesy of Bari Meyerson. Meyerson left her long-time post at Moniker as it was being sold to Key Drive. Today eNom announced that it has hired Meyerson to work with domainers.

Here are some other people who have recently (some more recently than others) changed jobs within the industry:

Jim Grace – from DomainSponsor to Domain Holdings

Frank Aiello – from Sedo to Domain Holdings

Peter Dengate Thrush – from ICANN’s board to Top Level Domain Holdings (sure, we’ll call the board position a job)

Kamila Sekiewicz – from Sedo to NameDrive

Tessa Holcomb – from Sedo to PPX

Jeff Gabriel – from Sedo to PPX

Lisa Box – from iREIT to Oversee.net (now Moniker:SnapNames)

Who else have I missed?

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Review: Twitter self service advertising tool

Andrew Allemann — Tue, 15 May 2012 14:54:44 +0000

A great way to boost your social presence, but light on analytics.

I have a confession to make: I’ve been buying Twitter followers. 87 of them to date.

It all started when I saw a promotional tweet from American Express offering $100 in Twitter advertising credits to small business owners that wanted to try out Twitter’s new self-serve tool. Never one to turn down free advertising, I followed Amex and responded to the offer.

Twitter’s self serve advertising tool offers two ways to boost your social presence: Promoted Accounts (pay-per-follower) and Promoted Tweets (pay-per-click).

With Promoted Accounts, Twitter features your account under the “Who to Follow” section. You pay each time someone follows you, but only if they follow you because you showed up as a Promoted Account.

Here’s how Twitter support described it to me:

You are only charged when someone clicks the Follow button from the Ad itself. Your Promoted Account will appear in the ‘Who to Follow’ section, and if someone follows you from this location, you will be charged.

If a user finds you by other means, or if your account is displayed in ‘Who to Follow’, but not as an Ad, you won’t be charged for Follows.

I guess the big question is if Twitter highlights you as a promoted account in “Who to Follow” when your account would have shown up anyway. That would mean you’re paying for followers you could have gotten anyway.

Stats are quite limited, too. You can’t see which followers were paid versus free. You can’t change the date range of your stats, either. Basically, this is what you get:

At a minimum of 50 cents per follower, Promoted Accounts makes sense for some types of Twitter users. Frankly, it would even be worth it to me if it attracted good followers. But I don’t know who I’m paying for and who is following me organically, so it’s hard to evaluate the results.

The other advertising option is the Promoted Tweet. You’ve undoubtedly seen promoted tweets in your twitter stream from time to time.

These are pay-per-click. But here’s the rub: advertisers don’t get to pick which of their tweets get promoted. Instead, Twitter picks “5 of your most engaging, recent Tweets”. You have the option to block tweets from the list, but this requires quite a bit of management.

It’s not a problem for companies trying to promote their products if they don’t also tweet about other things. In my case, I frequently tweet links to other interesting domain articles. I don’t want to pay 50 cents per click to send traffic to these other sites.

I think Twitter advertising will be a gold mine for certain companies. I’ll continue to play around with it as well, but until Twitter offers more analytics it will be difficult to determine an ROI.

In the mean time, feel free to follow me (for free) @DomainNameWire

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Like I said, TAS problems doom Digital Archery

Andrew Allemann — Tue, 15 May 2012 14:42:06 +0000

IPC questions ICANN’s ability to execute digital archery.

Digital archery is doomed.

The clever way ICANN plans to “batch” applications for new top level domains will either be killed, or it will be subject to accusations and lawsuits.

Shortly after the bug in ICANN’s new TLD application system was revealed I wrote about how this was going to cast a shadow of doubt on digital archery.

Then, as the number of applications slowly trickled out and delays mounted, I mentioned it again.

Now ICANN’s Intellectual Property Constituency (IPC) is sharing the same concern:

The “digital archery” batching method announced by the ICANN Board on March 28 is complex, untried, and readily subject to gaming. The paralysis of ICANN’s new gTLD application system (TAS), resulting from a so-called “glitch” that ICANN failed to detect in testing the TAS, has now persisted for nearly a month, with no defined end in sight. This episode inescapably casts doubt on ICANN’s capacity to implement another technically complex system for batching evaluation of applications. Another such “glitch” in the earliest stages of the most ambitious and far-reaching project ICANN has ever undertaken would permanently damage the organization’s credibility, and likely call into question its continued viability as the steward of the domain name system.

Now, I understand that the IPC comes up with a lot of stuff to complain about. But it’s right in this case.

If ICANN goes forward with digital archery, applicants who end up in later batches will rightfully distrust the system after what happened with TAS.

The only way to make digital archery work is to have someone like PWC manage it. It simply cannot be done in house at ICANN.

My recommendation: find a creative economic way to persuade some applicants to wait for a later batch. With over 2,000 applications and $350 million in the bank, there’s plenty of money in the war chest.

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The inside story of Mama.com

Andrew Allemann — Mon, 14 May 2012 20:07:00 +0000

Mamma.com owner selling Mama.com.

I was originally a bit surprised to see mama.com in Moniker’s Spring Auction ending this week.

Then I realized the domain on auction is actually a typo of the once popular search engine Mamma.com — not the search engine itself. Well, sort of a typo, as I later found out.

I reached out to the founder of Mama.com owner Empresario, Omar Solis. As it turns out, his company bought the Mamma.com search engine in a deal completed in 2011. I asked him for the back story on the domain and he wrote a good explanation. Rather than chop it up, I’ve decided to publish it in full here….

The back-story:

Mamma.com was once a promising search engine from the “.com-bubble” era. It was founded in 1996 by a graduate student from Quebec Canada named Herman Tumurcuoglu. Eventually it got funded and taken public, ultimately merging with a desktop search company named Copernic in 2005. They also wanted to own the single ” m” version of their brand name and an Executive at the company acquired mama.com from a small us-based organization sometime around 2000-2001.

In 2009 we acquired the Mamma.com search and ad network assets from Copernic, which included the two domain names. Originally the deal was for $5 million, but we ended up paying $500,000 for all the assets. We took over the business in 2009, but did not take ownership until Sept 2011 when the sale was finalized with the assistance from a well-known American investor.

Although mamma.com didn’t make it to the big stage as a search engine, it still enjoyed a loyal user base from the US, Canada (especially French CA), France, and Asia. The Ad Network business was also profitable, generating several million dollars a year in revenue. Plus it came with the mama.com domain, which I knew had plenty of value in itself.

Present day:

Today we continue to operate the ad network and monetize the search engine traffic from mamma.com, which has proven to be a steady revenue business. In addition we operate a business incubator called Empresario.com, where we work with nimble entrepreneurs to create new value from our business platforms. Predominately working with online publishers, advertisers, and agencies that leverage our resources to advance their own business.

Our plan this year is to develop our incubator business further, so we decided to systematically dismantle and sell assets that did not directly support our current goals. After the mamma.com deal was finalized in Sept, we took a step back and evaluated the business from top to bottom. What we uncovered was a nice cache of Internet assets that no longer supported our objectives, but had tremendous value.

A good portion of these assets came in the form of premium domain names that we acquired over the years and have been sitting on parked pages. A while back we did well in domain parking but after 2009 our revenue channels became more diverse and parking was overlooked. In regards to selling domains, we have always entertained offers and have sold many domain names over the years, but have never made it a full-blown effort like we are doing now.

Coincidentally, at the end of 2011 we started receiving serious 6-figure offers for mama.com, mostly interest from China and Japan where our largest offers have originated. As we drilled further into the analysis, we figured out that all the type-in users that went to mama.com, were looking for “female/maternal” topics and not a search engine. Separating and selling mama.com from mamma.com started making sense.

Also the sale includes the Twitter handle @mama, which will give this deal a unique twist. I have have not heard of many domain sales that also included the related Twitter handle, which these days is an excellent value-add.

Currently we are focused on the mama.com sale, but we have also put up a sample of 36 premium domain names from our portfolio that are currently available for sale via our site. In the next few weeks will place the rest of our portfolio on Sedo & Snapnames, except for a few exclusives that will only be offered on our website.

Hopefully mama.com will sell via Moniker’s auction this week, but regardless we will continue to push the sale this year, as we are eager to focus on our core business.

You can reach Solis here.

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VL.com Domain Name Stolen, Too. Here’s the Inside Story.

Now this is a creative UDRP argument

Andrew Allemann — Mon, 14 May 2012 17:58:03 +0000

You violated someone’s rights when you registered the domain, even if it wasn’t our rights.

Think you’ve seen them all?

Here’s a very creative argument from Stabilus GmbH, maker of electronic tailgate openers, on why a UDRP panel should give it the domain powerise.com.

Stabilus started using the “Powerise” term in commerce back in 2008. But the domain was been registered in 2002.

Under the guidelines of UDRP, the registrant couldn’t have registered the domain in bad faith since Stabilus didn’t have rights in the mark at the time of registration.

Hence this creativity:

The Complainant also indicates that other companies are using “Powerise” as name and trademark, such as the company Babcock Borsig (owning the trademark POWERISE POWERPLANT), and Powerise Consult, which, according to the Complainant’s verifications, would have been using the mark since 1998/99 and 2001, respectively. The Complainant contends that, therefore, the Respondent must have applied the disputed domain name on January 21, 2002 with knowledge of third parties’ rights in the name. The Complainant also states that the Respondent’s bad faith when it registered the disputed domain name must lead to a right for the transfer of it to the Complainant, even though the Complainant’s trademark registrations are more recent than the Respondent’s registration of the disputed domain name.

In other words, when you registered the domain someone else had trademark rights in the term. You registered in bad faith on someone else’s rights, so you should transfer the domain to us.

In one blow Stabilus shows that its rights in Powerise aren’t all encompassing and makes a really dumb bad faith argument.

Needless to say, Stabilus GmbH lost.

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