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Domain Capital successfully defends H.co.uk domain

by — Policy & Law 0 Comments

This story is brought to you by the letter H.

Domain name financing firm Domain Capital has sucessfully defended (pdf) its domain names H.co.uk and H.uk in a cybersquatting dispute.

.UK manager Nominet auctioned off many valuable one letter domains in 2011 and a Domain Capital Client bought H.co.uk in the auction for £16,000. The buyer later defaulted and Domain Capital took over the domain.

The cybersquatting complaint was filed by a UK company called H Limited. The company seems to believe it is the only company in the UK that could legitimately use the domain.

This runs contrary to what the Complainant stated in correspondence with the Respondent in 2015, when the Complainant’s representative proposed splitting the .CO.UK and .UK domain names among different purchasers, stating, “I can imagine a number of individuals to whom ‘H.UK’ would have the numerical value you describe”.

Attorney John Berryhill, who represented Domain Capital, noted that the Complainant’s imagination has become much more limited in the intervening several years.

(The Complainant replied to this assertion with an explanation I don’t really understand.)

The Nominet panelist noted:

[T]he Complainant cannot claim all-encompassing rights in the letter H on the basis of the evidence put forth (and indeed it is highly unlikely that any brand owner could ever claim exclusive rights in a single letter of the alphabet, even a huge conglomerate), and the Respondent certainly does have a reasonable justification for having registered the Domain Names, namely resale.

and

Trading in domain names can be lawful, and indeed there is a thriving domain name aftermarket. What is prohibited is attempting to profit from another’s goodwill and reputation in a name and, as explained above, the shorter that name, the more difficult it is to convincingly evidence abuse. In the case at hand, the letter H could relate to just about anything, hence its value when used as a .CO.UK or a .UK domain name.

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Holding cash for buying opportunities

by — Uncategorized 6 Comments

It’s a curious time in the financial markets. What about the domain market?

It’s hard to believe that the greatest stock market crash and economic recession of our generation is now a decade old. Since then, at least as far as the stock market is concerned, it’s been nowhere but up. There have been some blips, such as this week, that serve as a reminder. But those have usually been followed by a continued march upward.

It can be easy to become complacent in such environments. I personally like to keep cash on the sidelines to buy into opportunities when the market dips–whether that’s for stocks or domain names. Unfortunately, you can’t time these things. I ended up keeping way to much cash on the sidelines over the past five years as the market soared.

That said, some of the best domain investments I made were when people were hungry for cash during the great recession.

Although the domainer-to-domainer market is a bit soft right now, it seems like some of the valuations people are putting on domains in the expiry stream are rather frothy. The prices don’t seem sustainable when you consider the typical domain investment practice of selling 1%-2% of a portfolio per year. That doesn’t work if you buy at prices that you can only get a 5x return on when the domains finally sell.

I’m continuing to hold cash on the sidelines for the true buying opportunities. But my conservative approach is probably why I don’t drive a Bugatti.

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Domain stocks hit hard in market

by — Uncategorized 1 Comment

Domain name stocks haven’t been immune to the market rout.

It’s been a rough week in the stock market, especially yesterday and today. The NASDAQ shed 4.7% in the past two days.

There aren’t that many publicly traded domain companies anymore on the big exchanges, but here’s a look at how the remaining ones fared over the past two days:

Endurance International Group (NASDAQ:EIGI) -0.9%

GoDaddy (NYSE:GDDY) -3.9%

Tucows (NASDAQ:TCX) -3.9%

Verisign (NASDAQ:VRSN) -5.7%

Overall, the domain stocks did better than the markets as a whole. It’s worth noting that GoDaddy, Tucows and Verisign have had significant gains over the past couple of years.

Web.com officially went private this week. What timing!

 

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Automattic readies CrowdSignal survey platform

by — Domain Sales 2 Comments

Company acquires CrowdSignal.com and applies for trademarks.

Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, is getting ready to launch an online polling/survey platform.

The company recently acquired The CrowdSignal.com domain name and has registered many variants of domains with “CrowdSignal” in them. CrowdSignal.com currently resolves to a WordPress site that is protected.

At the end of September, Automattic applied for two intent-to-use trademarks for ‘CrowdSignal’. The Goods and services are listed as:

Application service provider (ASP) featuring software in the field of online voting, surveys, polls, quizzes, questionnaires, assessments, and ratings for use with websites, blogs, email and social media.

It will be interesting to see if CrowdSignal is primarily a tool for use with WordPress or if it’s a standalone survey and polling solution.

The CrowdSignal.com domain name was listed on domain sales platform Undeveloped.com with a $25,000 asking price prior to its transfer to Automattic.

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11 more end user domain name sales

by — Domain Sales 4 Comments

A clothing Designer, a project management company and a discount travel site bought domain names last week.

This week we have a rarity: a .net domain name was the second highest sale among end user sales I found at Sedo. Mahjong.net sold for $10K.

That and B13.com were the only 5-figure sales from last week that I was able to find. There were several sales at $5K and above including UHive.com, a social network with an interesting twist. Uhive has been using a new TLD.

Take a look at some of the end user sales at Sedo this past week, and you can view previous weeks’ lists here.

B13.com €13,000 – This domain forwards to the .DE version of the site for a German online digital communications agency. The agency’s name is b:dreizehn; dreizehn translates to “thirteen”, so they now own the shorter numeric .com version of their domain.

Mahjong.net $10,000 – This forwards to the .Com version of this gaming site that offers free Mahjong games online playable on desktop, tablet and mobile.

UHive.com $9,999 – This site forwards to UHive.life. It claims to be a comprehensive social network, the “World’s First Social Network With Physical Dimensions. Combining technology with Human psychology to deliver a new, remarkable and unique user experience.”

Norlha.com $5,500- Norlha is a clothing company based in China that works with high-end Paris fashion houses. They use the domain NorlhaTextiles.com, so this shorter domain was a nice pickup for the company.

TheWorldTour.com $5,000 – This looks like the landing page for a travel adventure club. Their tagline is “A social, member driven, international travel club of fun people. Awesome trips since 2000!”.

QUWI.com €5,000- This 4L .com has a preview page with the message: “World’s easiest project management system with screenshots.”

Viagens.com.br $3,300 – Forwards to Leblon.com.br, a travel booking site for Brazil where you can reserve discounted hotels, cars and airline tickets. Viagens translates to travels so this is a  keyword term.

ConnectingHelp.com $3,000 – This site is in development for a Montessori school in London called Over the Rainbow.

MyFellow.com €3,000 – This domain was purchased by Towerview Health, which also operates PillBox.com, a prescription medication subscription service and “personal assistant” for medications. Perhaps My Fellow will be an offshoot service for this company.

Inlogy.com $2,500 – Forwards to the .DE version of this site for a German software engineering company.

MachineCafe.fr $2,000 – This site operates as a French music forum where users can make comments on albums.

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