What’s going on with a major geo website and AWOL end user reports.
[Update: the sale has been confirmed.]
I spent last week vacationing in Seattle and central Washington. There was a lot of news last week and I did my best to stay on top of it (despite complaints from my wife).
One potentially big piece of news last week that I didn’t cover was a development at Chicago.com. Dan Pulcrano of Boulevards New Media, Inc. had a well researched story about the Sun-Times Owners buying Chicago.com.
Did the Sun-Times’ investors actually buy the site?
At a minimum, we know that Wrapports invested in Chicago.com. That’s on the company’s website. What we don’t know for sure, since no one involved is talking about it, is if they bought Chicago.com.
It’s true that the registered owner of Chicago.com has changed in whois. But I ran a search with the Illinois Secretary of State and determined that the new registrant – THINGS TO DO CHICAGO, INC. – is merely an assumed name of CHICAGO.COM, INC. The listing with the Secretary of State shows that Josh Metnick is still the registered agent and president of the company.
It’s possible Wrapports bought the whole thing and Metnick is still on board, but it’s also possible it was just an investment. Given Wrapports’ complementary investments such as Chicago Sun-Times (which had a partnership with Chicago.com), it seems like a good fit.
Whether it was an outright sale or investment, congrats to Metnick.
Now, an update on my weekly end-user sales reports.
Each week I uncover which companies bought domain names at Sedo and Afternic. It takes a lot of time but readers tell me it’s valuable.
I’ve run into a hitch as GoDaddy has changed how it’s serving whois results, a key ingredient to creating these reports. Until I get it resolved with GoDaddy I won’t be able to provide new reports. Hopefully it will be resolved by next week. I promise to catch up on those as soon as I can.
Leon says
Andrew, these reports are not valuable, they’re INvaluable. Seriously, you’re one of few on the Domaining feed that actually has content worth clicking through to and reading rather than just duplicated Sedo/Afternic sales lists or pigeon shit drop lists. Hope you find a resolution soon bro, I really enjoy the who bought what reports.
Andrew Allemann says
Thanks Leon. I hope to have it fixed soon.
James Bladel says
Reading your article and wanted to explain the WHOIS change.
We did recently modify our WHOIS output to comply with the new format requirements in the 2013 RAA (the WHOIS Specification), so any reporting system parsing that data will need to be updated. The good news is that the new data format will be uniform for all registrars going forward. Hope this helps.
James Bladel – GoDaddy
Sr. Director ICANN Policy
Andrew Allemann says
Thanks. That will help me track down the issue.
Andrew Allemann says
James, that helped me fix it. I need to change how I was parsing the data. I can now resume the end user sales reports 🙂