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HomeAway.com Evicted in Domain Dispute

by — Policy & Law 6 Comments

Vacation rental directory loses domain name dispute.

HomeAway.com, Inc. has lost its domain dispute for HomeAwayFromHome.com against Frank Schilling’s Name Administration. Name Administration was defended by domain attorney John Berryhill.

Name Administration bought the domain name for $1,400 in an expired domain name auction in 2005. HomeAway.com acquired the Home Away From Home trademark from another company in 2007.

The arbitration panel at National Arbitration Forum found that Name Administration had rights and legitimate interests in the generic domain name. The panel found that Name Administration’s use of the domain name as a pay-per-click web site was a bona fide use of the domain name, and also noted that HomeAway.com does not have exclusive rights to the common phrase “home away from home”:

The Panel also finds that the terms of the homeawayfromhome.com domain name are generic and of common use and therefore, Complainant does not have an exclusive monopoly on the terms on the Internet.

Hurting HomeAway.com’s case was that, although it acquired the trademark “Home Away from Home”, it has barely used the term in commerce — and has used it in its generic nature on its web site.

New York Magazine Buys Vulture.com Domain Name

by — Domain Sales 6 Comments

Vulture.com now forwards to popular blog at New York Magazine.

New York MagazineNew York Magazine has acquired the domain name Vulture.com for its popular entertainment and culture blog Vulture.

A review of historical whois records shows that Frank Schilling’s Name Administration sold the domain name to New York Magazine. Records indicate that the domain was transferred to New York Magazine around September 2.

This is an interesting example of a domain purchase by a major media outlet. What makes it interesting is that it acquired a domain name for a popular subsection of its web site, not just the main site. It’s a direct navigation play. The publication has a number of popular blogs, and owns the corresponding domain names for two others: TheCut.com and GrubStreet.com. It does not own the domain for four of its other key blogs:

-DailyIntel.com (parked)
-TheProjectionist.com (owned by Warner Bros.)
-TheSportsSection.com (owned by Upper Deck, which also owns SportsSection.com)
-Surf.com (owned by household products company)

I have no doubt New York Magazine paid dearly for Vulture.com. Not only is it a good domain, but Name Administration doesn’t sell domain names for cheap.

Incidentally, Vultures.com goes on the block in New York this week for $25,000-$50,000. Rest assured that Vulture.com sold for many times that amount.

Name Administration Looks to Direct Advertisers

by — Domain Parking 12 Comments

Name Administration to offer direct ad placement on its domain names.

Perhaps in a bid to counter falling pay-per-click revenue, Frank Schilling’s company Name Administration is soliciting direct advertisers via a banner on some of its parked pages:

The service will be called LinkBox. The description at Linkbox.com reads:

Welcome to Linkbox.com.

Direct advertising opportunities will be available soon with prices from less than $30 a month.

If you would like to be contacted with further information please leave your email address below and you will receive a message when the service is ready for use.

Your email will only be used to provide information on the availability of LinkBox.com ads and won’t be shared with third parties.

Alternately you are welcome to check back at the website you wish to advertise on for further instructions as we get closer to launching the service.

Thanks,

LinkBox.com

You can see an example of the banner at 2703.com.

It makes sense to strike direct relationships with advertisers to bypass third party advertising aggregators such as Yahoo and Google. However, you need a self serve and scalable platform to do it across long tail domain names.

Frank Schilling Tests New Domain Parking Templates

by — Domain Parking 20 Comments

Schilling’s Name Administration tests new parking templates.

Mike Cohen of WannaDevelop.com has made some interesting observations about Frank Schilling’s parked domains. It seems that Schilling is testing some new designs.

Here’s what a typical Name Administration (owned by Schilling) domain that I come across looks like:

You have a relevant graphical header, 5 keyword tabs along the top, a section of either direct ad links or related keywords, related keywords on the right, and then pictures at the bottom with more keyword links.

Now take a look at this domain, also owned by Schilling:

It looks like a search results page. The first result is actually a link to a page that looks like his other parking pages. The other results are direct ads.

Schilling is also trying the opposite approach by adding non-ad content to some of his parked pages, as seen on this one:

It also appears that Schilling has been venturing into full-scale development.

On his site Cohen observes:

[Schilling] is still sticking to his guns and knows what performs best and hasn’t yet rolled this out across all of the 1000’s of premium domains he owns such as antarctica.com and propertylistings.com or foreigncurrency.com — But slowly and surely I see more and more of this domains popping up with a fresh and new look to them and better monetization and use of traffic.

There’s one other observation not on Cohen’s site but that some people have noticed lately: domain for sale signs.

Read more of Cohen’s observations here.

Frank Schilling Changes Registrar Name

by — Domain Registrars 13 Comments

Registrar for Frank Schilling’s Name Administration empire changes name.

I was always a bit confused about the name of Frank Schilling’s domain registrar, Domain Name Sales Corp. Schilling would lament on his blog about how many purchase inquiries he received, when he generally did not sell domains. Well, if I saw a domain name registered at “Domain Name Sales Corp”, I would think it was for sale.

An astute reader noticed that the name of the registrar has changed from Domain Name Sales Corp to iRegistry. This appears to now be reflected in the whois records of domains owned by Schilling’s company Name Administration.

In addition to consumer confusion over the name, there’s another reason I think this move was smart. Lawyers look for any angle possible to prove that you registered a domain in bad faith. By pointing to the name of the registrar as “Domain Name Sales Corp”, a lawyer could suggest that the domain was registered purely for the intent of resale.

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