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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.

Frank Schilling Loses His First UDRP

by — Policy & Law 31 Comments

Schilling’s company comes down on wrong end of ChilliBeans.com decision.

Frank Schilling’s Name Administration has lost its first UDRP decision, spoiling a perfect record of success (according to searches at National Arbitration Forum and WIPO).

Schilling, teamed up with attorney John Berryhill as usual, failed to convince a three person WIPO panel that its use of the domain name ChilliBeans.com was generic. The complainant is a company selling sunglasses under the “Chilli Beans” brand, mostly in Brazil.

Based on his record, you can have no doubt that Schilling registered the domain name with the generic term in mind. But at some point in time links related to glasses started popping up on the landing page. Most of the page was about the generic term chilli beans (more commonly spelled “chili”), but apparently there were a limited number of links related to glasses.

The complainant brought up the issue of willful blindess, as described by the panel:

There are circumstances, however, where an unwavering adherence to conventional wisdom may unduly and unnecessarily frustrate the fundamental purposes of the Policy. This is clearly the teaching of Panel decisions holding that that those who register domain names in large numbers for targeted advertising through the use of automated programs and processes cannot be willfully blind to the possibility that the names they are registering will infringe or violate third-party trademark rights.

Essentially, here’s what happened:

1. Schilling registered what he believes to be a generic keyword domain name
2. The domain is parked, and automated programs populate it with ads related to chilli beans as a food
3. Over time, some ads that may be construed as relating to the trademark show up
4. The trademark owner files UDRP and gets the domain name

Incidentally, Chilli Beans uses the domain chillibeans.com.br, so it’s no surprise that many people ended up at chillibeans.com. The complainants used Alexa data to show that 75% of visitors to the domain name were from Brazil. It also showed a Google search that its domain name is first in Google for the term “Chilli Beans”. This must be in Brazil only, because a search I just ran shows it in the #5 spot.

You can also infer from reading the decision that, after Schilling removed all links related to the trademark, the complainants then visited the parked page and did a search for a trademark related term to bring up a page of “infringing” links. You can do this on just about any domain. [John, if you read this please confirm if this is the case.]

This is a case of finding a “gotcha” and could really happen to anyone. Although it’s outside the scope of the policy, it would seem that in a case where someone has such a solid record of avoiding trademarked domains, and something small happens to potentially infringe, that changing the domain’s content to be non-infringing should be a fair resolution.

After all, here’s what this case is really about: Chilli Beans is moving into the U.S. and wants the .com domain name.

[Full decision here. Thanks Ramiro for the tip.]

Schilling and Berryhill Win Another UDRP

by — Policy & Law 22 Comments

Frank Schilling, with help of John Berryhill, successfully defend domain name.

Frank Schilling’s Name Administration has won an arbitration case brought by a trampoline company. Domain name attorney John Berryhill represented Schilling.

NAOP, LLC, which apparently manufactures trampolines under the JUMPRO brand, filed for arbitration. I can find little information about the company, and jumpro.com is in use by a company unrelated to the trampoline manufacturer.

The panel decided that the NAOP did not prove it had rights in the mark at the time the domain name was registered. It further said that there was no evidence of bad faith since Schilling could not have known about the trademark when he registered the domain. The trademark was not approved until 2006, a couple years after the domain was registered.

Berryhill requested a finding of reverse domain name hijacking, but the panel declined and explained, “Given the virtual identity between the JUMPRO mark and the domain name, the Panel accepts that Complainant honestly believed its rights were being infringed.”

Schilling is known for owning a large portfolio of non-infringing generic domain names. This is the fourth UDRP at National Arbitration Forum that Name Administration has one this year. Previous wins include Timpano.com, xoft.com, and FoodEmporium.com.