Gather round

A Domain Campfire Story

Recently I tried to dump a handful of domains that were soon to be dropped, by listing them over at Bido.com, a domain sales venue I hadn’t frequented in quite some time, perhaps a year or more.

I used to make fairly extensive use of their Sales Archive tool to see which domains had sold for what prices, particularly in the ccTLD space.

At the time I was closely monitoring .MX sales, as well as a few other extensions.

It seems the Bido team has since eliminated the ability to see the nicknames of bidders, both during auction as well as in the bid history from archived sales.  The names are now displayed as Bidder 1, Bidder 2, etc.

Perhaps this is as it should be.

Back in the day, I recall a bidder named Gunman who, to an acute observer such as myself, seemed to be buying up every keyword domain under the sun. He was infamous, in the Three Amigos sense of the term.

Or at least, that’s the way I like to remember him.

Draw

I remember when it suddenly dawned on me, digging through sales histories day after day, domain after domain, until one name began surfacing over and over: A lone Gunman, riding through Bido auctions, picking off keyword domains in every TLD imaginable, mostly for $38 (the minimum Bido Price), sometimes mowing down other bidders who were courageous, or careless enough to get in the way.

I’d had it in mind at the time to begin buying up a few keyword domains at bottom dollar prices in off-hand extensions just to feed them over into Bido auctions, like sending one stagecoach after another through an unprotected pass, right into the hands of a wanted bandolero, ready and waiting to take them down.

I never got the chance.  Before I knew it, Gunman had all but Vanished. Perhaps he’d decided to ride south with his hoard of domain names in tow.  I never could tell.

Not more than a month or so later Bido shut down operations, and that was the last I ever heard or seen of Gunman.

Legend has it, if you listen real still, sometimes, you can still hear the sound of old Gunman bidding, late at night.  Listen …

I saw that there is an upcoming Moniker & NameDrive Premium International & ccTLD Auction in July.  I thought for a moment about submitting a few domains, until I realized one thing:  An unreasonably long period of exclusivity.

Here are the official auction dates and deadlines:

Submissions End: May 10, 2012
Auction Begins: June 21, 2012 at Noon ET (9:00 am PT)
Auction Ends: July 19, 2012 at 3:15 pm ET (12:15 pm PT)

According to the SnapNames/Moniker Auction Seller Agreement to which you must comply should you wish to submit your domains, you also agree to grant exclusive rights for Moniker/Snapnames to market and sell your domains for a period of 60 days following the auctions closing date.

Let’s do the math.

If you submitted your domains today, April 12th, you’d be locked in from now until September 19th.  That’s over 5 months!!

I honestly can’t see any good in that unless you’re absolutely positive your domain will sell.

Otherwise, why keep them off the market for that long, only on the chance that they’ll sell at auction.  As many of you know, industry auctions can sometimes have fairly lackluster results.   I think it’d be considered a highly successful turnout of any domain auction if even 1/3 of the inventory sold over reserves.  Often its less.

Would you play those odds unless you were absolutely certain?

A couple days back I had an expiring one-word .tv domain on my watchlist – Auctions.tv.  It was due to drop at 3am on April 8th.  However when the evening of April 7th rolled around I somehow lost track and called it quits for the night without having set up a backorder.  It completely slipped my mind.

The next morning when I realized the missed opportunity, I quickly went to check DomainTools to see who, if anyone had caught it.

I was certainly surprised to see the words, Registrar: .TV Reserved Domains

Here you can see the whois record for yourself. (also shown below).  Notice the Creation Date.

Domain Name: AUCTIONS.TV
Registrar: .TV RESERVED DOMAINS
Whois Server: not defined
Referral URL: not defined
Name Server: No nameserver
Status: SERVER-UPDATE-PROHIBITED
Updated Date: 08-apr-2012
Creation Date: 08-apr-2012
Expiration Date: 08-apr-2022

Now I’m no expert on the policies and inner-workings of domain registries, but it did strike me as a bit questionable that the dotTV registry (a Verisign company, according to Wikipedia) could just decide on a whim to pull certain domains out of circulation.

Maybe I’m wrong, or maybe it was just sour grapes. I can see an argument both ways, and I suppose it may also depend on what the reasoning is.

In the past, the dotTV Registry was known for charging elevated registration and renewal fees on certain domains they classified as premium, but to my knowledge they ceased that business model a couple years back. Is it possible they plan to auction Auctions.tv themselves at a later date?

If anyone has any thoughts on this I’d love to hear.  Thanks

It looks as though domain registrar Name.com pushed out several new ccTLDs onto its platform today, including .ca (Canada), .fr (France), .ch (Switzerland), .cz (Czech Republic), .pl (Poland), and over a dozen others.

I observed the change around 2pm while conducting some domain research.  I like using Name.com to run a a quick bulk scan to see how many different TLDs a particular keyword or keyword phrase is registered in, as a rough gauge of popularity.

Here you can see that the new ccTLDs have been added beginning after .co.  (.mx and .com.mx got double billed for some reason).

Name.com now gives you 19 more ways to get your domain fix

I have not received any email or marketing notification from Name.com on this change yet, so this may be breaking news.

I’m sure the flexibility to register a wider variety of domains is a welcomed addition for those who already enjoy Name.com’s services.  Here is the full list of new ccTLDs:

• .ca
• .ch
• .li
• .cm
• .cz
• .dk
• .fr
• .gy
• .net.nz
• .org.nz
• .pl
• .pm
• .re
• .se
• .so
• .tf
• .wf
• .xxx
• .yt

Strangely, .net.nz and .org.nz are included, while .co.nz is not.

In the graphic below you can see current pricing for each:

I'm going to Sizzler just as soon as I register this .CM

With little fanfare and on a completely first-come, first-served basis, it appears the .NAME registry operated by Verisign has decided to release all number and number-hyphen combinations for general registration, effective immediately.  Numeric domains had been previously restricted from registration and reserved by the registry.

The following is an email I received just minutes ago from the Canadian registrar 007Names -

We are pleased to inform you that .name registry has received the approval  to remove pure numbers and combinations of numbers and hyphens from the list of names required to be reserved at the second level.

As a result and starting immediately, you will abe able to:

·         Add second level domain names with pure numbers and/or combinations of numbers and hyphens

·         Add domain names with pure numbers and/or combinations of numbers and hyphens  at the second level of a
third level domain name;

·         Add NameWatch with pure numbers and/or combinations of numbers and hyphens;

·         Add standard and premium Defensive Registrations with pure numbers and/or combinations of numbers and
hyphen; and

·         Add Email Forwarding registrations with pure numbers and/or combinations of numbers and hyphen.

Best Regards,
Support Team
007names.com

For Due Diligence: official .NAME registration restrictions

Note, the numeric restriction lift does not appear to include 1 or 2 character domains (i.e. 1.name – 99.name)

Do you believe in precognition?  Precognition is the experience of sensing a future occurrence prior to having direct first-hand knowledge of it actually happening.

I have a recent story to share that is domain related which involves what I believe may have been precognition (of some sort).

It happened this past Friday.  I woke up and was lazing in bed for a few minutes just thinking on everything and nothing at once.  It was one of those states of mind where my train of thought was just that, a train of thoughts moving broadly in succession from one thing to another.

Ever get that feeling you're on another wavelength?

At some point I found myself thinking about domain sales, (go figure) which lead me to remembering how I’d had an offer on one particular domain a couple months back that had fallen through.  I was half-contemplating how I’d priced the domain, that I felt it was well priced, and the next thought that came to me was sort of like a daydream about the domain selling through Go Daddy.

Shortly after I pulled my laptop into bed and was about to commence running through my inbox to check the morning’s email before getting up.  As I sat in bed and opened gmail, scanning down the unopened messages one subject line quickly caught my eye – Your Domain, xxxxxxx.com, Has Sold.

Yup, it was the same domain I’d just been thinking of no more than 15 minutes earlier.

Coincidence?  I don’t blame you.   I wouldn’t deny anyone a healthy skepticism, and there’s nothing that proves I had “the shinning” that day.

Let me also make an important distinction here ….  It’s certainly not the case, and I’m not claiming that I somehow predicted the sale itself would occur.   That wouldn’t bare out because the email from Go Daddy came in at 3:04 AM while I was asleep.  The thought about the domain selling didn’t enter my brain until around 9am, six hours later. So the sale itself had actually already occurred prior to my thinking that it did.

Rather, what I believe is that on some level my mind experienced a bit of foresight about the sale having happened prior to acquiring direct knowledge of the fact that it did happen.   Though there was no way I could have identified the thought as a foresight, except in hindsight. 

In case you’re wondering, the domain name Precognition.com is currently being brokered by DomainBrokers.com, while Precognition.net belongs to Frank Schilling.

What do you think?  Is precognition real?  Have you ever had a similar experience that you thought was more than pure coincidence?

Perhaps not if you list your domains for sale at Sedo, and certainly not if you care about saving 20% commission on your sale price.

As a result of Go Daddy’s recent partnership with domain aftermarket Sedo, domain names registered with Go Daddy that are listed for sale with a fixed price on Sedo.com are now automatically added to Go Daddy Auctions and are also displayed for sale in the registration path when a customer searches for available domains.

Check out the screencaps below which I took after searching  the availability of two domains on the Go Daddy homepage.  The first shows a domain name which I’ve listed for sale via Go Daddy Premium Listings.

30% Sales Commission On This Listing

This second screenshot shows a domain name which I have listed on Sedo.com with a fixed price but which I did not yet have listed via Go Daddy Premium Listings.

10% Sales Commission On This Listing

As you can see, both domains are listed for sale directly in the registration path.  To the best of my knowledge, this was not always the case with normal Go Auction listings, and is only now occurring as a result of the Sedo MLS integration.

I’m only seeing upside here. First, it eliminates the need for double entry by not having to list the domain at both places.  More importantly, there’s a difference of 20% commission between sales of Premium Listings (30%) and Auction Listings (10%).  On a $2000 domain sale that’s a real savings of $400.

Heck yeah.

As you can see, the listings follow slightly different formats.

• The Premium listing allows a user to add the domain directly to their cart for purchase, whereas the Auction listing must first be viewed on a separate page
• The Premium listing displays the price in big block letters, whereas the Auction listing displays the price in the smaller subtext underneath the main heading
• The Auction listing displays an end date, which might appeal to a sense of urgency if the potential buyer perceives there is a diminishing window of opportunity to purchase the domain

On a side note, there’s also a difference in case.  After testing a few domains, I noticed that the Go Daddy Auction Listings do not attempt to display your domains in CamelCase, but put them in all lower case letters.  While on the other hand, Premium Listings do attempt to display the domain name in CamelCase – and as you can see from the first screenshot above, got it wrong.

It lists the domain as DngIrl.com, making the capital ‘I’ look like a lower case ‘L’, due to the sans-serif font.  Another domain I looked up – Cuffa.com – was displayed as CufFa.com.  I guess no automated system is perfect.

By the way, Ladies … if you’re interested in DNGirl.com, not only does it make a great name for a domain brand or blog, it also comes with the matching Twitter handle @DNGirl.   If you contact me directly as a result of this post I’ll cut the price for you by 25%.

Up with the chickens this morning, I put on some television, and surfing the channels I came across an infomercial for a product called No! No! Hair.

The infomercial advertised the domain TryNoNo.tv.  Naturally I wondered about the choice of TLD, and whether the .COM was taken or what was behind their decision for using .TV.

It turns out No! No! Hair owns the .COM as well.  When you type in the .TV domain it fowards to TryNoNo.com with a referrer id in the URL for TryNoNo.tv.

No! No! more running ads that we can't track

This is a pretty clever way to track a television advertising campaign.  Most companies choose to advertise their primary domain (usually .COM) in television ads. While this is smart from a branding perspective, it really doesn’t allow any way to gauge the number of internet hits resulting from the ad.

In fact another such infomercial I saw this morning was for TRIA Laser using TryTRIALaser.com (coincidentally another laser hair removal product … maybe I’m in the wrong business here).

For the sake of example, let’s say TRIA Laser is also running radio ads for their product.  Using the same domain in both ads would leave them no way of knowing which ad brought in more traffic or how much, which ad is generating more sales and which advertising medium is giving the better ROI.

It’s true that the tracking via domain ‘channels’ could also be accomplished using subdomains, e.g. – tv.nonohair.com – but it could be confusing to some and may leak a fair amount of traffic to tvnonohair.com.  In this case I believe they’d actually be diluting the brand by having to own a separate .COM domain for every subdomain they use to advertise.

Just some thoughts at 5am on a Friday.

Who do you side with in the battle of the laser hair removal infomercials? Is it No! No! Hair with the .TV domain, or TRIA Laser with the .COM?

All in

Believe your eyes.  The following domains are now up For Sale:

• Poker.co.uk
• TexasHoldem.co.uk
• Omaha.co.uk
• PokerForum.co.uk

The domains are being sold by Matt Dale, Founding Director of Poker.co.uk and The Gambling Network.

I just caught wind of the sale via a discussion he started today on a mutual LinkedIn Networking Group that we both belong to.

Poker.co.uk is currently a developed website.  TexasHoldem.co.uk and Omaha.co.uk both forward to Poker.co.uk.

PokerForum.co.uk forwards to an active online poker forum at the Gambling Network’s main website.

The sale is for the domain names only, and does not include any other assets.  I spoke to Matt through email and he indicated that he has other plans for the software involving a rebrand/merger with another company, which is the reason behind the sale.

If you have an interest in acquiring any of these top-tier beauties you can reach out to Matt directly via this contact form on his website.

In recent news as covered by DNJournal, entrepreneur’s Morgan Linton and Daina Burnes launched Appraiso.com, a new automated website appraisal service.

Upon signing up to scope things out, my first thought was to do something unorthodox and test the system by evaluating a parked domain instead of a developed website.

I know the software was obviously not meant for this, but testing a system on something it wasn’t designed for can sometimes reveal useful insights.

Moreover, I’m just curious and don’t like to do things by the book.

Here’s a screencap for the Appraiso appraisal of my domain i-covergirl.com

dear Germany, can we get a second opinion on the domain value? ... please?

The domain has been parked with Above.com, and you can see its traffic and revenue metrics which I input in the fields to the left side.

It looks as though Appraiso has given a valuation of roughly four years current revenue.  For developed sites, I believe the traffic and revenue are assumed to be more stable than parked domains, so this may well be in line with what buyers are willing to pay. I’ve read that from 3 to 5 year multiples are in the norm.

Let me stop and say that I am not an expert in the area of buying and selling developed sites, at all.  I’m just going on what I’ve observed generally from following newsletters like Rick Latona, and discussions on forums and blogs.

Having recently advertised i-covergirl.com for sale on some forums, and based on feedback I’ve gotten, I feel comfortable saying that most buyers of parked domains right now are looking to pay more in the ballpark of 1 to 1.5 years revenue, which would be significantly less than the above appraisal (understandably so).

Back to Appraiso: I’m sure the system is more complex than simply calculating revenue multiples.  For example. in trying to reverse engineer the black-box (whatever the proprietary algorithm Appraiso is using), I would be inclined to guess that the parked domain’s having zero overhead (monthly revenue – monthly profit = 0) may have added some weight to this valuation.  It’s just a guess, and may not be correct.

On another note, I would also be curious as to how the Appraiso system evaluates push-button websites like that provided by Epik.com, or the new BankAds.com platform, not to mention hybrid parking solutions like SmartName shops.  All that’s required in these cases is to point your DNS to the platform.  On one hand the output is considerably more robust than pure parking, since they dynamically create sub-pages that populate with content to get indexed by search engines.  Yet they are not traditional websites in the true sense, but more of a hybrid.

Perhaps this illustrates the point as to why there is no one size fits all equation for valuating web properties and why automated appraisals are generally frowned upon by domainers – an obstacle that any such system must surely seek to overcome.

In any case, congrats to Morgan and Daina on the successful launch of their new business.  I look forward to testing appraisals on some of my developed domains proper-wise in the future.