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Transaction creates market leading ad network in Europe.

Montabaur, July 6, 2009. The AdLINK Group (AdLINK Internet Media AG) sells its division for display marketing, AdLINK Media, to Hi-media and becomes a major shareholder in the French online media and micropayment company. AdLINK Group will focus on operational activities and further investments in…

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AdLINK to focus on domain name marketing and affiliate marketing.

AdLINK, parent company of domain brokerage and parking company Sedo, has sold its online display marketing business to French company Hi-media S.A. AdLINK will get 10.7% of shares in Hi-media S.A. and about EUR 12.2 million in cash. The cash component will be in the form of a vendor loan by AdLINK, which must be paid off by June 30, 2011.

With the sale, AdLINK now has two primary businesses: domain marketing and affiliate marketing. The sale will allow the company to apply more focus to its domain business, so this could be a boon for Sedo and its customers.

The timing of the sale is interesting given the poor state of online display advertising. However, AdLINK can participate in the upside of an online display advertising rebound through its equity stake. The company can increase its stake in Hi-media beyond the 10.7%. Hi-media will be able to realize cost savings by joining AdLINK’s unit with its existing operations.

© DomainNameWire.com 2009.

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This morning Sedo parent company Adlink announced that they were selling their display ad group to the French Hi-Media group and in turn receives a 10.7% stake in the Hi-Media group and 12.2 Million Euro in Cash. Adlink retains ownership of their affiliate marketing (affilinet) component as well as Sedo. Adlink remains part of the United IInternet group.

More details after the jump.

From the press release:

AdLINK Media [ed. the display ad unit] is valued at 29.4 million euros and will be transferred to Hi-media net of any cash and of all debt. According to the terms of the agreement protocol, the consideration paid for this transfer will be:

• 3,940,000 newly created shares in consideration for a portion of the AdLINK Media shares;
• 795,000 existing shares currently held by the Hi-media Group for the remaining shares of AdLINK Media plus;
• A deferred payment in the form of a vendor loan of 12.2 million euros.

This vendor loan which will end the 30th of June 2011, is repayable in fine and will have an interest rate of 3.7% for the first 12 months and then 5% afterwards. The shares to be held post acquisition by AdLINK AG will be subject to a one year lockup period.

[…] In recent years, AdLINK Media has achieved EBITDA between 0.5% to 3.6%(5) but there is potential for significant improvement in margins of the combined entity and, taking into account the level of cost synergies of around 5 million euros for the full year, the transaction should be particularly accretive as early as 2010.

About Hi-Media (from the press release)

Hi-media, the online media group, is one of the top Internet publisher in the world with more than 50 million unique visitors per month on its proprietary websites. Hi-media is also a leading European player in online advertising and electronic payment. Its business model relies thus on two different sources of revenues: online advertising via its dedicated ad network Hi-media Network and online content monetization via its micropayment platform Allopass. The group which operates in 6 European countries, China, USA and Brazil employs more than 370 people and posted in 2008 135 million euros in sales. Independent since its creation in 1996, the company is listed since 2000 on the Euronext Eurolist Paris (Eurolist C) and is included in the SBF 250, CAC IT and CAC Small 90. ISIN code: FR0000075988. Hi-media qualifies for FCPI as it received the OSEO label of “innovating company”.

There are no changes to the ownership of Sedo. United Internet had assigned Morgan Stanley in February of 2008 in order to investigate a potential sale of the Adlink group.

[via Press Release, Techcrunch]

(c) 2009 DomainNameNews.com

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Sedo once more was kind enough to share some selected sales of the week up to July 6th, 2009 with us as well. Highlights include the sale of 434.com for $18,500, jaba.com for $18,000 and your.de for 16,065 Euros.

Please find the full list after the jump.

(c) 2009 DomainNameNews.com

DomainConvergence | August 12-13, 2009 | Toronto, ON, Canada

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Recent car shopping experiences are similar to buying a domain name.

What’s it gonna take to get
you into this domain today?

It’s time to replace my Acura, so I’ve been car shopping lately. I’ve checked out all the regulars, but decided it was worth stopping by the Hyundai dealer since everyone is raving about its Genesis. The Genesis is an upscale sedan priced around $35,000 — much less than comparable cars. But it’s being sold by a dealer used to selling $20,000 cars, and it shows.

From the moment I walked into the Hyundai dealer, I was in a different world. No sparkling showroom like Lexus and Acura. Cramped space. A receptionist who was busy reading a book. An old, decrepit building. It felt like I was at a livestock auction.

The Hyundai dealer used every trick in the book to sell cars to people who probably couldn’t afford them. They had open air offices, salesperson tallies on a big marker board, etc. They handed me a visitor form to fill out, asking such gotchas as “what do you want your payments to be”.

It was a miserable experience. Over the weekend I started reflecting on it, and realized how it’s very similar to the domain name sales process. People on the outside of the industry look at it with disdain and suspicion, and much of that is rightly deserved. A classic example is the sales process where domain owners ask the “what do you want your payments to be” question. Not in terms of financing as it is at the car dealer, but sizing up the pocket book of the buyer.

The salesperson in me says it’s smart to figure out how much the buyer can pay. But to the outside world, it looks slimy. It reinforces the perception that domain owners are “squatters”, just holding out to fleece a deep pocketed person who wants a domain.

The domain industry needs to shift gears. Shift away from that used-car-salesman feeling to a Lexus or Acura car dealership. Lexus and Acura are still sales machines, but they operate in a clear and transparent manner.

© DomainNameWire.com 2009.

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Seller listed domain on AfternicDLS with Expanded Promotion.

BuyDomains, the end user sales arm of NameMedia, has sold the domain name Rosary.com for $78,088. The domain was listed through Afternic.com, and the seller selected the Expanded Promotion option. This means the listing was syndicated across multiple sales sites and gave the seller access to BuyDomains’ sales team, which closed the deal.

Although NameMedia wouldn’t disclose the name of the seller, historical whois records show that it was likely Adam Dicker, owner of DNForum and GoDaddy Vice President.

The sale helped push NameMedia’s weekly sales tally up over a half million dollars again. Other notable sales included:

kapre.com $7,588.00
lottofever.com $6,400.00
stti.com $5,556.00
engineeringsystems.com $5,000.00
digisol.com $5,000.00

Sedo didn’t report any major sales this past week. Its notable sales included:

434.com $18,500
jaba.com $18,000
playcasinogames.com $10,000
campuspoker.com $8,590
acaiberryjuice.com $5,800
your.de 16,065 EUR
vivid.de 7,000 EUR
musikvideo.de 5,250 EUR
pokeronline.org 5,000 USD

© DomainNameWire.com 2009.

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And again AfternicDLS shared selected domain sale data with us for the week up to July 6th, 2009. Highlights include the sale of rosary.com for $78,088.00, engineeringsystems.com for $5,000.00 and cofounders.com for $3,500. The sales total is $548,162.60 for 341 domains, bringing the average sales price to $1,607.51 per domain.

Find the full list after the jump.

.COM Sales

Other TLD Sales

(c) 2009 DomainNameNews.com

DomainConvergence | August 12-13, 2009 | Toronto, ON, Canada

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Football team trying to get OaklandRaiders.com domain name.

National Football League franchise Oakland Raiders have filed for arbitration to get the domain name OaklandRaiders.com. The case was filed at World Intellectual Property Organization against a registrant who is using whois privacy to protect his information. The domain name is parked and shows ads for Oakland Raiders tickets and merchandise.

The Raiders’ official web site is Raiders.com.

The whois history for OaklandRaiders.com is amusing and hard to track, which is probably why the Raiders decided to file the domain dispute. Before the record turned private on March 14, 2009, the registrant listed himself as “Oakland Raiders Realty” in Dallas Texas. In 2008 the domain owner listed himself as “National Football League”, but used a Hotmail email account and an address in California.

The National Basketball Association’s Denver Nuggets are an example of a professional sports team to recently win a domain arbitration case. The team won the domain name DenverNuggets.com.

© DomainNameWire.com 2009.

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Sun awarded patent to detect spoofed domains and send web users to intended domain name.

Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) has been awarded U.S. patent 7,559,085 for “Detection for deceptively similar domain names”. The patent was filed in 2004 and awarded today.

The system includes a number of methods for detecting that someone is accessing a spoofed domain name and redirecting them to the correct domain name. For example, a web user may click on an email containing the web address 1BM.com, which is spoofing IBM.com.

The patent application cites the introduction of Internationalized Domain Names (IDN), which can contain non-roman characters, as one enabler of spoofed domain names.

There are a couple ways the system could detect and redirect a web user. In one case, the web user may have software on his or her machine that remembers frequently visited web sites. If they click a link to a similar web site, the local software would determine it to be a spoof and redirect the user to the correct domain or alert the user. In another case, a DNS server cache or internet service would determine if the domain was a spoof. This could include a system that uses web site traffic data to determine the most likely domain name the user meant to visit.

View the patent here (pdf).

© DomainNameWire.com 2009.

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Problems continue at once high-flying domain name company.

The problems keep mounting at domain development company Live Current Media (OTCbb: LIVC.ob).

The company announced that its auditor found that a slew of its reported financial statements are incorrect. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company wrote:

…C. Geoffrey Hampson, our Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer, concluded that the previously filed consolidated financial statements contained in our Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the nine months ended September 30, 2008, which was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on November 14, 2008, our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2008, which was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on March 31, 2009, and our Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the three months ended March 31, 2009, which was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on May 15, 2009, should no longer be relied upon due to errors in the consolidated financial statements…

Most of the mistakes seem minor yet basic accounting:

-The company classified warrants issued in its November financing as equity rather than a liability

-Not accounting for the pro-rated fair value of shares to be issued to founders of Auctomatic Inc. based on its acquisition agreement

-Not accruing a guaranteed bonus as a liability. Instead, the company expensed it when it was paid.

Just another diversion at a company in serious trouble.

© DomainNameWire.com 2009.

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