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Sep 14

GoDaddy to Advertise in 2010 Super Bowl

Domain name registrar signs up for 6th consecutive year.

GoDaddy Super Bowl Domain name registrar and web hosting company GoDaddy has purchased an ad spot in next year’s Super Bowl on CBS. This will be the sixth consecutive year the company has advertise on the big show. The company has agreed to air two spots in the Super Bowl on February 7, 2010.

If you’re wondering what the company might feature in its commercials, I have a hunch it will involve scantily clad women.

GoDaddy can credit its Super Bowl commercial strategy with launching it into the mainstream. It isn’t just the air time it buys, it’s the added media mentions thanks to being an internet company (didn’t they all stop advertising in the Super Bowl after the bubble burst?) and its controversial commercials. It’s safe to say that CBS’ censors will deny at least one version of GoDaddy’s commercial for the 2010 game.

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Sep 14

Intuit Agrees To Buy Mint.com For $170 Million

Intuit, Inc agrees to purchase personal finance website and domain name Mint.com for $170 million. Intuit, Inc. products include QuickBooks, TurboTax and Quicken.
Mint.com is a free service that allows consumers to track their expenses and investments. The site was launched approximately two years ago. The start-up’s founder and CEO, Aaron Patzer, will become general manager […]
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Sep 14

Hotel-Reservation.com Domain Checks in for Over $200k

Hyphenated domain sale is a shocker.

Sedo has brokered the sale of Hotel-Reservation.com for a shocking 142,800 EUR, or about $208,000 USD at today’s exchange rate. This is certainly one of the most expensive hyphenated domain name purchases of all time. With nearly 700,000 global searches monthly for this term on Google (and 25 million for the plural version reservations), the SEO value of this domain is certainly high. Whois records show that the likely seller was DomCollect, and the buyer is Hotel Reservation Service GmbH. UPDATE: As pointed out by a reader below, DomCollect is owned by Sedo.

Separately, HotelsWashingtonDC.com sold for a strong $22,000. That domain appears to have been purchased by Graham Easton of SwiftRank.com, a company that creates optimized travel portals.

Other notable sales include 34.com for $68,000 and ElectricGuitars.com for $42,700.

Other sales at Sedo over the past week:

.COM
7y.com 25,000 USD
juegos-gratis.com 16,500 EUR Free games in Spanish
zwan.com 15,350 USD
newharvest.com 15,000 USD
live-odds.com 8,000 EUR
christianstore.com 6,000 USD
cheapvuelo.com 5,000 EUR
mypapa.com 5,000 USD
dextro.com 5,000 USD
flashxml.com 4,800 USD
timetogo.com 4,500 EUR

ccTLDs
steroids.com.au 8,000 USD
tapisroulant.it 6,000 EUR Treadmill in Italian
testosterone.co.uk 5,500 GBP
bao.fr 4,000 EUR

Other
tagesgeld.info 11,500 EUR
travelguide.net 10,100 USD
businessschool.org 10,000 USD
tarife.org 7,500 EUR Tax in French
game.pro 5,000 USD

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Sep 14

Hotel-Reservation.com Domain Checks in for Over $200k

Hyphenated domain sale is a shocker.

Sedo has brokered the sale of Hotel-Reservation.com for a shocking 142,800 EUR, or about $208,000 USD at today’s exchange rate. This is certainly one of the most expensive hyphenated domain name purchases of all time. With nearly 700,000 global searches monthly for this term on Google (and 25 million for the plural version reservations), the SEO value of this domain is certainly high. Whois records show that the likely seller was DomCollect, and the buyer is Hotel Reservation Service GmbH. UPDATE: As pointed out by a reader below, DomCollect is owned by Sedo.

Separately, HotelsWashingtonDC.com sold for a strong $22,000. That domain appears to have been purchased by Graham Easton of SwiftRank.com, a company that creates optimized travel portals.

Other notable sales include 34.com for $68,000 and ElectricGuitars.com for $42,700.

Other sales at Sedo over the past week:

.COM
7y.com 25,000 USD
juegos-gratis.com 16,500 EUR Free games in Spanish
zwan.com 15,350 USD
newharvest.com 15,000 USD
live-odds.com 8,000 EUR
christianstore.com 6,000 USD
cheapvuelo.com 5,000 EUR
mypapa.com 5,000 USD
dextro.com 5,000 USD
flashxml.com 4,800 USD
timetogo.com 4,500 EUR

ccTLDs
steroids.com.au 8,000 USD
tapisroulant.it 6,000 EUR Treadmill in Italian
testosterone.co.uk 5,500 GBP
bao.fr 4,000 EUR

Other
tagesgeld.info 11,500 EUR
travelguide.net 10,100 USD
businessschool.org 10,000 USD
tarife.org 7,500 EUR Tax in French
game.pro 5,000 USD

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Sep 14

To Develop or Not to Develop

There is no question that certain domain names I own shouldn’t be developed by me. Purely and simply, they are domain investments, and the goal is to eventually sell them to an entity that does want to develop them.

Some domain names I shouldn’t develop are in highly competitive verticals, and it would be virtually impossible to rank high enough in search engines to drive traffic and generate revenue in a cost-effective way. Other domain names are highly targeted and specific, so even with a high ranking website, there wouldn’t be much traffic or a great pay off with development.

However, there are some domain names that I own that might make good candidates for smaller sites that can be monetized effectively with affiliate banners or Adsense, using the services of AEIOU, MiniSites.com, or WannaDevelop.com. Choosing what to develop in this manner is difficult.

Out of the names below, on which would you develop mini sites, and on which would you hold simply as investments?

BeerPairings.com
DebtSettlementCounselors.com
EasternCaribbean.com
DubrovnikVacations.com
JerusalemVacations.com
MartiniqueVacations.com
FatMetabolizers.com
Metabolizers.com
PaintHardener.com
ParabolicSkis.com
PopunderBlocker.com
RedBelliedPiranha(s).com

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Sep 14

Lawyers: We Started Investigating Moniker in 2005

Lawyers say investigation against Moniker has been long-running.

For the record, I have no idea if any of the allegations in Transamerica’s lawsuit against Moniker are true. But I do know that its lawyers bungled the first complaint they filed. It was rife with many “gotchas” that could be proven false with cursory investigation.

So I was somewhat surprised to see, in an opposition to Moniker’s request for more time to make a filing, that the law firm says it has been investigating Moniker since 2005. The law firm writes:

The main contentions in Defendants’ threatened Rule 11 motion were that Plaintiff failed to perform a cursory pre-filing factual investigation and that its legal claims were frivolous. The investigation leading to this dispute was anything but cursory. That investigation goes back to 2005 and involves virtually every one of the principal trademark clients at the law firm of Plaintiff’s counsel, all of whom have been affected by the conduct of Defendants described in Plaintiff’s complaint. Plaintiff’s pre-filing investigation includes (and included at the time Plaintiff’s original complaint was filed) reports from investigators in the Cayman Islands, China, Germany, the Netherlands, the Russian Federation, Ukraine, and the United Arab Emirates.

That makes sense and is believable. But in all that time they didn’t talk to a domain name lawyer or someone familiar with the domain name system to figure out how it works? In all that time they missed so many red flags?

But the statement I really don’t get is that the lawyers say their amended complaint against Moniker is “fundamentally unchanged” from the original complaint, and:

Plaintiff did not amend its complaint to remove any frivolous contentions or material errors. Plaintiff amended its complaint to shorten and sharpen its allegations as a means of meeting Defendants legal contentions more directly, something that could not have been done before Defendants’ contentions were known.

I don’t know the definition of “frivolous contentions” or “material errors”. But to me,changing the crux of your argument from “Moniker owns all of these domains” and set up bogus entities to hide them is very different from “Moniker’s customers own all of these domains”.

Transamerica objection filing document (pdf)

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Sep 14

Lawyers: We Started Investigating Moniker in 2005

Lawyers say investigation against Moniker has been long-running.

For the record, I have no idea if any of the allegations in Transamerica’s lawsuit against Moniker are true. But I do know that its lawyers bungled the first complaint they filed. It was rife with many “gotchas” that could be proven false with cursory investigation.

So I was somewhat surprised to see, in an opposition to Moniker’s request for more time to make a filing, that the law firm says it has been investigating Moniker since 2005. The law firm writes:

The main contentions in Defendants’ threatened Rule 11 motion were that Plaintiff failed to perform a cursory pre-filing factual investigation and that its legal claims were frivolous. The investigation leading to this dispute was anything but cursory. That investigation goes back to 2005 and involves virtually every one of the principal trademark clients at the law firm of Plaintiff’s counsel, all of whom have been affected by the conduct of Defendants described in Plaintiff’s complaint. Plaintiff’s pre-filing investigation includes (and included at the time Plaintiff’s original complaint was filed) reports from investigators in the Cayman Islands, China, Germany, the Netherlands, the Russian Federation, Ukraine, and the United Arab Emirates.

That makes sense and is believable. But in all that time they didn’t talk to a domain name lawyer or someone familiar with the domain name system to figure out how it works? In all that time they missed so many red flags?

But the statement I really don’t get is that the lawyers say their amended complaint against Moniker is “fundamentally unchanged” from the original complaint, and:

Plaintiff did not amend its complaint to remove any frivolous contentions or material errors. Plaintiff amended its complaint to shorten and sharpen its allegations as a means of meeting Defendants legal contentions more directly, something that could not have been done before Defendants’ contentions were known.

I don’t know the definition of “frivolous contentions” or “material errors”. But to me,changing the crux of your argument from “Moniker owns all of these domains” and set up bogus entities to hide them is very different from “Moniker’s customers own all of these domains”.

Transamerica objection filing document (pdf)

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Sep 14

Automated Domain Auction Fulfillment is Worth the Price

Domains at Moniker can be transferred quickly with direct and automatic fulfillment.

I often hear grumblings about how Moniker requires you to have domains registered with them in order to submit them to auction. (It’s not a requirement for the big auctions, but there is an added charge if you don’t and the domain sells.) Many people think this is just a way for Moniker to get you to transfer domains to them, but that’s ancillary to the real reason: it allows domain transactions to be finished fast.

Last week I picked up SoftwareCareers.com in Moniker’s monthly Snapnames auction. Within hours my credit card was charged and the domain name was in my Moniker account.

When I won domains at the last TRAFFIC silent auction, the two domains that were with Moniker were charged and in my account within an hour or two. The two that were with different registrars took about a week to complete.

Compare this to how it worked a couple years ago, when there was a lot of paper pushing and it took weeks to get the domain into your account. Automated fulfillment makes sense, and domains must be a Moniker to make it work.

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Sep 14

Overstock.com Launching O.BIZ Bulk Merchandise Site