T-Error

While watching the New England Patriots play the New York Jets today at the Meadowlands in New Jersey, I have been catching up on some domain news from the past week, including an article about the Jets.com domain sale.

I read that Jets.com was sold by Sedo for $375,000 last week. According to the Whois information, the registrant is currently “Sedo LLC Domain Transfer Escrow Service” which is standard for domain names that are undergoing an ownership change with Sedo acting as the intermediary.

I also saw that the nameservers are currently set to Sedo’s DNS, ns1.sedoparking.com ns2.sedoparking.com, although I am not sure when those nameservers were changed. Previously, the domain name was owned by a private jet charter service, and the website was a jet airplane booking engine.

At the moment though, it appears that the domain name has advertising related to the NFL’s New York Jets (see screenshot below). There are PPC ads for the following football-related offers:

HSN.com: “New York Jets Shop for Jet’s Gear at HSN Low Prices On NFL Team Merchandise!”

NFLnewsline.com: “Patriots vs Jets Matchup Our NFL Game of the Week! Get the Latest Info & Week 2 predictions.”

Justbuytickets.com/Jets: “NY Jets Tickets Just Buy New York Jets Tickets New York Jets Tickets All Games”

I am not an attorney and have very limited legal knowledge, but I am wondering whether this usage could put the domain name at risk. If there is any risk, I am wondering who has responsibility for this risk, since the domain name is technically registered to Sedo right now pending transfer to the buyer.

This would certainly be a moot point if the NY Jets purchased this domain name, but if they didn’t, I sure hope the new owner will take steps to mitigate the risk ASAP. This is somewhat similar to the Dolphins.com UDRP (domain now owned by the NFL), although the Dolphins still aren’t using Dolphins.com. Incidentally, there was a UDRP filed for Dolphins.com and Jets.com back in 2000, but it was terminated.

Related posts:

1. Miami Dolphins Not Using Dolphins.com A few weeks ago, I reported on the Miami Dolphins…
2. Dolphins.com UDRP Update As reported last week, the Miami Dolphins filed a UDRP…
3. Sedo to Repeat .mobi Auction According to a post on DomainNameNews.com and a post on…

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I am a person who is interested in many things. Although this blog is clearly about domain names, I actually enjoy studying other subjects too, such as finance and economics, but do I write about them? Rarely.

That is so because whenever I have written a post on something other than domain names, interest in that blog post was low. Too low, I should say. My stats also indicate that the number of readers who unsubscribed was significantly higher on days when I published a finance-related article, for example. I have only written a handful of those so far, but I’m afraid I won’t be doing it again in the future.

Blog readers seem to be looking for one specific topic, and they don’t like having to read something unexpected and unrelated to the blog’s main topic. If you look at the popular blogs out there, niche blogs are the most successful! I used to own a blog where articles about various topics were published, but that blog never really took off. In my experience, it is a lot easier to publish a niche blog and to make yourself a name in that specific niche. Any why not? It is more convenient for readers and it is easier for a blog to turn into a brand when only servicing one niche.

Pick a niche that you’re interested in and that you know. Only this way you can produce content that is superior to that of competing blogs. If you’re a specialist in something, chances are good that you will be able to write insightful blog posts about that topic. Use that to your advantage and always remember: Stay on topic.

So, I decided to do away with the Finance & Economics category of my blog. That category only includes very few articles anyway, and I will just archive them in the “Café” category where I have occasionally published off-topic posts or blog announcements. In the future you will only read domain-related articles from me on this blog. Possibly I will start another blog for the other topics I’m interested in, but this one shall be strictly about domain names or web development from now on.

Copyright © 2003-2009 Dominik Mueller.

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1. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
2. German content category added
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I can’t believe it, this is my 52nd comic strip. We’ve had some good and bad, but it’s been fun. Thank you everyone for your support through all of them.

My favorite ten (in no specific order):

Domain Flipping (1st comic)
Anatomy Of A Hard Core Domainer
GoDaddy Checkout
GoDaddy Checkout (another version)
Won’t Budge On Domain Sales Price
.tel But No […]
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DotWeekly calls Chef Patricks latest domaining news video something that “crossed the line,” in their recent article. A commenter from the DotWeekly article says that Patrick had “to resort to gratuitous nudity to get people’s attention.” While what Patrick did was too graphic for the eyes of some, he was simply following one of the most effective marketing techniques in America today, subliminal advertising.

While Patrick’s video showed a very obvious subliminal message to a demographic consisting mainly of adults, companies such as Disney have shown subliminal ads to kids of all ages, especially younger kids. For example, take a look at the picture below.

When Disney’s The Little Mermaid first came out, the picture to the left was a snapshot of the picture on the cover. At first glance, this looks like your everyday children’s movie cover in “fantasy land.” But take a closer look at this picture. Here’s another hint, look at the background of this picture. Do you notice what the towers in the background all look like? They each look like a man’s penis. It was even admitted by Disney that the person in charge of designing the cover for The Little Mermaid intended for it to look like penises in the background. After a large controversy, and realizing that this probably isn’t great for their image, Disney did have the illustration redone. But nonetheless, Disney subjected kids as young as 1, 2, and 3 to a very inappropriate subliminal image, and is just as guilty, if not more guilty than Chef Patrick.

The main point of this entire article is that Chef Patrick showed us an interesting way of associating the domaining and internet industry with subliminal ads, which as I said before, is one of the leading, most effective forms of advertising today. Whether I agree or disagree with the way he went about associating the two, I am not really sure to be honest. So I’d love to get your thoughts on this!

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Rick Schwartz has been writing about how Google turned off serving ads on his minisite, a few days ago, without notice or a right to appeal.

Rick asks in his 2 posts, what does that type of treatment say, for how Google feels about domainers.

Well Rick,  Google has been operating like this for years.

Many years.

Remember when Google Implemented “Smart Pricing” many years ago?

At that time we had a direct contract with Google.

One day we noticed our revenue got slashed dramatically, overnight.

We called our Google Rep to find out what happened, no response.

We e-mailed our Google Rep to find out what happened, no response.

We left support tickets, no answer.

It wasn’t until a WEEK passed that we received a any notice from Google.

Google told us that they had implemented “smart pricing”, not only without prior notice, but without notice for a week until after it was in effect.

To this day, Google has never supplied a domainer its “smart pricing” ranking.

Compare this to Yahoo which gave the world months of notice of its “Panama” project and its newest quality score adjustment that was launched on September 9th.

Google doesn’t tell you what your “smart pricing” score is, whether its gone up or down since last week, last month or last year, how it is computed or any other information on this extremely important issue which dramatically affects what domainers earn from Google.

When I asked a question to Matt Cutts at the TRAFFIC show, I got the standard answer you always get whenever you ask Google about this: Its proprietary information and we aren’t going to tell you.

Nice.

Compare this to Yahoo which shows you your accounts quality score on a scale from 1-10 every day of the year, (even when you use a parking company) clearly showing any changes.

How about domains Google “bans” from their system overnight, again with no notice or explanation.

Google doing what ever the hell they want is nothing new.

Google basically pays you want they want.

No transparency, no notice, no explanation.

This is how Google does business and they have been doing this to domainers for many, many years.

However,  Google continues to grow in market share, their profits continue to rise, and the stock is at a 52 week high.

So I sure wouldn’t expect any positive fundamental change from Google and they way they treat or think about domainers.

Google will continue to do whatever they want.

I think we lost this battle a long time ago.

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