Domain Names costlier! .org hiked by 10%

Public Interest Registry, the registry for .org domain names, has notified ICANN that it is increasing the wholesale prices for .org domain names by 10%. The annual wholesale price for .org domain name registrations will be $6.75, slightly below the $6.86 rate that .com domains are expected to be available at later this year. As the profit margins are thin on domain registrations, the price hike will pinch not your favorite domain registrar’s pocket but yours!

Public Interest Registry has given no rational for the price increase to ICANN. As far as I can make out, it has the most obvious business interest in its mind - profits!

One can’t really blame Public Interest Registry for thinking about ways to increase its profits. After all, it has monopolistic control over the .org domain names! In fact, when .biz registry NeuStar raised prices last year, it was belligerent enough to state the reason for the price hike as - everyone else was doing it. What bullshit!

Also, there are talks that Afilias is all set to hike prices of .info and that NeuStar is already planning another hike in .biz prices.

I have always believed that this whole system of ICANN and domain name registries is rotten to the core. They all have a cartel of sorts. Why does the government allow such monopolistic market conditions to emerge? I wish some intelligent guy in the US will hire good lawyers and file a lawsuit against all this!

Why am I mad? Well, the simple reason is that I have loads of domains that I need to get renewed every year and even now it is quite a lot of money I have to spend. With the price increase it will be a whole lot of new burden.

Yes, yes… I know… you will ask me to monetize the domain to sustain themselves. But bro, monetization doesn’t work on its own. It requires a lot of time, skills and effort, which again costs money. A domainer like me is not a programmer or web designer or an SEO expert. To hire them, I would need to spend money. Domaining is getting costlier by the day. Tsk… Tsk…

if I keep it spending on sustenance, when do I get to enjoy it?

Virtual Real Estate market is booming!

The real estate market may be facing a real tough time these days, but the market for virtual real estate properties, the domain names is flourishing with people making heavy investments in acquiring prized premium domains.

According to DN Journal, domain sales worth $38,029,543 were reported In the first quarter of 2008, which is a 78% increase over the $21,253,105 in domain sales reported for the first quarter of 2007! The average sale is reported to be with average sale at $10,103 and the total number of reported sales was 3,764.

Amazing… I would say

The largest sale reported was that of the $10 million sale of Fund.com during the first quarter of the year! Other prominent sales included $2.6 million for Pizza.com and $1.7 million for DataRecovery.com

I am thrilled with this all. Seems like I am in the right business after all

Pizza.com sells for $2.6 million!

The owner of the domain pizza.com is reported to have accepted an offer from to an anonymous bidder of $2.6m for the domain name pursuant to a week-long online auction. The domain was originally registered in 1994 for just $20 annual fees!

The sale is expected to be finalized within next few days.

Ooooooh man, I wish I was into buying domain names when the world wide web was just taking off in the early 1990s. What a return on investment! What a business! Domaining…

Casino.de sold for half million dollars!

Another BIG sale of a premium domain, casino.de for half a million dollars! What more could the seller ask for when .de domains are available for as low as $15 per year? He must be today one real happy domainer

The buyer intends to use Casino.de to guide online gamblers through the options available in online casino and poker room choices by offering independent and thoroughly researched information about gambling on the Internet.

The past few days have seen some impressive domain sales in the aftermarket including that of datarecovery.com for 1.7 million USD and fund.com for 10 million USD!

Domaining isbecoming more and more popular as each day passes by!

Fund.com sold for cool $10m!

A New York, USA, based company, Fund.com Inc. (earlier known as Meade Technologies Inc.), has bought the rights to the domain fund.com for reportedly almost $10 million in an all-cash transaction! Another world record of sorts!

The deal was brokered by Clek Media Inc. and the sale of the domain FUND.COM was actually for US$9,999,950.

It is yet another big dollars domain acquisition to make people and take notice of the excitement that surrounds domaining and the profit that the domain has fetched its original registrant.

Such transactions, though few and far between, keep the hopes of us small-time domainers alive! Though I do not have any single word .com premium domain, yet I have a few that my domaining sense tells me will be worth a couple of hundred thousands down the line and till then, I am holding them

150 million+ Domain Names registered

Verisign has issued its latest report on domain name registration confirming that that number of registered domain names crossed 150 million in 2007. The report further states that during the fourth quarter of 2007, our good old Internet grew by nearly 33 million domain names!

Wow…. domain names are sure getting in vogue with more and more people viewing it as a profitable business

I can tell you by experience that registering domain names could become an addiction with no certified remedy if not checked in time!

But at the same time, the major share of the pie is taken by the .com domains and .net domains, which crossed the number of 80.40 million domain name registrations at the end of 2007, representing a 24% increase year over year.

New .com and .net domain name registrations were seen as growing at an average of 2.5 million per month in the fourth quarter 2007 for a total of 7.5 million new registrations.

Whatever anyone says, it is the domain registrar community that is benefiting the most from this tide in domain name registrations!

Domain name disputes on the rise!

Domain disputes are on the rise! What else could you expect when the domaining industry is such a huge money spinner while being a low investment business!

Unscrupulous yet highly intelligent cybersquatters pick up premiuim domains related to any event or celebrities/businesses as soon as they get a whiff of something new and exciting comping up. 

Sample this:

The National Arbitration Forum, an international provider of alternative dispute resolution services, administered a total of 1,805 domain name disputes in 2007, up from 1,658 disputes in 2006. The National Arbitration Forum has been approved as a domain name dispute resolution program provider by the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) since 1999.

The National Arbitration Forum reports at the end of 2007:

• UDRP domain names with common extensions like .com, .net, and .org accounted for 1,775 filings.
• usDRP domain names with the .us extension accounted for 30 filings.
• Of the 1,805 filings, Panelists heard 1,391 cases; parties worked together to settle many of the rest.
• There were 9,916 total domain name complaints filed since 1999.
• Of those filings, Panelists heard 8,006 cases; the parties settled many of the rest.

- PR-USA

I wish the practice of cybesquatting just disappears overnight. What a better place this world would be!

Hmmm… wishful thinking!

Datarecovery.com sells for $1.7 million!

Now, I never thought that data recovery could be sooooooooooooo hot as a topic or a business! Did you?

According to WikiPedia, Data recovery is the process of salvaging data from damaged, failed, corrupted, or inaccessible primary storage media when it cannot be accessed normally. Often the data are being salvaged from storage media formats such as hard disk drive, storage tapes, CDs, DVDs, RAID, and other electronics. This can be due to physical damage to the storage device or logical damage to the file system that prevents it from being mounted by the host operating system.

Now, a data recovery related website has been sold for a cool USD 17,000,000! Now, who would have thought of that? But apparently, that is the case!

This makes the deal one of the top 10 most expensive domain name acquisitions history.

The buyer, ESS Data Recovery Inc., is a US based company and seems to take its data recovery business really seriously! Kudos!

However, I’d like to see them develop the domain and optimize it for search engines as it has the potential to make it to the Top 10 search results organically.

What do you say, guys?

WikiLeaks gets a new lease at life!

At least, better sense and justice prevail!

A federal judge on Friday allowed whistle-blower site WikiLeaks to resume operation in the United States, a week after ordering its U.S.  hosting company and domain registrar to shut down and lock the renegade’s site from the internet.

The judge conceded the futility of attempts to censor information, in this instance private banking records, after it has been posted to the internet.

The judge signed an order last week that effectively took down the WikiLeaks site in the United States and also locked the WikiLeaks.org domain name to prevent transfer of the domain name to a different domain registrar.

- Wired.com

For those who came in late, WikiLeaks is a true whistle-blower website that published thousands of leaked documents. The web site was ordered to be taken offline in America after a suit was filed against the site posting allegedly stolen documents containing individuals’ banking records. The documents suggested that a Cayman Islands branch of a Swiss bank was helping customers practice money laundering and tax evasion across the globe.

Now, the banks in Switzerland must be getting the jitters as the pressure on them to be more transparent will be increased!

Network Solutions Gets kicked in the butt!

Yeah, I have been waiting for this and was hoping it’d happen soon!

Network Solutions has been sued for its holier-than-though policy of reserving domain names a potential buyer searched for on its website, practically disabling the poor guy to register it anywhere else but with Network Solutions at a price higher than other registrars.

Being a victim myself, I was hoping that it would happen real soon. Had I been a US resident, I’d have done it myself! The bozos thought that they had a good little scam running that nobody would blow the whistle on. Now, as I rub my hands with glee… I wish I could see the guys squirming in their seats with a potential PR nightmare at hands… something not even a seasoned public relations professional would be able to get them out of!

For those who came in late, please read the heads-up on the practice of Network Solutions at DomainTools.com

Here’s the excerpt.

I am confirming that Network Solutions steals domain ideas when people check domain availability on the Network Solutions website. They seem to have started the practice of stealing domain ideas on December 16th 2007 according to our Domain History database but I was just made aware of this practice today. I am appalled at the concept of taking people’s domain ideas and registering it before the consumer has the ability to manually register the domain.It is a deplorable action that Network Solution would announce potential domain names to the entire world. If a customer chooses not to register the domain name with Network Solution they are forced to wait 4 days for Network Solutions to delete the domain name in the Free Add Grace period. After the four day hostage period the consumer is free from the hostage situation and can register the domain somewhere else. However Network Solutions has now exposed those domains to Domain Tasters that will snipe those domain up milliseconds after Network Solutions deletes them. By registering the domain Network Solutions is exposing the domain in the DNS and every computer in the world now knows about the domain. These domains are now easy fodder for scammers and it is mind blowing that Network Solutions would expose their customers queries to the world in this manner.

- DomainTools

Their strategy was as good as those of the lowly domain tasters and try to profit from people’s ideas and that too on an automated basis. What a bunch of creeps!