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?

Jerry Seinfeld wins domain dispute over JerrySeinfeld.com

Another domain dispute has been resolved by the intervention of UDRP.

Noted comedian, Jerry Seinfeld won control of the domain name JerrySeinfeld.com after his lawyers launched an appeal to get the control of the domain name from a company called Anything.com, which used the site to host little but advertisements.

I wonder how much money did Anything.com was able to make through the advertising on the website considering that Jerry Seinfeld has quite a following!

Anything.com has agreed to hand over the domain name that it had owned for ten years even before the dispute went to arbitration.

Bond.com up for auction at Sedo!

A premium domain name, Bond.com has been put up for auction at leading domain name marketplace Sedo.com, for a reserve price of $1million.

Considering the immense hype surrounding the latest of the Bond movies, the interest of the fans in the Bond franchise, and the recent opening of the Ian Fleming exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, the domain name is likely to prove to be too hot and fetch a record price.

This is going to be worth watching out for, my friends!

Casino Royale was the best Bond movie if you ask me and the James Bond is one of my favorite movie series and I am sure that this domain is gonna be bought by a fan and for an astronomical sum! An excellent investment opportunity, more like a jackpot in a casino, it will be for whoever wins the domain auction

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…

Ramp.com sold on eBay for 25k USD!

Premium domain name www.ramp.com sold for US $25,211 tonight!

The domain, Ramp.com was owned by Ramp Corporation which is being liquidated in bankruptcy (U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York case 05-140006).

The transaction will be completed through the debtor’s law firm Snow Becker Krauss in New York (www.sbklaw.com).  The law firm will hold the payment in escrow until a bill of sale is executed and the domain is transferred to the new owner (eBay ID - discountramps).

If you ask me, the sale was a hurried one and the domain could have fetched much more, at least One Million USD, had the law firm made it a longer auction and publicized it a little as well. What do you say, guys?

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!

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?