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A few thoughts about the domain industry.
I’ll be at a conference all day, so I’m going to kick today off with some recent thoughts about the domain name business. I have other posts in queue for today.
…ICANN will be under intense pressure to hit its deadlines now that it’s sitting on $350 million + of applicant fees. Before it could just say “hey, it’s the process”. But now people have real money on the line.
…My guess is Frank Schilling either applies for his own new top level domains or invests in applicants. I’ll be curious to see which ones he goes after.
…If you are a domain business and send a press release the day after I see the news on another blog, don’t expect me to write about it.
…On the other hand, if you’re a new TLD applicant and want to share your application with me under embargo until the application period closes, drop me a note.
…Go Daddy has been on a PR blitz to introduce its new(ish) CEO Warren Adelman to reporters. It seems they’re putting him out there as the kinder, gentler, less controversial face of Go Daddy as compared to Bob Parsons. I’ve also seen quite a bit of advertising by the company on high tech sites. It also has launched a couple new micro sites geared to techies.
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Publicly traded new TLD company has a solid market value.
Top Level Domain Holdings, a pure play company focused on new top level domains, has a market cap of around £ 39 million. That’s over $60 million USD.
We’re talking about a company that basically has no revenue. So far it has just been spending on the new TLD process.
As of last February the company had about £ 15 million in cash. A lot of that has surely been spent since then. But to be conservative, let’s assume the market cap net of cash is around £ 24 million. That’s still about $38 million.
This $38 million value is based solely on the potential of its new top level domain business. That includes applying for its own TLDs, helping clients get their TLDs up and running, and partnerships for new TLDs.
That’s a hefty valuation, if you ask me. What it shows is that a lot of people are big believers in the profit opportunity of new TLDs.
Fortunately for TLDH, it doesn’t need all of its bets to pay off. It should have a large enough portfolio to weather a few duds.
What do you think…is Top Level Domain Holdings worth its $60 million market cap?
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TLDH adds to its stable of geo top level domains with .budapest.
Top Level Domain Holdings Limited (AIM:TLDH.L), parent company of Minds + Machines, announced today that it has applied for the .budapest domain name with the blessing of the city of Budapest. The city will earn a revenue share from the deal.
TLDH is also on the applications for .London, .Miami, .Bayern and .NRW. .NRW is for North-Rhine Westphalia, the most populous state in Germany.
These applications are pretty close to “sure things” since an applicant needs approval (or non-objection) from a governmental authority to apply for geo domains like these. The only exception would be if there’s more than one location of the same name. .NRW could also run into a bit of an issue if there’s a competing application because it’s not actually the name of a location and could have a different use.
© DomainNameWire.com 2011.
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Related posts:
- FIBA to apply for the .basketball top level domain
- Top Level Domain Holdings Raises $7.5 Million
- New Top Level Domains Still Two Years Away from Reality
Received yesterday…
Subject: Website Purchase Inquiry
Hi,
I am interested in setting up a new blogging website on your domain name.
My name is Adam and I located your contact information through a domain look up and I understand that you are the owner of DNW.com. I’ve been working in establishing a number of high quality websites for quite some time and think that your domain name fits in perfectly with the blog!
In my current situation, I would like to set up a new blogging site and conducted several site searches relating to my niche.
I decided to contact you after finding out that your domain is not one which is highly active at the moment. Obviously I would provide you some compensation for the exchange, so If you are willing to sell your domain name please let me know what sort of price range you would be willing to sell for and we can discuss further.
Furthermore since this is our first time to do business, I can easily set up an escrow service to ensure a safer business transaction for both of us if you would prefer.
Again, feel free to contact me through my email address if you would like to discuss.
Sincerely,
Adam Daniels
Zoom-IT
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Every blog is supposed to write about the IPO
I’ve got to write one, right?
If religious blogs find a way to cover an IPO then a domain blog should, too.
I actually have a bit of a domain angle. This morning I googled FacebookIPO.com because I recall seeing something about the domain previously. Here’s the first result:
Facebook-IPO.com has no content whatsoever. Google still cares about exact match domain searches, even if it’s on a really esoteric search. I suspect some people will type FacebookIPO.com into their browsers today.
OK, that’s my tie-in.
Facebook is expected to start trading this morning on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol FB.
© DomainNameWire.com 2011.
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- Facebook URL Landrush This Friday Night
- Facebook Deals Launches Sans Domain Name
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A look at a few stories I haven’t covered this week…
There are a few notable stories in the domain name industry that I missed writing about over the past week, so here’s a quick run down.
A “monster” of an acquisition – Mesh Digital, which owns domain name registrar DomainMonster, has been acquired by Host Europe Group for an undisclosed sum. DomainMonster isn’t a huge registrar, but it has proven quite adept at mastering domain registrations when new top level domains enter their “general availability period”. This will come in handing with hundreds of TLDs coming on line in the next couple years.
iPhone5.com – Apple filed a UDRP to get iPhone5.com earlier this month. The owners put up an initial fight before deciding to hand the domain over the Apple this week.
Vanity.com – Quite a stink going on over at TheDomains about this UDRP filing. I hope there’s more to this story than meets the eye. For what it’s worth, the owner of the domain has had it since at least 2005. The company was formed in Nevada.
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- Apple and iPhone.org – What does it mean?
- Apple Fights for iPhone Porn Domain Names Including iphone4s.com
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You violated someone’s rights when you registered the domain, even if it wasn’t our rights.
Think you’ve seen them all?
Here’s a very creative argument from Stabilus GmbH, maker of electronic tailgate openers, on why a UDRP panel should give it the domain powerise.com.
Stabilus started using the “Powerise” term in commerce back in 2008. But the domain was been registered in 2002.
Under the guidelines of UDRP, the registrant couldn’t have registered the domain in bad faith since Stabilus didn’t have rights in the mark at the time of registration.
Hence this creativity:
The Complainant also indicates that other companies are using “Powerise” as name and trademark, such as the company Babcock Borsig (owning the trademark POWERISE POWERPLANT), and Powerise Consult, which, according to the Complainant’s verifications, would have been using the mark since 1998/99 and 2001, respectively. The Complainant contends that, therefore, the Respondent must have applied the disputed domain name on January 21, 2002 with knowledge of third parties’ rights in the name. The Complainant also states that the Respondent’s bad faith when it registered the disputed domain name must lead to a right for the transfer of it to the Complainant, even though the Complainant’s trademark registrations are more recent than the Respondent’s registration of the disputed domain name.
In other words, when you registered the domain someone else had trademark rights in the term. You registered in bad faith on someone else’s rights, so you should transfer the domain to us.
In one blow Stabilus shows that its rights in Powerise aren’t all encompassing and makes a really dumb bad faith argument.
Needless to say, Stabilus GmbH lost.
© DomainNameWire.com 2011.
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Related posts:
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Cloud, tech, and tv are popular topics in domain names.
LeanDomainSearch has just published a list of the 10,000 most popular topics found in .com domain names.
The site used research from its list of top prefixes and suffixes for domain names to figure out which topics show up most often in domain names.
Here’s how the site describes the methodology:
So how do you do it? Several weeks ago I published a list of the 5,000 Most Frequently Used Domain Name Prefixes and Suffixes. If you know what a domain name’s prefix or suffix is, you can also tell what the topic is. For example, if you look for all the domains that end with hub you’ll get a list including github and carhub. Since we know the suffix is hub, we can tell that the topics are git and car. Figuring out the most popular topics then is a matter of figuring out all of the domain names that start with a given prefix or end with a given suffix, determining the topic, and then adding up the results to see which occur the most frequently.
It’s an interesting approach. Here’s what LeanDomainSearch came up with for the top 20 topics:
1. web
2. net
3. art
4. tech
5. cloud
6. shop
7. home
8. media
9. world
10. pro
11. design
12. mobile
13. life
14. city
15. tv
16. blog
17. travel
19. online
20. it
These results are somewhat surprising to me. Of course, it’s hard to figure out the true meaning of a domain name, and this approach doesn’t capture all topics. But I’m surprised to see terms like “cloud” so high up on this list even using the methodology.
I’m also curious how many of these are applied for as new top level domains.
What do you think?
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Related posts:
- Hand regging domains to sell? Include the word “online”
What do you think?
Texas now allows you to order a dot on personalized license plates. It only works on some of the designs, though. This is technically just a six character license plate since the dot doesn’t really count. But if you have a three letter .com to promote, why not?
Here are some other Texas license plates designs for domain investors:
Texas occasionally makes seven character domains available, so you could potentially snag “Domains” as well.
Unfortunately, this one is taken:
…but, Texas has license plates called “T Plates” that have a T at the beginning in the design. Technically the license plate below is “TDOTCOM”, but it looks like DotCom to me.
Alas, that one is taken too.
Here’s one that might work for any domainer who has been on the receiving end of a UDRP:
Just don’t blame me if your car gets keyed.
You could take it a step further with this one:
You can design your own Texas license plate at the (properly named) MyPlates.com.
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Overstock.com pleads for single letter .com domains in VeriSign contract renewal.
For many years Overstock.com has had an obsession. An obsession with getting the domain name O.com.
As you may know, there are only three one letter .com domains ever registered: q.com, x.com, and z.com. These were registered (and grandfathered) prior to a restriction on one character .com domains being put in place.
Since then, Overstock.com has done everything possible to angle itself for getting o.com whenever it becomes available.
Its latest action is to urge ICANN to make one letter .com domains part of VeriSign’s renewal of the .com contract with ICANN.
One thing’s a good bet: if ICANN ever allows single letter .com domains then Overstock.com will pay whatever it takes and sue whomever it has to in order to get the o.com domain name.
Back in 2005, Overstock.com started beating the drum to release single letter .coms. Here’s how domain attorney John Berryhill tells it in a 2008 article:
The subject of allocating single character domain names has captured the attention of the ICANN community to varying degrees from time to time, primarily depending on the interested efforts of Overstock.com and its advocates. For example, just prior to the December 2005 ICANN meeting in Vancouver, a press release was circulated, and its authors managed to pimp their claim that ICANN was weighing the release of single character domain names to a variety of media outlets (e.g. ICANN weighs single-letter Web addresses USA Today, November 28, 2005). During the 2005 Vancouver meeting, one of the more interesting exhibit tables was run by Overstock.com, for the purpose of distributing baseball caps embroidered with the letter “O”, apparently for the purpose of impressing on the minds of the ICANN community that Overstock.com claims a pre-eminent interest in the letter “O” – and apparently oblivious to the fact that Oakley has longstanding rights in the mark “O” for sportswear. Hence, while rumors spread that Oprah was coming to visit ICANN, the presence of blatant trademark infringement at an ICANN meeting by a member of the Business Constituency was, at least, entertaining.
Overstock.com has always argued that single letter domains should respect “prior use”. Of course, a domain like o.com can’t have any prior use. But that hasn’t stopped the company; it has registered trademarks for o.com. In fact, someone has at least attempted to trademark every single letter .com that could exist. (This is similar to all the companies trying to trademark non-existent top level domains.)
Overstock.com’s obsession with o.com is widely seen as its reason for pursuing other single letter domain names such as o.biz and o.info. It helps the company establish more rights to o.com (at least that will be its argument). It even went so far as to rebrand to o.co, only to pull back.
VeriSign floated an idea of offering single letter .net domain names back in 2010, but later withdrew its request.
One of the tricky parts for VeriSign is the windfall offering single letter .com domains would create. Who should get this money? A lot of people in the internet community would argue it’s certainly not VeriSign that should pocket the money.
VeriSign likely doesn’t want to bring up the single letter issue as it renews the contract. It doesn’t want to do anything to upset the apple cart. The .com monopoly is good enough for it.
So while others debate whether new IP protections should be included in the .com contract or challenge VeriSign’s .com price hikes, Overstock.com continues to focus on a mission. A mission it’s been working on for at least 7 years.
© DomainNameWire.com 2011.
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Related posts:
- Overstock.com to Launch O.Biz
- Overstock.com Continues O.tld Purchases with O.info
- Overstock.com Buys O.co For $350,000
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