Archive for the ‘VeriSign’ Category
.com and .net registry provides added detail about NXD traffic.
VeriSign has enhanced its DomainScore tool to provide more insight into the traffic unregistered domains receive.
DomainScore provides a relative score for the amount of traffic an unregistered domain name receives. But this so-called “NXD” traffic doesn’t qualify the type of traffic very well. That’s part of the reason people complain that they register a domain with a high score based on VeriSign’s data and don’t get any traffic.
The latest update includes time-of-day and location information about unregistered domain traffic.
The column chart above is an example of the traffic insight you can get. Lots of requests but few unique requests? That should be a warning sign. When the traffic comes in may have to do with the type of site.
The geo location data is helpful for a number of reasons. One obvious one: if you’re going to park the domain, you probably want traffic from the U.S. rather than China because it monetizes better.
VeriSign has also enhanced the user interface and historic data for its DomainView tool.
© DomainNameWire.com 2011.
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Related posts:
- VeriSign Releases Domain Traffic Treasure Trove to the Public
- GoDaddy releases traffic data
- VeriSign releases DomainCountdown for expired domains
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
Base of registered domain names continues to grow.
VeriSign released its quarterly Domain Name Industry Brief today, reporting that the total base of domain names increased by 5.2 million last quarter to 215 million.
Registrations have grown by more than 16.9 million since the second quarter of 2010.
The total base of .com and .net domain names passed 110 million. There were 8.1 million new .com and .net registrations during the quarter. VeriSign manages the registry for both of these top level domain names.
VeriSign reports that the rankings of country code top level domain names in terms of registration base stayed about the same. .Eu dropped one spot to ninth and China now holds the number eight spot.
You can view the full report here (pdf).
© DomainNameWire.com 2011.
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Related posts:
- 209.8 Million Domain Names As of April
- VeriSign Confirms Over 200 Million Domain Names Registered
- VeriSign: 177 Million Domain Names Registered
Here comes your yearly fee increase.
VeriSign has announced its almost-annual price increases for .com and .net domain names.
The wholesale cost from VeriSign for .com domain names will increase from $7.34 to $7.85 on January 15, 2012 and the registry fee for .net domain names will increase from $4.65 to $5.11.
The VeriSign fee doesn’t include ICANN’s 18 cent fee per year. So the wholesale cost of a .com domain name will be $8.03 and a .net will be $5.29.
VeriSign just renewed its contract with ICANN to run .net. It allows VeriSign to continue jacking up .net prices 10% a year. ICANN didn’t provide an explanation for this arbitrary increase.
VeriSign’s press release about the price increase mentions the increasing load of DNS queries the company handles.
Don’t blame VeriSign for raising prices. It’s just making a smart business decision. Blame ICANN.
© DomainNameWire.com 2011.
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Related posts:
- Renew Domain Names Before October Price Increases
- VeriSign Says Domain Name Price Hikes Coming
- eNom Announces .Com Price Increases
Tool lets you monitor real time domain registration trends.
After writing about VeriSign’s new beta NXD data tool yesterday, I also learned that the company has upgraded its Domain Tag Cloud into a neat tool to monitor real time domain registration trends.
DomainView incorporates the same data from the tag cloud — keyword frequency in recently registered domain names — and brings it to multiple formats. It also adds domain suggestions so you can see available .com and .net domains that include the hot keywords.
The product comes in several formats including a web app, an API, and an embeddable widget you can place on web sites. There’s also an add-on for Firefox and Chrome that creates a constantly updating ticker on the bottom of your browser. The ticker shows popular keywords in recent registrations and indicates if particular keywords are trending up or down.
VeriSign plans to launch a DomainView iPhone/iPad app soon as well. [Update: the app is now available.]
Combined with DomainScore, savvy domainers can use this tool to find high quality unregistered domain names.
© DomainNameWire.com 2011.
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Related posts:
- VeriSign Domain Tag Cloud Gives Insight Into Latest Domain Registrations
- Go Daddy Wants To Challenge Amazon and RackSpace in the Cloud
- Meetup.com Founder Puts Cloud.com on the Block
VeriSign has released VERISIGN® DomainScore™ to the public.
The beta tool allows anyone to enter an unregistered domain name and get an idea of how much traffic the domain gets.
DomainScore uses NXD data — basically visit requests to non existent domain names — to calculate a score ranging from 1-10. The higher the score the higher the traffic to the domain. The score is for the last full week, the last 30 days, and last 60 days.
Based on my experience with similar data for pending delete domains, I think you’ll find the data most relevant for domains that haven’t just expired. This reduces the amount of dead link traffic included in the total and gives a better impression of type-in traffic.
VeriSign already offers this data to registrars, some of which in turn offer it to customers. Dynadot offers the data but with a day turnaround time. Some customers have apparently run millions of domains through Dynadot’s system. However, a number of large registrars have held this data close to their chest for their own use.
The public tool provides data instantly on up to 100 domain names.
VeriSign might need to put a CAPTCHA on it 
© DomainNameWire.com 2011.
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Related posts:
- Dynadot Offers VeriSign’s Expired Domain Data Treasure Trove
- Google Public DNS Could Be Data Treasure Trove for Google
- Could VeriSign Topple Web Traffic Ranking Companies?
Web adds more domain names in Q1.
April started with approximately 209.8 million domain names registered according to VeriSign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief (pdf). That means the base of registered domain names grew by 4.5 million in the first quarter.
The company says there are a combined 108 million .com and .net domain names registered. I suspect we’ll see some huge PR as the base of .com domain names approaches 100 million.
VeriSign estimates there are 81.7 million country code domain names.
The .Com and .Net registration base is increasing at a faster clip than ccTLDs.
In terms of rankings, .uk moved up a spot to be the fourth largest TLD, surpassing .org. China’s .cn dropped from seventh to ninth as a continued result of higher registration prices and hefty registration restrictions.
Germany’s .de remains the biggest country code domain name.
© DomainNameWire.com 2011.
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Related posts:
- VeriSign Confirms Over 200 Million Domain Names Registered
- VeriSign: 162 Million Domain Names Registered
- China’s .CN Domain Name Keeps Dropping
Two domain name industry heavyweights spend more on government lobbying in 2010.
Both VeriSign and Go Daddy substantially increased their spending on U.S. government lobbying over the past year, data collected by Domain Name Wire show.
The numbers are based on public records filed with the U.S. Senate under the Lobbying Disclosure Act.
VeriSign spent $3.315 million on lobbying last year, up from $2.4 million in 2009. Go Daddy Group, which owns domain name registrar GoDaddy.com, spent $1.162 million in 2010. That’s up from $715,500 in 2009. Among the issues Go Daddy lobbied were piracy, privacy, and rogue internet pharmacies. Go Daddy has been a strong advocate of shutting down these pharmacies and suspended 150,000 domains related to rogue online pharmacies last year.
Most other domain name related companies either held lobbying expenditures steady or decreased them, as the chart in this post shows.
Non-domain companies also spent money lobbying the federal government about domain names. For example, Christian Coalition of America was at it again, lobbying the government to stop the .xxx domain name. (ICM Registry, which operates .xxx, just registered to start lobbying the government this year).
© DomainNameWire.com 2011.
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Related posts:
- $4 Million Spent Lobbying Congress on Domain Names
- GoDaddy Spends $580,000 on Federal Lobbying
- Domain Name Companies Spend $2M Lobbying Washington
Company files two trademark applications.
It looks like VeriSign might be working on a new slogan for its business.
The company just filed two “intent to use” trademark applications for its domain name business:
Connecting the World Between the Dots and The World Is Connecting Between the Dots.
They’re both clever slogans and I’m guessing they haven’t chosen which one to go with.
Of course as a domain person I wonder which dots are being connected. When I think of a domain name I think of one dot. So between the dots? Still, I guess I “get” it with regards to the DNS.
The applications were filed May 13.
© DomainNameWire.com 2011.
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Related posts:
- VeriSign Files Trademark Applications for New “V” Logo
- VeriSign Registry Changes Logo and Web Address
CFIT settles with VeriSign for $0.
Hopes by domainers that .com prices would fall thanks to an antitrust lawsuit have officially been dashed.
VeriSign just released a press release stating that Coalition for ICANN Transparency has agreed to drop a case against it.
The lawsuit attacked both VeriSign’s no-bid contract with ICANN that allowed it to raise prices 7% a year as well as its planned domain waitlisting service.
Although ultimately CFIT lost, I suspect their biggest concern was not the rising cost of dot coms but the waitlist service. CFIT was backed by Pool.com, which was one of the biggest domain backordering services when the case was originally filed. VeriSign’s proposed service would have effectively killed its business dropcatching .com domains.
VeriSign’s stock price has reacted strongly to developments in this case in the past. This announcement was released after the bell and the stock has not changed in after hours trading.
(via DomainIncite)
© DomainNameWire.com 2011.
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Related posts:
- VeriSign Scores a Win in Antitrust Lawsuit
- VeriSign Loses Big in Court on .Com Domains
- Enom to break out ICANN “tax”
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