This Bloomberg announcement caught my attention this morning. Its about a company called Bankrate who provide information on creditcards and mortgages.

The article speculates that Bankrate:

“may sell $280 million of five- year notes to help pay for the acquisition of NetQuote Inc. and CreditCards.com Inc., according to a person familiar with the offering who declined to be identified because terms aren’t set. “

According to the WSJ, it paid “$145 million for CreditCards.com“.

I’m not one to speculate on things like this, but if true (and being a public company it will come out eventually) we have a public company that:

a) Has a huge asset (creditcards.com) on the books.

b) Is actively engaging in acquiring such a blue chip asset.

I hope they keep it (or sell it to me for $1 – I’d be happy either way).

About 3 years ago I made one decision that dramatically changed my life for the better. Just like the butterfly effect, that decision is going to change other peoples lives for the better too. Before I tell you what happened, let me give you some context.

As some of you know, I’ve been using the Internet for a long time (I started in 1989), before Mosaic, Netscape or the even the web. For the technical people, back then it was all about Bitnet, ftp and gopher, but that’s another story…. The fact is, I didn’t buy my first domain until the mid 90′s and I didn’t sell a domain until 2002! Why? There was simply no way of monetizing domains like there is now.

When I first began investing in domains, I tried and tested everything I could get my hands on. If there was:

A product – I’d buy it
A service – I’d subscribe to it
A forum post – I’d read it.

To cut a long story short, there wasn’t anything on the market that did what I wanted, so I developed my own system to help me find and buy, the RIGHT KIND of domains, but on a massive scale! It ended up being so big, we built a farm of dedicated servers at a top US Datacenter just to run it! It was a system that “plucked needles from haystacks” over, and over again!

But that led to another problem….

I was buying great domains and hording (stock piling) them. My behaviour was like Gollum from Lord of the Rings – my precious domains yesss….owww dot com….so beautiful. They were mine, mine MINE! In what seems a complete contradiction to many domainers, ego wasn’t a big a part of it. Why? I simply didn’t talk about it. I didn’t go to conferences. I didn’t have a blog back then either. It was “head down” and a hell of a lot of hard work! Then something changed. From a personal standpoint, this was the “tipping point” that changed everything for me….

One afternoon I was talking with my wife, Anna; I’ll never forget this conversation. Our system had identified a lot of high quality domains the week prior and I’d purchased all of them. Ok, I admit, I was actually complaining about the number of domains – there were too many good ones! Of course – I wasn’t going to let them drop or go to someone else for THAT price! If you buy at auction, you’ll know what I mean. Anyway, Anna said “Well why don’t you give this system to other people then?” I burst out laughing and said “Are you crazy? This is making us $$$$ – I’m not telling ANYONE about it”. Lets also not forget that domainers are a very secretive bunch. After a very long, somewhat heated discussion, Anna convinced me to release our domain investment platform to the public. I ended up showing a few domainers what we had done (under strict, non-disclosure agreements of course) and they were completely blown away. There was, and still is – nothing like it.

But that was 3 years ago! What happened I hear you ask? Well, I’m a perfectionist. If I was going to put my name to something, then it better be “the best in the industry”. Those that know me personally, know that I have a professional / corporate background, and have a firm belief in customer support. As such, we spent a lot of time and money making the interface more user friendly. We produced “how to video”s, created detailed online help, a customer support desk, we added all the trimmings a professional investor would expect. Of course, redesigning the site three times with a team of designers doesn’t help either. The fact is, we have been working day and night, making this happen. Its consumed late nights, weekends, kids school holidays – even Christmas afternoon (I should have been sleeping off lunch).

Now its done.

Would I change anything? No way! I still believe that there are MORE than enough domain names for everyone.

I also know this – Domainer Income will:

a) Help many people to generate passive income – making a HUGE difference to peoples lives from a financial standpoint.
b) Take the Domaining industry to a new level.
c) Create a level playing field, by making information available to everyone.

Today, YOU have an opportunity to be a part of that.

So – here is the result of many years of hard work – an enterprise grade, Domain Investment Platform. You now have everything you need to Find, Buy and PROFIT from domain names. Where do you start? I’ve created many FREE videos that explain Domainer Income in more detail. There is also a FREE Membership too – so nobody misses out on an opportunity to start making money with domains.

Please leave a comment and let me know your thoughts….. remember – this has been my baby for many years. I’d love to hear what you think.

Simon

Lets not let the facts get in the way of a good story about the Internet. While symbolics.com might be the oldest currently registered dot com, its not the oldest currently registered domain.

As I pointed out years ago, nordu.net has a creation date of 01-jan-1985.

For those that don’t know, nordu.net is used by Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden as their research and academic backbone. The interesting thing about this domain is that it was registered before you could actually register domains, which officially began on 15 Jan 1985 as per RFC921.

For those Americans reading this; sorry guys, the Europeans beat you to it.

Now lets get back to celebrating how great Verisign is and their price rise to $7.34 in July 2010.

The thieves at Verisign announced today that effective July 1, 2010 there will be an increase in domain name fees for .com and .net.

The registry fee for .com domain names will increase from $6.86 to $7.34 and the registry fee for .net domain names will increase, from $4.23 to $4.65.

In a release to the market today, the organisation appeared to justify the increase saying:

“Over the last decade, the volume of Internet traffic and domain name system (DNS) queries on VeriSign’s global infrastructure has increased from an average of approximately 2 billion queries per day in the year 2000 to more than 50 billion queries per day today..”

To save you some maths, the industry is looking at a .com increase of 48 cents and .net increase of 42 cents. Happy New Year!

Tareq Salahi appears to have missed out on the domain name TareqSalahi.com after it was registered on November 26 to an individual in Palm Beach Florida.

It appears that Tareq registered michaelesalahi.com on June 15, but forgot to register his own name!

He and his wife Michaele gained national attention in November 2009 by allegedly crashing a White House state dinner in honor of India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Michaele Salahi has been filmed as one of the housewives for Bravo’s upcoming The Real Housewives of DC, and sources say cameramen for the show filmed their preparations for the dinner and followed the couple to the White House.

This is the first time a domain name has been part of an Olympic host city’s emblem.

The word “sochi.ru” appears above the number “2014″ in an apparent reflection, symbolizing the southern city’s water-based location on the Black Sea.

“It’s very appealing. It’s very creative, innovative,” International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge said at Tuesday’s unveiling. “I think it will appeal especially to the young population.”

It’s been reported that the IOC president then asked someone what a “domain name” was.

For those that believe there could be an opportunity – the .com, .net and .org is taken… as is the .ru.

Where do you draw the line between registering a domain name to mourn or honor an individual, vs profit from their death?

Since MJ died, there have been 3,459 .com domain names registered with the word “michael” in them. Don’t believe me? Well, here is the list I compiled (please give me credit if you use it) and a few extracts of interest:

• michaelisstillalive.com
• michaeljackson-conspiracy.com
• michaeljackson911tape.com
• michaeljacksonautopsy.com
• michaeljacksonconcertrefund.com
• michaeljacksonisfaking.com
• michaeljacksontributetour.com
• michaeljacksonwasmurdered.com
• whopoisonedmichaeljackson.com

In light of this registration frenzy, I’d ask the media, not to “tar and feather” the entire domain name industry with the actions of a few people who lack morals / ethics in this area.

Having said that, newspapers, TV and other sources “profit” from this as well. What do you think? Have you registered a MJ domain?

I was driving in Richmond today and noticed this massive domain name plastered on the side of the building. What a great use of a domain name! Look how big this thing is compared to a car – you can see it for miles away.

Being the domainer, I had to park and take a photo. The strange thing is, their website doesn’t even have a picture of the building. You’d think you were almost dealing with an online mailorder company.

At the top of the site is this quote – “When we drink, we get drunk. When we get drunk, we fall asleep. When we fall asleep, we commit no sin. When we commit no sin, we go to heaven. So let’s all get drunk and go to heaven!” – Brian O’Rourke.

Maybe they got the idea to make those HUGE letters over a few bottles of red wine?