Coming To America

This time next week I’ll be flying out of Australia to the USA. Its my second trip the USA in the last 9 months (the video below is just a couple of grabs from my previous trip).

The reason for making the journey to the other side of the planet, is that I’ve been invited to speak on Domaining at a Marketing conference in San Diego. On a personal note, its interesting for me to see that buying & selling domains (including websites) is becoming more mainstream.

Obviously, I’m delighted to be invited to speak and to help raise the profile of the industry, but here’s the thing…. I also love giving back to it – especially an industry that’s given me an “Internet lifestyle” for many years…. so here’s what I’m going to do….

[FLOWPLAYER src=http://domaining.s3.amazonaws.com/usa2009.mp4, width=480, height=360]

I’m going to stay a few weeks and spend some time interviewing prominent people in the domain name industry – from CEO’s, to parking companies, to young upcoming domaining bloggers. The interviews will be recorded on video and posted up here for your enjoyment.

The $100 Million Dollar question, that I have for you is…

What do you REALLY want to know about domaining?

Just post a comment below and let me know. Remember, everyone started somewhere, so there are no stupid questions – ask away!

Are You Based in LA, San Diego, Southern California?

I’d love to hear from you! Drop me a line on Facebook or direct message me on Twitter and lets catch up!

See you next week.

Simon

P.S. While I’m travelling I will be posting photos and updates on Facebook and Twitter so keep an eye out.

New IDN ccTLDs Added To Internet DNS

A few hours ago I was informed that the first three non-Latin top-level domains were added to the DNS root zone.

When you visit these sites, you may see a list of letters and numbers in your address bar (depending on the browser).

The three new are السعودية (Al-Saudiah), امارات (Emarat) and صر. (Misr).

You can test them by visiting this, right now! وزارة-الأتصالات.مصر

Snapnames Files Suit Against Former Employee

This morning I received the following statement.

SnapNames, and its parent company, Oversee.net, have filed suit against Nelson Brady in federal court in Oregon.

Brady is a former employee who, under the false name “Hank Alvarez,” improperly bid in certain SnapNames auctions. In some cases, Brady also embezzled funds from Oversee by fraudulently refunding himself a share of the purchase price for names he won.

For several months, the company has in good faith attempted to settle privately with Brady to recover its losses, including the rebate fund established by Oversee to address Brady’s activities and the funds he embezzled from Oversee. Those settlement efforts have been unsuccessful.

The suit seeks over $33 million in damages, including punitive damages.

Context

· In October 2009, Oversee discovered an employee, Nelson Brady, using an account under the false name “Hank Alvarez,” engaged in improper bidding activities in domain name auctions on the SnapNames platform.

· Oversee and SnapNames disclosed the situation to its customers and employees in November 2009. Oversee made available to affected customers a cash rebate in the amount of overpayment, plus 5.22% interest (the highest applicable federal rate during the affected time period), of any amounts paid exceeding what the auction price would have been without employee bidding.

· Since that time, more than 60% of the aggregate rebate amount has been claimed.

Impact of Brady’s actions on auctions

· Brady’s conduct affected:

· 5% of auctions since 2005

· 75% of total impacted auctions were between 2005 and 2007

· Less than 1% of SnapNames auctions during this period were won by the employee

· The remaining 4% were won by SnapNames clients.

· Brady’s bidding affected approximately 1% of SnapNames’ auction revenue during the full period.

Impact of Brady’s actions on SnapNames and Oversee

Oversee will be demanding millions of dollars from Brady for the damage he caused to Oversee and SnapNames. No amount of money, however, could compensate the damage Brady has caused to SnapNames’ and Oversee’s reputation in the marketplace.

Law enforcement

In November 2009, Oversee voluntarily disclosed Brady’s conduct to both the US Attorney’s Office and to the Federal Trade Commission. Oversee will not publicly discuss anything relating to law enforcement matters.

Customer Service

SnapNames customers who have questions about the rebate offer can contact the SnapNames support team:

On the web: http://snapnames.custhelp.com
By e-mail: supp...@snapnames.com

Phone:

+1 (866) 690-6279 (toll-free in the U.S.)
+1 (503) 241-8547 (outside the U.S.)

Getting Ready To Change Domaining Forever!

Very soon, we will be launching a new and exciting Domain Investment service. It will set the standard for the industry.

Our email subscribers will be given both advanced notice and priority. If you haven’t signed up for “7 Tips For Profitable Domaining” (see the box on the right) – do it now. Consider this advanced notice, so you don’t miss out!

For The Technical People

After 497 days of uptime, we are decommissioning the main Domainer Income webserver that has served you over the past 2.5+ years. For the techos  amongst us, here is a little “top” statistic for you:

The Domainer Income website will be migrating to the new server in the next few days. Fingers crossed that everything goes smoothly.

See you on the other side!

Premium Domains In Fort Lauderdale

I just received a note from Oversee talking about DOMAINfest Fort Lauderdale.

They have created a pre-bidding system and provided a sample of their domains (which are extremely high quality). I’m not going to list them all here, so I’ve hand picked a few from their catalog:

1. Dating.com
2. Jeans.com
3. Detox.com
4. Relationship.com
5. Therapists.com
6. HardDrives.com
7. BoardGames.com

I’d be more than happy to own any of them! Happy bidding.

PETA Wants Sex.com

PETA has announced their desire to acquire sex.com. Executive Vice President has written this letter to Dom Partners LLC stating:

“Visitors to the newly revamped Sex.com site could watch our sexy Super Bowl ads like “Veggie Love” (about how a vegan diet can enhance your time between the sheets) or watch Alicia Silverstone’s naked testimonial—living proof that a vegan diet does a body good.

They could gaze on sultry ads featuring gorgeous vegetarians, like Pamela Anderson and Owain Yeoman, or join the action and participate in one of our Sexiest Vegetarian contests. They could also read about the many vegan foods that are natural aphrodisiacs.”

Based purely on the above photo, I think that its a great idea; lets see Sex.com and PETA hook up.

Godaddy Registers Its 40 Millionth Domain

Over the years I’ve seen registrars come and go. One registrar that I really admire, is Godaddy. Bob Parsons has led the industry for many years and the recent stats published by Godaddy are simply amazing.

“GoDaddy now holds a near 50 percent market share of all active new domains registered in the world and is more than three times the size of its closest competitor.”

“Over the next twenty-five years, I see the Internet growing exponentially,” said Parsons. “Think about it, whether you are communicating, learning or conducting business, being on the Internet is where it’s all happening. I’d say if you aren’t online with your business, you really aren’t in the game.”

Congrats Bob.

Poker.org Sells For $1 Million

Its been reported that Sedo has brokered a deal selling poker.org to PokerCompany.com for the sum of $1 million.

Other .org auctions include engineering.org for $198k which happened in 2003 and date.org for $150k in 2006.

10 Interesting Facts From The Tucows Q4 Earnings

A few snippets of interest came out of the 2009 earnings call for TCX. For the record, neither I, nor any company I’m associated with own any shares in TCX.

1. Revenue for the fourth quarter increased 6.1%

2. New registrations up more than 10%

3. For 2009 as a whole, domain service revenue grew almost 10% compared to 2008.

4. YummyNames, (their domain portfolio group) also had another strong quarter with revenue up 78% year-over-year.

5. In 2009 YummyNames revenue grew by 35% compared to 2008 with $250,000 of sales in the last quarter.

6. “the number of individual name transactions which has grown more than tenfold to over 150 in the fourth quarter of 2009 from just 14 in the fourth quarter of 2008 with the average price remaining relatively constant.”

7. “Gross margin for the YummyNames, our domain portfolio services category, increased by $649,000 to $1.3 million from $680,000 for the same quarter of fiscal 2008. This increase was due to the strong domain name sales that Elliott described earlier which grew by 945,000 compared to the fourth quarter of 2008.

8. (Following on from point 7) “These increases were partially offset by a decrease of 296,000 in the delivery of third-party advertisements on parked pages.”

9. “Gross margin from our OpenSRS service which includes domain services, email services and other wholesale services was $4 million or 24% of net sales compared to $4.5 million or 27% of net sales for the fourth quarter of 2008. This decrease primarily resulted from the declining email revenue as well as the impact of the registry price increases and the success we have been seeing from our strategy to grow revenue from higher volume, lower priced customers.”

10. “There is a much greater willingness or a much greater recognition that the right thing to do when you are starting a business on the internet is often to spend $500-5,000 and get an excellent name instead of trying to drop a vowel or be cute with some exotic CCTLD when naming a business. That is happening on the demand side. It is tough to say how that will ramp up. I think that I am hoping for growth and would be just fine if that business was roughly flattish.”

Here are the numbers for the bean counters (don’t get too excited). Feel free to post a comment and tell us what you think.

The Hidden Cost Behind Domain Name Portfolios

A few weeks ago I received an email from someone who had a large portfolio of domain names for sale. This isn’t unusual, but what can be frustrating is seeing the same mistakes and unrealistic expectations, over and over again.

Consequently, I thought there are some interesting lessons for newcomers to the domaining industry, so I thought I’d share them. For confidentiality reasons I’m not going to reveal any information that could identify the seller or their domains. I have also “rounded out” the numbers below:

Parking Revenue: US$3993 per month
Price: 20 months parking revenue

The knee-jerk reaction for many people will be “$4k a month of parking revenue” is pretty good. From my perspective, it was “What’s the COST to me to keep this portfolio going?” After reviewing the documentation, I saw there were 3,300 domains. Of course, what was omitted from the documents was the COST to renew these domains. I know from experience, it costs about $17 per year for EACH of these domain names (they are ccTLDs). So you do the math…

Registration Fees: $56,200 per year
Parking Income: $47,916 per year
LOSS: -$8,284

Doesn’t look so good anymore does it? Now that is assuming that you are buying the portfolio for parking (not development or splitting it up for domain sales etc..).

The reason I’m pointing this out, is that there are many domains for sale at the moment and many newcomers (both investors and bloggers) to the industry.

If you are just starting out, domain investing can be time consuming and hard work. Don’t fall into the trap of buying up big straight away, you will almost certainly lose your $$$.