Domain names

How much do you love.info?

by kierenmccarthy on January 27, 2010

Enough to pay $12,000 for it?

I just got the results for the Domainfest first-day auction, described as “very strong” by Oversee’s main on the ground, Mason. Certainly looks better than last year, which was a bit of a wash-out. Is this another sign the economy is finally picking up?

Anyway, of 73 domains, 49 were sold totaling $150,950.00. It’s good but it still seems under-par. Oversee’s CEO Jeff Kupietzky alluded to this in his opening speech. Jeff believes that this is early days, that the world of domains will explode some time soon, like a real estate boom.

Maybe he’s right; maybe he needs to persuade himself he’s right, with a portfolio of one million domains that will cost over $5 million a year in holding fees. I’ll ask him tomorrow morning.

Here’s a random selection of domains, prices and mindless comments from me from the list:

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Adam Epstein wins Domain-pitch-fest

by kierenmccarthy on January 26, 2010

Just an update on my previous post – Adam Epstein from AdMarketplace won the first round of the PITCHfest.

The winning idea – pubMarketplace can be found at, well, pubMarketplace.com. There is a flyer in the Domainfest bag about the service.

It advertises itself as “Bringing the Power of Search to Content Publishers” and offers the ad tag cloud that he showed off during his presentation.

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Google gets rough ride at Domainfest

January 31, 2009

Dangerous degree of arrogance backfires

You know it’s bad when you start to feel sorry for the person on stage. Hal Bailey must have wondered what the hell happened. Coming to DOMAINfest Hollywood as the man in charge of AdSense for Domains, Hal was here to tell the assembled masses that Google was going to allow them to make money while sitting on their arses.

This incredible gift was going to come with some rules though: domainers would have to clean up their game. They would have to post original – i.e. not stolen – content on all the domains they owned, and they would have to provide a valuable informational service to their fellow Netizens. If they did that, they would find Google warm in their embrace; if they did not then Google would not help them and they would be out in the cold.

You can imagine Hal planning out this gentle lecture in his head before taking the stage with fellow Google employee Matt Parry: tough love but they would thank him for it later. It didn’t quite pan out like that.

Instead, the one-hour “Google Perspective: Winning over the Advertiser and Optimizing Site Performance through Analytics” was a lesson that Google executives would do well to learn from. Customers are customers and not just grateful users of services – no matter how much market share you have.

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DOMAINfest auction a wash-out

January 30, 2009

We first learned that the domain name market was far from stable around eight years ago when the dotcom crash turned a booming market into dust in just a few months.

Over the years, that market has grown in strength: its stability saw people invest in advanced systems for buying and selling domains, and the never-ending demand for Internet sites, coupled with the fact the the number of top-level domains stayed the same and so the domain space became smaller, meant that prices increased steadily to the point where tens of thousands of domains became worth tens of thousands of dollars.

Well, the DOMAINfest domain auction has just demonstrated that the domain name space may be more stable but it ranks alongside art, rather than houses, when it comes to property.

In short, the auction was a bit of a wash-out, with none of the 200+ domains available exceeding expectations; most hitting the bottom-end of their estimated value; and a very large number meeting no bidders and being pulled off the floor.

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203 domains; four worth more than $1 million

January 29, 2009

The big event at domaining conferences is the auction – almost like an online cattle show – where proud owners get to show off their biggest beasts and wait in silent anticipation about the huge pay-off.

I’m at DOMAINfest in Hollywood and it being Hollywood, there is some glitz and glamour to proceedings. The auctions people are dressed in tuxedos, swirling lights, a booming PA piping music and MCs, bars in the corners and excited chatter.

For an economy in the doldrums, the online auction market looks healthy (we shall see in a minute I suppose). There are 203 domains up for auction. No less than 18 of them are going for between $100,000 and $250,000; 4 for between $250,000 and $750,000; and no less than four domains with an “opening bid range” of over $1 million.

So what are those domains?

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DOMAINfest pictures

January 29, 2009

I’ll be taking pictures at DOMAINfest today and sticking them on Flickr – and possibly here – with a CreativeCommons license (free non-commercial use; accreditation required). The stream is below:

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Here at DOMAINfest, Hollywood

January 29, 2009

Today I’m at DOMAINfest in Hollywood. It’s the last day of a two-day conference all about the domaining side of the domain name industry – the sale and resale of domain names and associated websites.

Doug Brent, ICANN COO, is here to talk about policy issues and the work ICANN is doing this year – some of which is likely to impinge quite heavily on this fresh industry. But I wanted to come and learn about this aspect of the DNS and hopefully encourage people to get involved in ICANN.

So, if you are here and you see me, come over and chat. I’ll be here and writing blog posts throughout the day.

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Jennifer Lopez fights cybersquatting case

January 19, 2009

Singer Jennifer Lopez has filed papers against the owner of jenniferlopez.org and jenniferlopez.net, accusing him of cybersquatting.

The two sites are owned by one Jeremiah Tieman who lives in Arizona and uses the sites to display news, pictures and videos of and about the singer and includes a disclaimer at the bottom stating that the sites are fan sites and are not endorsed by Lopez. However, both sites also include prominent ads and links through to affiliate sites.

Case D2009-0057 was filed last week with the World Intellectual Property by Lopez’s charitable foundation – which support women and children on low incomes – rather than the hard-hitting IP lawyers Fross, Zelnick, Lehrman and Zissu that are the registered owners of Lopez’s dotcom website.

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Why Google has a dangerous amount of power – Part 1

January 9, 2009

I have long said that Google is going to become the new Microsoft. People forget that Microsoft was once also a poster-child, before its control over the majority of the world’s operating systems turned it into a monster.

The fact is that Google has a dangerous amount of power and it is only a matter of time before that level of power corrupts. The fact is that Google has gone beyond providing neat, market-changing products for free and has started to dictate what is allowed online through the rules it creates. Again, it is only a matter of time before those rules start being bent in favour of the corporation, rather than the improvement of its products or an improved end-user experience.

So, my first quick example of where Google has a dangerous amount of power. This site – kierenmccarthy.com and my other main site kierenmccarthy.co.uk – have this morning completely disappeared from Google. Last night my sites existed, this morning, they do not.

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Domainpulse in Vienna

February 18, 2008

I am going to have to make a determined effort to update this blog more often. I always feel better when I am writing. Anyway, just as an update: I am currently in New Delhi in the Maurya Hotel following a busy conference week. I’ll be heading to the airport soon to go to Paris, where I hope to meet up with various folk that are integral to the next two conferences coming up both in June: the OECD ministerial in Seoul, followed immediately afterwards by the next ICANN meeting in Paris.

But in between, and for Thursday and Friday this week, I will be at Domainpulse in Vienna giving a talk partly about my book, Sex.com, and partly about the history of making money from domain names. You can see the full programme here. It should be interesting: Wolfgang Kleinwachter, Peter van Roste, Sabine Dolderer, Patrik Faltström, Daniel Karrenberg plus a number of people I have yet to meet and look forward to doing so. If you’re going, see you there.

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