dot COM report » Domain Names

Sex.com Has a Price

dotCOMreport Editor — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 06:22:27 +0000

Any of you out there looking to venture into the adult entertainment world should best keep your wallets closed. Sex.com may be on the market, but it carries a hefty asking price of $13 million.

Escom, LLC, the current owner of the domain, made headlines awhile back when PETA called for the company to donate the domain to them so they could use it as a tool in a recent ad campaign. Clearly, Escom wasn’t interested in charity.

It’s been reported that a deal has been made with Clover Holdings Ltd., a company that outbid 12 others in the quest for the domain. No reports have been made on what will be done with the domain but most are thinking the intentions are pretty obvious.

What do you think? Is any domain worth $13 million?

Top 5 Things You Should and Shouldn’t Do for SEO

dotCOMreport Editor — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 10:16:44 +0000

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has been one of the best ways to implement into your websites and blogs to gain more traffic to your search. Gaining a higher ranking on the search engines’ results list takes bringing on great content. Content is king and it’s important to write using relevant keywords in order to bring in consistent and continuous traffic to your site.

Avoid using Javascript to write your content as this type of web language does not index too well on the search engines and it will be hard to get your website content on display through the search engines. This does includes the script Ajax and scripts that are used to show and hide text.
Avoid using images to replace text links as search engines will have a difficult time finding your site and ranking it too. The search engines use their spider features looking for links to add to search results. Also using images instead of text will make your web pages load slower so it’s best to use text links.
No misspelling of your keywords in your content as it will easily hurt your credibility and trust with potential clients. Clients who know the correct way to spell words will see the misspelling as unprofessional and not taking the time to review the website for errors.
Try to avoid using more than 3 keywords and phrases with your optimization as it will easily confuse the search engines as there will be too many topics on the page. It’s recommended to write small paragraphs on each topic in order to get the relevant keywords and phrases on the page.
Watch the amount of keywords in your URL and try to not have more than 10 words in your URL link. Putting keywords in your URLS is important however having a long URL will put your site on the spam side.

Flipping Domains Goes Local

dotCOMreport Editor — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 12:17:10 +0000

Domain name flipping is the method that is used for the buying and selling of domain names. The process is so easy that just about anyone can do it. Most flippers opt for a third party listing website, but you can easily maximize your profits by convincing someone to buy, but how?

Convincing someone to buy your domain name requires you to make sure it is worth the money. You can’t create a valuable domain name by typing in a bunch of letters. Domain names that sell are those that are short, easy to read, make sense, and contain a popular keyword or keyword phrase. If you just carelessly create domain names, opt for a third party listing website where you may be lucky to make $50.

You should have a good domain name to flip. When buying that domain name, first think of someone who would buy it. For example, do you have a lot of welders in your area who don’t have online websites? If so, start buying domain names that contain their business name or slight variations of it. When adapting domain name buying to a specific buyer, it is easier for you to make a profit.

Once you’ve purchased a domain name, what is next? If a business is established and has been operating for years, they may not contact you. This is because some feel they do not need a website. Unfortunately, this is a costly mistake. Many customers are completely foregoing their phonebooks and using the internet to find local businesses, including plumbers. Use this as part of your sales pitch.

The first step in convincing someone to buy your for sale domain name is to convince them that they need a website. When targeting business owners, state the fact that many consumers now use the internet to research local businesses. Say that adding information about the plumbing business and pictures of employees will give consumers peace of mind. They aren’t just hiring anyone to come inside their home. For retail storeowners, highlight the fact that products can be sold online too.

Once you are able to convince a business owner that they need a website, you need to convince them to purchase your domain name. This can be tricky. For starters, consider business profits. A company that just lay off ten employees, likely isn’t going to be able to pay $50,000 for a domain name. If you created a domain name specifically for the pitch, set the amount at a reasonable price, such as $2,000. If you were able to score an unregistered name for $10, you still make a profit. This is a win win situation for everyone involved.

If you decide to target local business owners and agree to lower your asking price to meet their needs, buy as many domains as possible. To maximize your profits, sell many. Instead of spending 5 days arguing with a business owner to buy your domain name for $50,000, spend one day targeting business owners. Even if you sell for $10,000 each, you make the same amount of money and in the same amount of time.

Domain Name Disputes On The Rise

dotCOMreport Editor — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 12:30:31 +0000

It’s fun to follow domain-name disputes. You know, like when Nutrisystem registers a grievance against some squatter who registered www.nutrisystems.com. Or when F. Hoffmann-La Roche, the creator of Valium, files a complaint against someone who registered www.prescriptionvalium.com. Or how about when The Donald takes on some dude who registered www.trumptajmahal.com?

There’s something about domain-name disputes that takes us back to those wacky dot-com days at the turn of the millennium. But did you know that these disputes are more intense now than in those days? Apparently, the number of complaints against cybersquatters by trademark owners under the “Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy” (UDRP) has grown with each passing year according to the World Intellectual Property Organization.

Doug Isenberg, an Atlanta lawyer with The GigaLaw Firm, a practice focusing on representing companies in domain-name disputes and other areas of Internet law. Mr. Isenberg, who also writes a blog on these issues called GigaLaw, credits the ever-increasing number of disputes to the continual growth of companies doing business on the Internet and the growing number of scammers.

Mr. Isenberg also serves as a WIPO panelist, where he resolves domain-name disputes filed by others. Domain disputes are filed under the eight-year-old Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (“UDRP”), a standard arbitration process for resolving competing claims to domain names. Complaints are also filed with the National Arbitration Forum, which also reported a jump in filings last year.

Though Mr. Isenberg states that there is a legal business in buying, selling and using domain names (i.e., domaining), he points out that the problem is that many “domainers” don’t understand seem to disregard intellectual-property law. This is evident in the results of WIPO arbitrations: About 85% of trademark owners triumph when they bring these complaints.

Affects Of Age On The Value Of Expired Domain Names

dotCOMreport Editor — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 16:02:02 +0000

Establishing the true commercial value of an aged domain is quite difficult and tiresome. Domain traders make it a point to snatch aged domains from auction houses just to taste their hidden powers and commercial advantages. However, knowledgeable and experienced domain traders always doubt the commercial viability of such domains. According to domain name experts, considering the actual age of a given expired domain is a very small aspect.

Expired domains that are truly old, say 12 years, may provide you some indisputable advantages due to their ripe, old age; lot of people can identify its name because of the old acquaintance. Now the big question is why do domain name traders c the issue of age so strongly? Is there something that you and I do not know? One typical bit of thought says that all good quality domains were registered first and in actuality, they should be too beneficial to be neglected. This seems a valid argument and a sensible issue as far as the issue of age goes.

Conversely, some domain name traders are too incredulous about old domains, just because they may have nothing to offer you, except that they have a past record of continuous and consistent renewal. An old domain may just be a simple domain with no reputable history of traffic and inbound links. Experts also suggest that an old domain may have belonged to two categories of owners- an established business or industry that will never let their domain slip out of their hands, or an old domain owned by small businesses or individuals, who might have lost their control over their domains due to some unknown cause.

Nonetheless, there is one single important advantage associated with old domains, especially when they relate themselves with the primary searching engines. Google has a verifiable system of grading domain names according to their age; its massive search technological algorithms ensure that really old domains are placed at their relevant search engine rank positions. Yet, at what position such domains get their ranking is still uncertain.

Calculating the actual worth for such domains are actually very difficult and you may come to a decision going by the current market trends, while buying one such domain. One thing to note here is that people are prepared to pay a fair price for such domains, just to utilize them for developing meaningful web sites. If you wish to buy an old expired domain, ensure that you are checking its age; if the age is more than 8 years, you can absolutely go for it. Age factors can help you find out the quality of generics, as this is a better indicator of finding the value of an expired domain name. The internet boom era of late 1990’s produced most of the premium and better quality domain names.

On the other hand, buying expired domains based on their supposed age could be a tricky issue and you may need to learn and understand how the age of a given expired domain can really help you in your domain trading enterprise.

How to Make Money with Expired Domain Names

dotCOMreport Editor — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 18:26:15 +0000

Everybody is searching for more ways to make money successfully and efficiently in the world of online marketing and business these days. One untapped resource that you are probably not yet taking advantage of is the field of expired domains. An expired domain name can potentially earn you a great deal of cash and it can be another powerful tool to have at your disposal in your quest to be as successful as possible in the online marketplace.

First of all, you must of course recognize what an expired domain name is. It’s a domain name that was purchased by somebody else and either forgotten about or not renewed. That means that the original owner no longer has possession of it, although there may be a period of 30-45 days before it hits the open marketplace again.

As somebody looking to make money from expired domains, the first step in the process is being able to keep track of these names. You can do manual checks for this kind of thing and of course that can work although it will eat up a lot of time. The good news is that there are now many automated tools, services and sites out there that will allow you to quickly find expired domains based on dates, keywords, topics, traffic and more.

Now that you know about how to find some of these expired domains, you of course need to know how to actually go about earning some cash from them. You will have several different options at your disposal, and different situations call for different courses of action.

Perhaps the best case scenario is when you purchase an expired domain that was made into a real website and was able to establish itself somewhat. This site will have a supply of traffic already, and will also having incoming links leading to it. You can then redirect that traffic to your own website to quickly add more visitors.

An alternative in this situation is to throw up new content on that existing website that produces affiliate income or displays other advertisements. This way you can keep the site and its traffic intact for a time, but you can quickly and easily start squeezing some money out of it.

Even if the website never really was built and therefore doesn’t have any traffic, you can still quickly start earning. Build a micro-site based around the keywords in the domain, and use it either as a direct push for a product or affiliate program, or as a launching pad to your main site. Either way it won’t take you long to develop at all.

These are just a few of the ways that you can make money with expired domains. It’s all about being able to find them and being able to find the right ones. From there, you can build new content, sell affiliate products, redirect traffic and more, whichever solution is best for your particular case.

What Is Your Domain Name Worth?

dotCOMreport Editor — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:38:13 +0000

If you plan to assess the value of your domain name, you’ll find services, some free and others for a fee, offered by many companies. Although it is certainly worth looking at the current domain name market and trying to find equivalence with recent sales, it’s impossible to base the valuation of one domain name on the valuation placed on another. Ultimately, a domain name is worth what a buyer is willing to pay for it and no more.

Go with one of the free services if you insist on having your domain name appraised. Paid appraisal services, costing as much as $50, could cost you more than the domain name itself is worth. Also, bear in mind that few paid appraisal services are going to tell you that your domain name is worthless, since that would guarantee that they would lose the chance of any repeat business from you.

Use these guidelines to help you understand the prospective value of your domain name.

1- If you receive unsolicited offers to buy the name, that clearly shows it’s worth something to somebody.

2- If the domain name is a .com, it will have 5-10x or more the value of the same name with any other extension.

3- The length of the domain name may be relevant. Normally, the shorter the better.

4- Is your domain name hyphenated? Sometimes, hyphens help to maintain clarity, but generally they reduce the value of a domain name.

5- If the domain name is a misspelled word, you can knock 99% or more off the price.

6- If the domain name uses prefixes or suffixes, it can REALLY hurt the value.

7- The number of words in the domain and how common the words are can make a difference. Typically, the more words in the domain name, the less it is worth.

The entire process of trying to establish a value for your domain name may leave you feeling frustrated, but don’t give up. Without at least an sense of the value, you’re going to find it much harder to locate a buyer for the name and close a deal.

Domain Suffix .mobi Acquired By Afilias

dotCOMreport Editor — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 14:42:51 +0000

Afilias, an Irish Internet infrastructure company, announced that it is buying Top Level Domain Ltd, the registrar for the .mobi Internet domain for mobile Web sites.

Afilias, founded in 2001 by several technology and Internet companies, already owns “.info” and had been running “.mobi” and others under contract. Through the acquisition of “.mobi” outright, Afilias will get an undisclosed annual fee for each of the nearly 1 million “.mobi” names registered.

The financial terms of the sale were not released.

Operations began in 2006 for the “.mobi” suffix as a home for Web sites that are specifically tailored for mobile device screens. The creators of the company that had owned the domain, mTLD Top-Level Domain Ltd., include Nokia Corp., Microsoft Corp., Google Inc. and T-Mobile.

Number Of Registered Domain Names Approaching 200 Million

dotCOMreport Editor — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 16:07:20 +0000

Twenty-five years ago, the first domain name was registered. A new report has shows the number of registered domain names has broken the 192 million mark.

Network infrastructure company, Verisign, has released a report that shows an extra 11 million domain names were registered in the fourth quarter of 2009, taking the number to 15 million in total since the end of 2008 and now quickly approaching 200 million overall.

The end of last year saw the well-known .com and .net domain names reach 96.7 million. That’s up seven per cent from the same quarter last year, with a stable renewal rate of 71 per cent – 70.5 per cent in the previous quarter.

“It took some time for .com to take off. Two and a half years after the first registration, only 100 total .com domain name registrations existed. Then came the ‘.com boom’, with nearly 20 million names registered in the next two years” the report states. “The emergence of online businesses as well as early speculative activity fuelled the rapid growth.”

Still proving to be popular, the .uk domain was the third most registered regional domain after .cn for China and .de for Germany.

Cybersquatting May Net Google $500M Annually

dotCOMreport Editor — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 12:31:34 +0000

By meticulously analyzing data, Tyler Moore and Benjamin Edelman of Harvard University have revealed that Google may be making nearly half a billion dollars on an annual basis from cybersquatting.

Cyberquatting is loosely defined as the act of registering a domain name with typos, trademark variations, etc with ill-intent to bring in traffic from the actual site. A cybersquatter seeking to get himself/herself a slice of someone’s traffic pie could register a similarly-named domain, in hopes that visitors will mistype the domain name, and be directed to their page instead.

A great case of a cybesquatted website is ccnn.com. Some users may mistakenly type another “c” in “CNN”, and be directed to a page with advertisements.

Money, of course is the driving force. If enough folks make typographical errors and are directed to a cybersquatting website, the owner of that domain/site is pocketing an income from your mistake (provided you’re clicking their ads, which many people do).

So what is Google role in all of this? Google has one of the internet’s top advertising schemes — Adsense. It’s so amazingly easy to implement AdSense on a domain name, even a caveman can do it. With every ad click on Google’s advertising network, you can bet even Google’s getting a slice of that pie.

A message from a Google spokesperson indicates that Google will abolish any AdSense publisher from advertising if they are discovered to be cybersquatting, according to New Scientist.

Since the internet’s infancy, Cybersquatting has been around. Many of the initial cybersquatters are now very wealthy individuals, sometimes holding a domain name hostage, prompting the rightful owner (of a trademark, for instance) to hand over cash to take custody of the domain during the dot-com bubble time period. Naturally, things have changed massively on the ‘net with regard to intellectual rights since those times, but evidently, cybersquatting is still a problem.