WASHINGTON, D.C. - On Wednesday, the United States Justice Department announced it has seized 17 website domains utilized by North Korean information technology (IT) workers to purportedly evade government sanctions, conduct cyberattacks and defraud U.S. businesses, with the millions of dollars in illicit proceeds generated from such activities being used to fund North Korea's weapon development program. The Justice Department confirmed in a statement that the … [Read more...]
How Am I Supposed to Find A Good Domain Name When They Are Already All Gone?
PALM BEACH, FL – Finding a good, short, “.com” domain name nowadays is much harder than it was in the past, but it certainly isn’t impossible. What you don’t want to do, is listen to bad advice from someone who tells you to go ahead and register an alternative, such as “.net”, “.biz”, or “.info”. Whatever you do, don’t make that mistake, because you will very likely regret it at some point in the future. Unless your business is an ‘organization” you could get a “.org” … [Read more...]
Must Be Nice To Be “THE Sheriff” with “Sheriff.org”… URL Branded Vehicles
PALM BEACH, FL – Sometime back in 1996 someone had a pretty decent idea down in Florida; to register the Internet domain name “Sheriff.org” for the Broward County Sheriff's Office. I’m often reminded of this ‘solid decision’ as I live one county North and often see these URL branded police vehicles Wizz by me with “Sheriff.org” branded on the back bumper. I always think, there’s probably a lot of Sheriff’s offices around the entire country that wish they had that URL. … [Read more...]
Seven Days Remain to State Your Case on Price Cap Removal for Legacy Domains
PALM BEACH – ICANN, The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and PIR, Public Interest Registry, are considering the removal of current ‘price caps’ on legacy domain extensions such as “.org”, “.biz”, and “.info”; if you have an opinion on them doing so, you have limited time to make your comments and opinions heard as the window for public comment proceedings will close in seven days on April 29, 2019. The current Registry Agreements expire soon and they … [Read more...]
gTLD Madness: Five Years Later and Where Are We Now? T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Panel Debate
NEW YORK - By the time I started visiting domain conferences in person, unfortunately, what I feel was the greatest domain conference of all time, Howard Neu and Rick Schwartz’s T.R.A.F.F.I.C., had seen its last days. I wish it weren’t so. I think the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. conferences were the best respected domain conferences in history; I can only wish that Howard and Rick, for whatever reason, will team up again and bring it back one day, because everything else, in my opinion, … [Read more...]
Will People Use Alternative Domain Names Like They Do Toll Free Phone Numbers?
NEW YORK - Much like .com domain names, 1-800 toll free phone numbers with meaning in their letters such as 1-800-FLOWERS, are hard to come by these days – or even impossible to obtain, based on limited supply. Although it is indeed possible to get a 1-800 phone number today, if you’re looking for a vanity number, such as one with clear meaning in its letters, you’re much more likely to get it using an alternative such as 888. This is very much what we are seeing today … [Read more...]
Examining Past Alternative Dots Helps Predict Future Adoption of New Ones?
NEW YORK, NY – Sometimes to predict the future, it is as easy as simply examining the past. Based on a comment from one of my readers, this simple graph shows movements and numbers of registrations for some of the ‘original’ alternative dots and what is happening with them. Alternatives such as .BIZ, .INFO, .MOBI, .PRO, .NAME, .XXX for example, verse the originals. What good are or were these alternative URLs availability and how have newcomers adopted these into branding … [Read more...]
Sedo.com Releases Weekly Domain Name Sales List 10/23/2017 – 10/29/2017
NEW YORK, NY – Just released is Sedo’s weekly sales list, a weekly list of public transactions above $2,000. This weeks highlights included the top .com sold as ezy.com at 50,100 EUR ($58,371.01 US), the top ccTLD as dan.de at 5,950 EUR ($6,932.17 US) and the top other as SportsBetting.info at $20,000.00 USD. Here is the entire list for Sedo.com sales from 10/23/2017 - 10/29/2017. Domain … [Read more...]
What Do You See Here? Top 10 Legacy Domain Name Sales Over Last Few Years
NEW YORK, NY - Thanks to sites such as Namebio, we can examine REPORTED domain name sales over the years in just about any order or scenario. Today I wanted to look at the top 10 domain name sales over the last few years for legacy and some popular domain extensions. They are listed here twice; once accounting for only characters in the domain and then again for those including numeric and dashes. There has been some changes in the investments from foreign countries such as … [Read more...]
Top 100 .Info Domain Name Sales So Far This Year (01/03/2017 – 05/25/2017)
NEW YORK, NY – According to NameBio, there were a total of 101 reported .info domain sales so far this year totaling $90,327.00. The highest reported sales were the domains “Train.info” for $12,438.00 with the second place name as “Bus.info” for $10,732.00. Both domains are developed and look identical so they were purchased by the same buyer. To what is likely no ones surprise, .info domains significantly lower than both .net sales ($646,016.00) and .org sales (totaling … [Read more...]
Is There a Limit to Your gTLD Stupidity Meter? At $185k a-Pop, Who Cares Right?
NEW YORK, NY - There are a lot of cool looking domain name extensions hitting the market and making the rounds these days – so many in fact it is getting hard to keep up with them all. I mostly like the short ones which at least somewhat represent the Internet such as “.web”, “.site”, “.link”, etc. But who in their right mind would want to register and own a .motorcycles domain name? Could it be any longer? I mean, nine times out of ten the beginning word (what's left of the … [Read more...]
Review.info Sells for $6k on Sedo.com Weekly Domain Name Sales List 04/03/2017 – 04/09/2017
NEW YORK, NY - Today, Sedo released its weekly sales list, a list of public transactions above $2,000. This weeks highlights included the top .com sold as Susen.com at $36,000.00 US, the top ccTLD as blackjack-vegas.de at 53,052.50 US and the top “other” TLD as review.info at 6,000.00 US. It is interesting to see a .info domain name sell for three times what its Estibot value shows it should be ($2,000.00). I like .info domains a lot - always have. It seems that every now … [Read more...]
Nice to Hear: Dot Info Domain Extension Used in Radio Commercial by University
I heard one of my first radio commercials today to use a “.info” domain name for its website address. The commercial was about “Brain Imaging” research and was running on behalf of Stony Brook University Hospital and Yale University for their Department of Psychiatry using the domain name Imagers.info to promote Opportunities to Participate in Research. I’ve always liked .info domain names very much when it comes to either “getting information” about something or … [Read more...]
Measuring New gTLD Growth and Market Share via The DNS Zone File System
NEW YORK, NY - As should be no surprise, new gTLD growth and usage is on the rise exponentially. There are several tools available for measuring gTLD growth and market share which are ‘fairly accurate’ as they use the DNS Zone File system which maps domain names and IP addresses. One such tool which I originally thought was new is ntldstats.com, although the owner Stefan Meinecke was interviewed back in 2014 by TheDomains.com - so it is far from … [Read more...]