With the buzz circulating around the upcoming Sex.com sale, mainstream press is picking up the story of  “the world’s most expensive domains”.  Several people contacted us to tell us about CNN running the Sex.com domain sale on the ticker this morning.

Now HuffPo is getting in on the story with their take on the top domain sales.  They’ve included a couple domains on their list that many reading will point out were more than just domain sales (insure.com,casino.com, fund.com ).  The story actually looks like it may have been sourced from the Daily Telegraph story from today.  See I told you that everyone is getting in on this story.

The best part of the HuffPo story though is that they allow their readers (the average Joe) to rate, on a 1-10 scale, whether these were good buys or not.  Only a couple domains have broken out of the 5 range so far. If you’ve ever wondered what people thought of these sales. Now you can see first-hand

(c) 2009 DomainNameNews.com

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Myths about sales prices grow like weeds.

With Sex.com hitting the auction block next week, mainstream media are in a tizzy writing about the auction of the “world’s most valuable domain name”. As usual, they’re comparing it to other big ticket domain sales. The only problem is that many of the sales they refer to have misleading sales figures.

Consider The Huffington Post’s “The 11 Most Expensive Domain Names Ever“.

Casino.com is on HuffPos’ list at $5.5 million, but the caption notes that it was the web site and domain. So that wasn’t a domain sale.

You’ll also see Business.com, which was widely reported as sold for $7.5 million. But that was in illiquid equity. According to the buyer, the equity ended up being redeemed for only $2.0 million. (The seller claims it ended up being more than $7.5 million.)

Then there’s the granddaddy of them all, Insure.com. Look, Quinstreet did not buy the domain name Insure.com for $16 million. It bought an active web site, and it generates substantial leads. The domain itself wasn’t worth that much.

Buyers and sellers often times have an incentive to pump up the sales price for domains. The buyer gets lots of publicity, and the seller gets an ego boost. Yet it’s painful to see this sort of misinformation continue to spread.

© DomainNameWire.com 2009.

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Company defends generic domain name and explains legitimate reasons for blocking robots.txt from parked domain names.

Marchex subsidiary MDNH has successfully defended the domain name Clara.com from an attack by a magazine publisher in Spain.

Complainant Rba Edipresse, S.L. owns a magazine called Clara, and argued that it should get the domain name because it has trademarks for the term “Clara” and that Marchex hadn’t used the domain name since it was registered.

Clara.com was one of the domain names Marchex acquired when it bought UltSearch. It pointed out that the domain name is generic (woman’s name, translates to “clear” in Spanish) and that the parked page at Clara.com didn’t contain links competing with the magazine. In other words, the magazine didn’t have exclusive rights to the term Clara. The panel agreed with this assessment.

The complainant argued that Marchex’s use of robots.txt to exclude bots from visiting the site, including Archive.org, was a sign of bad faith. Complainants frequently suggest that using robots.txt to block archive.org is a sign of bad faith, especially when the block is placed after a complaint is received. In this case, robots.txt was in place well before the complaint was made. Further, Marchex and sttorney John Berryhill explained many legitimate reasons why the company uses robots.txt on parked domain names:

1. Lowers bandwidth costs
2. Limits click fraud and appearance of click fraud due to same IP
3. Avoids reverse engineering, copyright issues, click fraud, and other issues inherent with archiving
4. Keep parked pages out of search engines
5. Archived pages show only what was visible in one location; geo-targeting of parked domains means archives not accurate for all users

© DomainNameWire.com 2009.

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2. Marchex Named in Complaint to FTC
3. Ex-Marchex Employees Pay Up For Competing Web Sites

Second domain name auction in Las Vegas scheduled for later this month.

DomainConsultant premiered “Domain Madness” last year, a (mostly) online auction that was broadcast live from The Palms in Las Vegas. They’re back at it again this year, organizing an auction that will conclude on March 23.

This year’s auction will be limited to only a dozen or so premium domain names, and the auction will take place online at OneofaKind.comsite to be named soon. The sales commission is 8%.

Last year’s event was supposed to be online only, but the group organized a last minute trip to Vegas. This year will have a small crowd, as DomainConsultant invited a handful of people who were willing to pay up for an all-inclusive 48 hours in Vegas. Sounds like fun, but I won’t be able to make the last minute trip this year.

The 2009 event sold $150,000 in domain names. Here’s some video from the KingPin suite at The Palms, where the event took place.

© DomainNameWire.com 2009.

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Sedo will be hosting a Benelux auction for domain names with the  .nl and .be extensions.

Online pharmacy argues “Rugs” is merely a typo of “Drugs”.

Take two of these and
fire your lawyer in the morning.

Here’s an interesting UDRP case from National Arbitration Forum.

The company that runs CanadaDrugs.com, a popular online pharmacy, filed a complaint against the owner of CanadaRugs.com, which is a parked page featuring links for rugs.

CanadaDrugs.com tried to argue that the owner of CanadaRugs.com was typosquatting:

Complainant submits that the Domain Name is confusingly similar to its website and Canada Drugs Marks and that respondent has merely removed the letter “d” from the spelling of the word “Drugs” in the Domain Name. Complainant also submits that this omission of the letter “d” constitutes typosquatting and that Respondent has registered the Domain Name in an effort to take advantage of internet users’ typographical errors. Complainant argues that this alteration is not sufficient to distinguish the Domain Name from its own domain name and registered marks.

Hmm. Did it not occur to their lawyers that “Rugs” is a word?

The links on CanadaRugs.com are clearly unrelated to drugs, but the complainant argued that the parked page was a sign of bad faith intent to profit on the “typo”.

The panelist found that the two domain names were not confusingly similar for this reason. He then considered the last two elements of the UDRP “for completeness”, finding in the respondent’s favor. But for some reason he neglected to consider reverse domain name hijacking, even though the respondent asked for it.

The kicker? CanadaRugs.com is available for purchase on Sedo for only 500 EUR.

© DomainNameWire.com 2009.

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