Geo Domain Names Rise in Value

I’m writing today from the Atlanta suburb of Buckhead. Buckhead is the world’s most expensive neighborhood. Well, in domain name terms, that is. The domain name Buckhead.com sold for $250,000 this year. $250,000 seems like what someone would pay for a city name, not a neighborhood.

But geographic domain names continue to ride the rising tide of localization. How many times you have you heard about local search over the past year?

At first this seems counterintuitive. The internet is global. Why would someone want a domain that applies to only a small percentage of the world, not a generic word that people in every city might search for?

I recently purchased the domain of a small Austin suburb for $5,200. A traditional pay-per-click domain buyer would laugh at the price and say it’s too high. After all, the domain only gets about 10 hits per day. But this small suburb of 10,000 people is growing quickly. It should nearly double in population over the next five years. And it’s affluent. There are at least a dozen home builders in the suburb selling their share of nearly a thousand lots. If you were one of those developers, wouldn’t you pay $5,000 for just one lead that resulted in a sale?

The price of a city name is probably out of your reach. There’s no way I could buy Austin.com. But you can still join the rising tide of geo domains by buying neighborhoods, suburbs, and small cities.

Source
www.whataredomains.com

Comment sought on domain names

The Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers has invited public comment on procedures for creating domain names, the first expansion for general use since 2000. Names added since then have been limited to specific regions or industries.

Domain names are key for helping computers find websites and route e-mail. There are currently about 250 domain name suffixes, most of them for specific countries, such as ".fr" for France. General-use names include ".com" and ".net."

Some critics of the nonprofit Internet organization have complained that it has been slow to approve new names and that the procedures sometimes have been arbitrary.

Businesses and trademark owners, meanwhile, worry that more names will lead to more "cybersquatting," the practice of grabbing names before companies can in hopes of selling them at a premium.

Source
www.whataredomains.com

Lack of posts

I would like to apologize to everyone for the lack of new content lately. I am in the process of moving and it has been consuming all of my time. If there is a topic you would like me to discuss please drop me an email to whois@dr.com.

Thanks,
Justin Godfrey

This is definitely not Rupert Murdoch's MySpace

A beta version of News's MySpace community site was launched this week in China, but users must be careful when typing the Chinese site's URL or may end up shopping for patio furniture.

MySpace China's Web site can be found at http://www.myspace.cn. But users who type the address http://www.myspace.com.cn in their browsers will instead find themselves visiting the Web site of Zhejiang Yong Qiang Group Co. Ltd., a company that specializes in outdoor furniture and accessories, such as reusable ice packs for coolers.

Representatives for Yong Qiang, which also uses the Yotrio brand, and MySpace China could not immediately be reached for comment.

A search of whois records maintained by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), which oversees the .cn top-level domain, shows the current MySpace.com.cn domain name registration was dated November 2003, less than six months after MySpace was founded. That was long before the first rumors of MySpace's interest in China appeared in the press.

The domain name MySpace.cn was registered in January 2004, according to CNNIC records.

Domain-name squatting is relatively common in China, where speculators have been known to register domain names that include product names of multinational companies, hoping to sell the names for a profit. In other cases, Chinese companies lay claim to a domain name before a multinational company begins to use it.

Such was the case with a Chinese domain similar to Google's Gmail service. A Chinese company, Beijing ISM Internet Technology Development Co. Ltd., registered the http://www.gmail.cn domain for its own e-mail service in August 2003, more than six months before Google first announced its free Web mail service.

Source
www.whataredomains.com

.biz domains set for rate hike

NeuStar, the operator of ".biz," said it would raise fees 7 percent to $6.42, starting Oct. 19. In a letter to ICANN, NeuStar said the company was "taking this action to align .BIZ domain prices more closely with those of competing global TLDs," or domain names.

Another week, another price increase in Internet addresses. This time, it's ".biz" whose fees are going up.
In recent weeks, operators of ".com," ".net," ".org" and ".info" have announced increases beginning in mid-October in the wholesale prices for domain names -- what the operators collect from the companies that sell names on their behalf. Such charges are generally incorporated in the prices companies, groups and individuals pay to register names, and they apply to new registrations, transfers and renewals.

Many of the announced hikes became possible when the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the Internet's key oversight agency, agreed to new contract terms in December, permitting an annual hike of up to 10 percent a year upon six months' notice.

NeuStar Inc., the operator of ".biz," said it would raise fees 7 percent to $6.42, starting Oct. 19.

In a letter to ICANN, NeuStar said the company was "taking this action to align .BIZ domain prices more closely with those of competing global TLDs," or domain names.

With about 1.7 million names registered, the ".biz" suffix is the world's 10th most popular domain name and was one of seven ICANN approved in 2000 in the first major expansion of Internet addresses since the system was created in the 1980s.