Randys Domaining Blog

I own one (1) domain that is registered with Name.com. It is a Noomle site I bought from a fellow Noomler a year or so ago. The renewal date for the name is April 15th, 2012.
Name.com took it upon themselves to charge my credit card $9.99 on March 10, 2012 – a full 31 days before the domain renewal fee was due. I protested – and here is their lame reply about why they feel justified in using my money – interest free – for a month before the actual renewal date.

“The reason we renew the domains several weeks early is so that we can notify our customers if there is a problem with the renewal (i.e. the credit card on file has expired). That way their domains do not expire and are not disabled. This can bring down websites, email accounts, etc.”

What a lame excuse for using my money free for a month. Shameful!

Has anyone else found this practice to be offensive?

Okay – it’s 2012, and I feel compelled to make a new years resolution.

I hereby resolve to make a better effort to sell my domain names.

There – now I feel better.

So, in order to do this, I am actually working on pricing my domains, and getting them ALL listed at Godaddy. I might try a name or two elsewhere – maybe ebay on cheap domains that are close to expiration. I also resolve to do some end user marketing.

A very satisfactory resolution – if I say so myself.

Several posts around recently about Microsoft selling domains on Sedo.  Some are good – others questionable. You can view the list here. A little research on these names yields some insight into the mind of microsoft. Some of these are quite good (eg. answerville.com, flycast.com, pcpal.com  – others maybe not so much (eg. phizzbang.com, willcodeforgreen.com). Heck – looks like I could have worked in that department! I wonder if these were all hand registered or if they bought them?

Now some more fun with microsoft domains. Drop a name from the list into My-IP-Neighbor for another fun list of domains that share an IP address. There are such gems as 0xf0ffff.com!

I have to go make a few offers now.

What really ticks me off is when you write to someone on their web site contact form with a serious inquiry, and you never hear back from them.

About two weeks ago I wrote to another domainer about the possibility of acting as a broker for my airlinereservations.us domain. Two weeks and no reply. How frigging long does it take to dash off a note that says “thanks for your email, but I am not interested. Thank You”.

I understand not replying to spammers and folks offering to make my site number one in search engines – but to not reply to a serious inquiry just sucks.

The world is buzzing over the long-awaited demise of Osama Bin Laden.

To me, the real headline here is that President Obama and his staff managed to keep the wraps on such an important operation for so long. I think it speaks volumes about the integrity of the presidents staff and everyone involved. My hat is off to them.

Well, I am no longer a member of our little domain name buyers group. It’s not that I wanted out, it’s just that the group decided to split into several directions and really lost our original vision; which was to invest in and sell domain which we could not individually afford.

Instead of a focus on just domains, the group, which I must say was dominated by pretty much one individual, decided to provide a domain brokerage service, a domain reseller website, and even considered an escrow service. In addition to this, they started playing around with strange non-premium TLD’s such as .GY (Guyana). Granted, we made a few dollars, but we lost our vision and diluted our manpower and experience. the group still owns one great domain name, and I am sure they will cash it in some day.

It was fun, interesting, and enlightening to belong to this group. I wish them all well in their continued ventures.

Okay – I have been ignoring the .co extension – rightly or wrongly – until today. I decided to try one high-CPC name. If it works that’s fine if not I have not made a huge investment.

What did you buy, you ask.  I went with MarylandAttorneys.co and parked the domain. If the .co does not catch on maybe someone looking for a lawyer in Maryland will make a mistake and leave the ‘m’ off the URL. We’ll see.

Okay, has everyone noticed the transition of Google from search provider to content provider?

The transformation is totally amazing, and has some real ramifications to the domaining world.

First, their computing power is absolutely stunning. They now take a simple search and provide local results in seconds. Think about how often this search is run and it is a truly impressive accomplishment.

Now consider the implications for small web publishers – especially the publishers providing local or ‘geo’ sites. Domain publishers have long sought names like NewYorkLawyer or MinneapolisDoctor. Google now provides listings matching the query, and also maps their locations. Need more specialized information? Just scan down the list and there is a place to select specialty results (like these for Minneapolis Doctors). The actual results (links removed) are shown below:

Dermatologist – Eye doctors – Women’s Clinic – Pediatrics – Psychiatrist
Doctors near: Uptown – St Paul – Edina

Zero in on a type of doctor – or select a more targeted location.

Another example – no need to even type in a location if you want a lawyer or doctor near you! Try it – type a query for “Dermatologist”. Google locates you by IP address and displays results for you – no need for a web site providing a listing of local dermatologists. $$$ ChaChing!

Okay – so they point you to a dermatologist. But wait!

Now you can also shop for dermatology products, dermatology books, read dermatology news, see dermatology videos, and even see real-time results. Oh gosh, I hope Hannah is safe on her trip to the dermatologist!

As promised,Rick Schwartz wrote about the first domain industry scandal of 2011 this morning. You can read about it here. I’m not going to talk much about it. It involves the apparent release of confidential domain ownership data. As I understand the article, an individual who is employed by (let’s say) xyz corporation, registered the domain xyzsucks.com using a confidential domain registration. The scandal is that an employee of the registration company wrote an email to xyz company divulging the identity of the owner of xyzsucks.com. This should not happen.

The real question here is why the folks at xyz corporation did not have the foresight to register the domain name xyzsuck.com!  I just checked a few company names and it appears that some  large companies still are not too swift when it comes to protecting their intellectual property from the embarrassment of outsiders registering this type of name. Granted – a company can use the UDRP process to recapture a domain name using a trademarked name – but for the cost, why not just register the name and avoid the hassle!

Okay this frustrates me greatly

I have what I consider to be a pretty good domain name in airlinereservations.us.

Similar names have been sold. For example:
airlinetickets.us – $3600 – 07/08/2010 – showcase.snapnames.com.
airlinereservations.de – $9750 – 08/08/2007 – undisclosed per estibot.
airtickets.com – $80,000 – 09/10/2010 – sedo.

Now I submitted airlinereservations.us to an auction that included mainly domain tld’s from Europe, and it was declined.  Another auction appeared and I re-submitted the name and received an automated reply that the domain had been previously declined.

So, is there a domain auction that would like to take it on?

contact me if interested!