Monday, January 25, 2010

.DE hyphen sales, .EU IDN sales

DomainReport.ca

If you review the weekly sales reports from DNJournal.com, you've probably noticed a general trend in country code sales lately in that there are quite a few .de (Germany) domains selling with hyphens in them, and also many .eu (Europe) IDN sales.

A few recent examples of these sales from DNJournal.com are:

Free-SMS.de - $162,150

browser-game.de - $1,588

future-business.de - $1,378

fussball-blog.de - $1,160

Diät.eu - $4,301

Rechtsanwälte.eu - $4,100

börse.eu - $3,032

währungsrechner.eu - $1,413


I'm not sure when I noticed this trend, but it's hard to ignore if you follow country code domain sales.

Domains with hyphens aren't normally desirable for even the .com extension, so to see repeated country code domains sell for good prices stands out to me. The only thing I can tell is that the .de extension is a hot seller for country codes, so maybe that has spilled over to hyphen versions too. As a side note, I do own some hyphen domains and think they can work well if the keywords are strong.

As for the IDN .eu sales, you don't often see any IDN sales in the DNJournal report (though they've been picking up a bit lately). Now all of a sudden you see IDN .eu sales popping up every week.

If anyone can add to the discussion of these sales please go ahead!

.CA domain sales of past two weeks

DomainReport.ca

There were three .ca domain sales reported at DNJournal.com in the past two weeks. One was a modest sale at Sedo, and two were premium level sales sold by N49 Interactive.

If you haven't heard of N49 Interactive before, they are a web design company based in Toronto. Their website shows a diverse portfolio of websites they have designed. I believe they also own a large portfolio of .ca domain names.

The three sales reported by DNJournal in the last two weeks are:

Proxxon.ca - $1,750 US (Sedo)

Play.ca - $34,000 US (N49)

Vans.ca - $25,000 US (N49)



Not a bad start to the year for .ca sales, and the weekly .ca TBR drops are still competitive from what I've seen too.


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Tuesday, January 19, 2010

TBR.ca - New .ca domain drop catcher

DomainReport.ca

TBR.ca, a new .ca domain drop catching service, is now open for business at http://www.tbr.ca. I thought this service would be of interest to anyone who buys .ca domain names, especially in drops, so I have posted their announcement below.

The site is currently in beta stage.

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TBR.ca offers full statistics of each name that is dropping; these statistics currently include:

Google Links
Number of Google Pages
Archived at Archive.org
Yahoo pages
Yahoo Links
Bing Pages
whether it has alexa ranking
Dmoz Listed
Google Page Rank

In the future TBR.ca will be able to provide more statistics, and suggestions are more then welcome on researchable statistics to provide.

Searching

Visitors can search by:

Length
Number of words in the domain
Language, we can detect english, french and bilingual names
Any of the stats mentioned above
Categories, domains when imported are assigned a category based on keyword recognition. This will be enhanced and automated as our keyword database grows. To start categorizing may not be fully available.
Keywords, keywords that are located within the domain name

Searches can be named and saved to your search filters for use in future drops, eventually it is planned that we would notify you if any domains are dropping that match your criteria in our Featured email each week.

Pricing

Our pricing structure is a minimum of $10 backorder price +
Registration fee of $8.93, making the minimum purchase amount $18.93

Payment Methods

Tbr.ca currently accepts credit card, interac, paypal, moneybookers, bank transfer and check payment methods.

Bank wire payments incur a $10 processing fee.

Members can also make partial payments from any of the sources above,
meaning if you have cash in your paypal you can use that then pay the
remaining on another payment method.

Payment Plans

We offer an indepth Payment Plan which can be used to differ the payment into increments for up to 4 months from the purchase date. The minimum purchase amount for a payment plan is $200.

More information is available on this during the auction and at checkout, we have included a detailed payment calculator so you can see the exact breakdown before proceeding.

Bidding Incentives

Currently our auctions are schedule to be held from Wed to Friday closing from 12pm - 5pm EST, our current policies enable a discount based on when the winning bid was made. Winning bids placed on Wed receive a 20% discount on the final purchase price, bids placed on Thurs incur a 10% discount on the final purchase price, there are no
discounts for bids placed on Fridays.

Bids are defined as either proxy or bids that are made after the auction has started and backorder bid amounts are exempt from the discount.

There is more information on this feature
http://www.tbr.ca/terms/earlybidincentive

Open or Closed Auctions?

Our auctions are available to all members of the site, there is a direct incentive to backordering prior to the auction.

Watchlist

Ever wanted to be kept up to date on an auction/backorder, we have
implemented a watchlist service where you can receive email updates as
the auction progress, or if we are able to backorder the domain.

Bidders who have not backordered the domain prior to it going to
auction are allowed a single binding bid that does not utilize the
proxy bid system.

We feel that this gives a huge benefit to the members that have
backordered the domain with TBR.ca.

Auctions

Our anti sniping rule is if a bid has been made in the last 5 minutes
of an auction the timer is reset to five minutes.

Minimum Bidding Increments are:

Less then $100: $10.00 increments
Less then $500: $25.00 increments
Less then $1,000: $50.00 increments
Less then $5,000: $100.00 increments
Less then $7,500: $250.00 increments
Less then $10,000: $500.00 increments
Less then $1,000,000: $1,000.00 increments

More information on auctions can be found here http://www.tbr.ca/terms/auction/

Invoicing

Our invoices are generated after all auctions have been completed
allowing for multiple purchases to be placed on a single invoice.

DNS Servers

Under your account you have an option to set default DNS servers, once
auctions have been completed and the invoice paid in full, the winning
domains dns servers will be adjusted. This is currently not yet
implemented but should be by next week.

Partnerships

TBR.ca is working on a system to allow current registrars to partner with us to utilize our auction system as well as allowing investors an opportunity to partner with TBR.ca, while remaining able to utilize the site without any unfair advantages. More information on this will be available as we iron out the details, if you are currently running a registrar or may be open to partnering with TBR.ca in the future feel free to shoot me an email and I can pass along the information when it becomes available.

Beta Special

During the beta stages of the site we are covering the registration fee on all purchases, this discount will be automatically added to all invoices.

Any bug reports can be sent through the support form or directly to
JBrumwell *@* ReadyNetwork.ca


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Sunday, January 10, 2010

Did you register any Phone Apps domains?

DomainReport.ca

From time to time the question always comes up in domaining, "Are all the good domains already registered?"

My personal answer to that is No, if you do enough searches you can always find a term or word in some extension that has some potential, where you or someone else could take that domain and turn it into a useful site. If you're lucky, it might even come with a little traffic right away.

One specific area where hand regging still has potential is when new markets or terms are created, especially popular ones. I believe Apps are one of those new terms where you can still dig up a good unregistered domain. I don't own a smartphone or webphone, and have never used a phone app, but if you've watched tv and ads the last month or two, you can't help but notice the increase in space devoted to Apps.

Phone apps (short for applications) are little programs you can add to your phone that show you sports scores, film times in your area, play games, organize your life, and so on. Like it says in the commercial, if you have a need, 'there's an App for that'. Apple, Blackberry, and other phone makers have created App stores where you can browse the different apps and download them to your phone for a small cost. Some apps are even free. The number of apps seems to be growing exponentially, and with smartphone use predicted to have huge growth, it's a market that can't be ignored. Five years ago it was a market that pretty much didn't exist, now it's in the hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars!

Since last month I've begun to search for different types of terms to register as domains. Doing a search in Google keywords, most of the highest searches for apps include trademark terms like App Store, iPhone apps, blackberry apps, palm apps, and so on. These I'd stay away from. Safer terms would be phone apps, or smartphone apps.

Next I checked terms like free apps, best apps, new apps, top apps, top 10 apps, etc. These are taken in .com and many other extensions, and even into country codes.

Another idea I had was to search for categories of apps that might be popular, like game apps, music apps, horoscope apps, fishing apps, travel apps, car apps, and so on. Pretty much take any top keyword and put apps after it, and you can see some potential.

Brandable apps domains? How about App world, App web, App net, App shop, AppZilla, Appster, and so on. Again all taken in .com.

Yet another thing you can try (and I did) is to search for app terms in other languages, like Spanish, French, and German. Here I had more luck and was able to get what would be top terms in english - but in different languages.

All in all how did my search go? I probably registered under 20 domains, so not a huge investment. It was split between english and other languages, with .com and country codes. I didn't register any .net's .org's .info's or .mobi's. I am checking to see if they get any traffic now, so don't want to list the names. I may do so in a follow up post after I see how this goes.

What do I see for the future of Apps? I see them being similar to games, eventually almost everyone will have a smartphone, and the number of apps will continue to grow, and the apps themselves will continually evolve. There will always be a new app to get, and more hot apps. More app stores will be created, not just run by the phone makers themselves. Companies will specialize in certain types of apps, and having good descriptive domains will help people find them.

I think Google keywords searches for apps terms will increase every month, and the top terms will get registered in more extensions over time.

So how about you?

Did you register any good apps domains? Do you get traffic to your apps domains? What do you see as the future for phone apps?


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Saturday, January 9, 2010

.CA sales activity of past week

DomainReport.ca

Last week saw one .ca domain sale reported at DN Journal, and a very active TBR .ca domain drop.

The one sale reported at DNJournal.com was:

CarpeDiem.ca - $1,000

The Wednesday TBR drop featured more good quality .ca domains than usual, and some of these went to auctions at the various drop catchers.

Some of the auction results were posted in DNForum.com. I haven't verified these results myself, but I have no reason to believe they aren't correct.

TBR auction sales reported this past week were:

smartcar.ca - $3550
rz.ca - $2750
ear.ca - $2250

erection.ca - $960
filmschool.ca - $551
businessnetwork.ca - $310

convenient.ca - $280
showbiz.ca - $3061
canadatourism.ca - $3650

booth.ca - $1030
sunscreen.ca - $1500
handcuffs.ca - $75


Some other nice .ca domains that dropped in the last week were:

showtime.ca
interactive.ca
teeoff.ca
greycup.ca
ris.ca
5n.ca
beijing.ca
stanleycup.ca
pnr.ca
hoh.ca
jar.ab.ca
pilots.ca
argentina.ca
poodle.ca
tidy.ca
terrier.ca
croissant.ca
muffin.ca

It will be interesting to see if next week's TBR has domains that are this good, but this was likely just an irregularity in the world of TBR drops.


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Tuesday, January 5, 2010

CIRA .CA domain WHOIS policy review

DomainReport.ca - CIRA gives results of .ca WHOIS policy consultation, here is the email I received from them below.

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As you may recall, in June 2008 the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) launched its new WHOIS Privacy Policy, which protects the privacy of individual Registrants by restricting personal information. At the time of the policy launch, CIRA committed to holding public consultations on the WHOIS disclosure policy within one year. Accordingly, these consultations have recently been concluded and CIRA is pleased to announce the results.

The purpose of this consultation was to obtain input on whether the WHOIS disclosure policy strikes the appropriate balance between the privacy rights of Registrants and other stakeholders, such as intellectual property interests and law enforcement agencies given the experience since the launch of the policy. The consultation was also designed to measure overall satisfaction of key stakeholder groups with the policy, and whether any impacts on these stakeholders require changes to the policy. To this end, CIRA engaged the services of The Strategic Counsel, an independent national public opinion and marketing research firm.

The key findings of this consultation can be found at:
www.cira.ca/whois

Thank you for your participation in this important project.

If you would like more information on this consultation or the WHOIS Privacy Policy,
please visit the CIRA website or contact Michael Stewart, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary at WHOIS2010@cira.ca


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