Here is a little glimpse of domaining history with help of dnjournal.com: 2004 top sales

It’s always interesting to see the old sales to find what was a good buy and what wasn’t and try to predict the future prices by that:

CreditCards.com $2,750,000 Pvt Sale
Mercury.com $700,000 Pvt Sale
ME.com $460,000 Moniker / Domain Systems
Rugby.com $350,000 Pvt Sale
Smoking.com $325,000 GreatDomains
Viajes.com $300,000 Sedo
Arab.com $225,000 Pvt Sale
TourismAustralia.com $201,000 Pvt Sale
VisitFlorida.com $186,000 Pvt Sale
Commerce.com $180,000 Sedo
Beef.com $150,000 GreatDomains
Animation.com $150,000 Pvt Sale (more…)

Jpost, the top israeli newspaper, published an article on the upcoming Israel.com auction at moniker

You would think Israel.com would be an exciting, detailed Web site on the Jewish state, designed to attract tourists from abroad. But when the Web address is punched in to your Internet browser, all you get is a simple page with an Israeli flag smack in the middle.

In contrast, Australia.com has a virtual tour video where a young man from down under guides you through the complex and fun site, and Mexico.com helps Net surfers plan their entire vacation in “just one click.”

But come May 23, Israel.com should be on its way to becoming exciting and informative. The domain name will be auctioned off to the highest bidder on the Moniker.com live auction site. The physical auction will take place at the T.R.A.F.F.I.C East Conference in Orlando, Florida. (more…)

CBS is making a bigger push on the Internet. The broadcast company said Thursday it would acquire CNet for $11.50 a share, or $1.8 billion, in a deal that will make CBS one of the top 10 Internet companies in the United States. The deal offers CNet shareholders a 44% premium to Wednesday’s closing price and comes as CBS has been struggling to gain traction with investors.

“There are very few opportunities to acquire a profitable, growing, well-managed Internet company like CNet Networks,” said CEO Les Moonves. “CBS stands for premium content and unparalleled reach, and CNet Networks will add a tremendous platform to extend our complementary entertainment, news, sports, music and information content to a whole new global audience.” (more…)

Winner.com Ended at $225K on Sedo

Decent sale for a great domain. I think both the buyer and seller got a good deal here.

This could be the best domain for a Gambling portal, or casino and that is the most lucrative business online.

There is an ongoing discussion about the sale on DNF

There are 1,426,613 .ru domains registered in total and 60,491 .su
.ru stands for Russia and .su is the obsolete extension of Soviet Union, which is still being used.

But the shocker is all 3 character .ru domains are registered! I could hardly believe that the first time I heard about it mentioned on NP, but a bunch of random checks show that this is true, most appear to be registered by one company: LEGATO LLC and were taken a month ago.

Personally I think the buyout is quite premature, there is hardly enough reseller interest to sustain market values above reg fee for these and it’s highly probably that they will all be dropped in a year, in a same way as it happened to LLLL.com around year 2000, when one company bought about half of them and dropped them a year later realizing it was a bad idea.

One thing is clear though - this should help push the LLL.ru domains prices up on the market. The current prices for these seem to be around $250 and up.

For comparison LLL.ca domains sell for a minimum of $100 now. Canadian tld recently passed 1 million registrations. LLL.co.uk names sell for $1k and up, there are currently about 7 million of them registered.

According to the recently published stats by hitwise (first posted here), Google accounted for 67.90 percent of all U.S. searches in the four weeks ending April 26, 2008. Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com each received 20.28, 6.26 and 4.17 percent respectively. The remaining 45 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.40 percent of U.S. searches.

Hitwise data is based on the sample of 10 million US Internet users.  christianity (more…)

Ask.com acquires Dictionary.com, other Internet reference sites in search of better answers

Ask.com has bought a stable of Internet reference sites that includes Dictionary.com in its latest effort to distinguish itself from online search leader Google Inc. and other much larger rivals.

Besides Dictionary.com, Ask is picking up Thesaurus.com and Reference.com in its acquisition of Lexico Publishing Group LLC. Terms of the deal, set to be announced Thursday, aren’t being disclosed. (more…)

Top sedo sales publiched by domainnamenews:

taz.com 		40,000	USD GreatDomains
chianti.com		28,500	USD GreatDomains
posse.com 		24,500	USD
diw.com 		12,500	USD
ylc.com 		10,100	USD
textr.com 		8,750	USD
yachtshop.com 		7,600	USD
wzb.com 		7,100	USD GreatDomains
gonk.com 		7,000	USD
motionsports.com	6,700	USD
vko.com 		6,100	EUR
zoyo.com 		6,000	EUR

 more..

DomainNameWire reports about a very interesting patent filled by Frank Schilling with the help of domain attorney John Berryhill:

 On April 24, 2006, domain name portfolio owner Frank Schilling filed a patent application for “Generic top-level domain re-routing system” with the help of attorney John Berryhill. This patent, if granted, could end up being very important to the domain name industry.

Patent application 20060265516 describes a system for redirecting typos of domain names, such as a typo of the .com portion or the actual name:

…Because mis-typed TLDs in Internet domain names will not resolve to a valid address, valuable web site visitors and e-mail (more…)

DATO.com

- 70 Million google results
- Means “Data” in Spanish - one of the most valuable keywords
- DataRecovery.com recently sold for $1.7 MILLION!
- VINO.com was on GreatDomains auction last month and bidding went up to $66K

Bid here

Perfect domain for any IT related company in a Spanish speaking country and one of the best CVCV.com’s around!

DATO means Data in Spanish, but to the hundreds of possible endusers around the world, DATO is so much more than a Spanish dictionary word. Can you say 80 million + Google results? How about literally hundreds of daily Wordtracker results which include the word “dato” in them?

DataRecovery.com recently sold for $1.7 MILLION dollars! Spanish is the MOST POPULAR foreign language in the United States and ranks THIRD Worldwide in Internet users.

We ask you this… What would Data.com go for? Pause. Think about that for a sec…
Then tell me how Dato.com isn’t one of not only the greatest spanish generics auctioned this year, but one of the greatest generics period. Worldwide Internet penetration continues to increase… This is a domain which will forever have value, forever be recognize as a Tier 1 Spanish domain, and continue to increase in value for many, many years to come.

Need I really say more? If I haven’t sold you on DATO yet, I don’t think you’ve been listening — or you clearly don’t understand THE BIGGEST OPPORTUNITY IN THIS CENTURY, which is premium foreign language domain names.

DATO is an incredibly strong CVCV that flows off the tongue like any True CVCV should. DATO is being offered to you with NO RESERVE. In short, this domain WILL SELL, regardless of what’s offered. Arguably The Strongest CVCV offered on Sedo EVER.

Compare this to VINO (wine in Italian) which received offers of $60,000 and DID NOT MEET THE RESERVE. We’re giving you a once in a lifetime chance to pick up a Tier 1 premium for pennies on the dollar… There might never be an opportunity like this again!

Compare to domains like:

POPA.com sold on Sedo $15000+
ZOYO.om sold on Sedo 6000EUR ($9000+)

… and I think you’ll feel as confident as me in saying that this is a 6 figure domain any day of the week to a Spanish enduser.