Rick Shwartz, aka the domain king, recently announced his sale of Property.com to Foreclosure.com.

The sale is obviously marked as one of the highest in the domain industry, however the price wasn’t made public.. for all we know it could $500k.. or $1M, or $5M. Or $10M, as many domainers would expect.

Dnjournal has the full cover

All Other blogs reported the news: (more…)

Namepros is having some technical difficulties and the forum is not working currently. This happens very frequently lately, which is getting quite annoying. They should get a new server, or something.

I got a bunch of pm notifications by email and I can’t view them.

Here is the recent registrations stats for End of June 2008, or the latest data available. Top 3 tlds, .com, .de and .cn make up over 100 million domains, .net pushed to the 4th place.

We can see an enormous growth in .cn registrations, but this is mostly due their extremely low price. Many sites offer Chinese domains for just $0.13, yes, 13 cents only!

.co.uk is now slightly above .org and with UK pound going strong unlike the US dollar, the recent week’s sale of Phones.co.uk for $345k and LegalJobs.co.uk for $40k in addition to the previously reported sale of Cruises.co.uk for $1.1. Million comes to show how big the .co.uk tld is.

Apotheke.eu (”pharmacy” in German) sold for $81K last week and as the EU expands and grows tighter we can expect the .eu names to grow as well.

.asia is the new kid on the block and while many consider this new extension completely useless, there was one good sale in dnjournal last week: LasVegas.asia for $30k.

No it.s not WhiteCity.com, actually it’s the real city this time! As msnbc reports, also spotted on unplain

CARLSBAD, N.M. - White’s City, a tourist town at the entrance to Carlsbad Caverns National Park, has been sold at auction for $1.55 million.

Higgenbotham Auctioneers International says the community and the surrounding 366 acres were sold Monday. The company did not release the identity of the winning bidder.

White’s City includes two motels, a recreational vehicle park, a museum, retail shops, a gasoline station, an opera house and a water park. (more…)

The Montenegro Times reports:

30,000 applications have arrived to date for the registration of Montenegrin Internet domain .ME, the domain company have announced.

The company announced that the next round of registration, functioning on a first-come, first-serve basis, would start on July 17, during which all available domains would be awarded to the first bidders that meet required conditions.

  (more…)

www.LLLL.com is the new 4 letter domain portal by VURG, Philip O’Neil:

I have been a big supporter of Namepros in the past couple of years and try to devote some time to helping other members with their domain collections. I love the forums policy of keeping everything free. I expect big things to happen through Namepros in the future. I go by the name VURG and am also involved in other forums with that username including DNForum, DomainState and DNLodge. Online many people call me Vurg, not Phil. (Vurg.com was the first 4 letter domain that I bought.) I also spent a couple of years selling online through the name LessThan96 on eBay, LessThan96.com and LT96.com.

In May 2008, I aquired the domain LLLL.com with the view of using this domain to educate people on LLLL.com (4 letter domains) and provide services. I am currently using this name for blogging but with time plan on improving the domain with other services. This site is all about LLLL.com and so browse around for more info on 4 letter domains.

The site currently has a few interesting articles on LLLL.com domains, chosen sales history and links to auctions. More to come so add the name to your bookmarks.

A Chinese investment fund manager won the chance to have lunch with billionaire Warren Buffett by bidding 2.1 million dollars (£1.05m) in the most expensive charity auction ever held on eBay.

Zhao Danyang of the Hong Kong-based Pureheart China Growth Investment Fund won the auction, which ended Friday evening with a bid of 2,110,100 dollars.

A spokeswoman for the Glide Foundation, which receives all the proceeds from the auction, identified the winner yesterday.

It appears that Zhao and Buffett share a similar investment philosophy.

The auction will provide a significant boost to Glide, which provides social services to the poor and homeless in San Francisco. The foundation operates on a 12 million dollar (£6m) annual budget, spokeswoman Denise Lamott said.

“It almost feels like a miracle,” Glide’s founder Reverend Cecil Williams said in a statement. “We are amazed and ready to continue our work of breaking the cycles of poverty.”

Last year’s lunch brought in 650,100 dollars (£325,000). (more…)

The silent auction which ended recently netted $99k, according to the domains reports:

The silent auction from the Paris Domainers show just concluded and a total of 64 domains were sold for $99K

sprints.com                                $35,300.00
asj.com                                    $15,300.00
jpv.com                                     $8,240.00
WorkFromHome.info                           $5,000.00
travelplus.com                              $3,530.00
MKF.NET                   $1,770.00 (more…)

Dot Asia released a press release about their successful auction

.Asia Auctions Fetches Over US$3 Million

.Asia Hot-or-Not Contest First Weekly Prize Winning Domain: resorts.asia
GMA2008.Asia Attracts Millions of Hits, Drives .Asia Adoption

Hong Kong, 16 June 2008 – DotAsia Organisation announced today total registration for .Asia
domains are expected to exceed a quarter of a million by the end of the first quarter after its public
launch . Proceeds from the .Asia Sunrise and Landrush auctions have already exceeded US$3M
and rising, demonstrating strong demand and growth value for .Asia domains. (more…)

DomainPulse reports:

China (.cn) has overtaken Germany (.de) to become the world’s largest country code for domain names. With an average of around 400,000 to 500,000 .cn domain names registered each month it would be safe to assume there are more than 12,300,000 names registered compared to 12,098,279 .de names registered at the time of writing.

The two ccTLDs (country code top level domains) are much larger than any of their competitors with the next ccTLD being .uk (United Kingdom) with 6,880,775 and close to three million .nl (Netherlands) domain names.

Of all TLDs, ccTLDs and gTLDs, only .com is larger than .cn and .de, followed by .net, while .org and .uk are roughly equal in fifth position.

The success of Germany’s country code has been due to few restrictions on the eligibility of registrants for .de domain names and a low price. Although France has a similar population, there are currently only 1,153,637 registrations.

These extraordinary registration rates are a result of extremely low reg fees in .cn domains. Regular domainers from all over the world can buy .cn domains for just $0.13 at a variety of sites. A predeposit is usually required.

Bigger resellers can get the domains for even cheaper paying just pennies on the dollar.

My guess is once the reg fees rise there registration counts for .cn will fall dramatically, unless we start seeing some high sales to support the tld growth