Domain Magnate

About a year ago things were quite different and domainers were encouraged to invest by ever rising prices on both short domains and generics and recent buyouts (such as LLLL.com and premium letter LLLL.net’s) which proven to be quite worthwhile. Minimum prices for LLLL.com’s reached $65 during peak times and there was a healthy supply of buyers. So back in those times it made sense to buy lots of NNNNN.com’s as well and hold them because prices would rise eventually. Which is what many domainers did buying up to 1k of them each. I had 875 of them at a total cost of around $6k - several other investors purchased more than 1000 of them and now realize the mistake and decide not to renew most. read more »

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.

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

DomainNameNews reports:

MacRumors.com is reporting a rumor that Apple is the new owner of the domain name Me.com. It’s unclear why the company purchased the domain name, but rumors center around it possibly being used as a rebranding of the popular .mac services. The speculation was first started by John Gruber at DaringFireball.net when he noticed that the domain name was using MarkMonitor services. MarkMonitor.com is a company that many large corporations, including Apple, use to manage their domain names. The initial rumor was shortly followed up by a MacRumors reader who pointed out that the Netcraft page lists, Kenneth Eddings, an Apple employee as the DNS administrator.

The domain name was previously being used as a social network site by a company that re-branded in December 2007 under the new name Snappville. The domain name whois records reflects the change in ownership to MarkMonitor around that same time. If Apple purchased the domain, it was likely for a sizeable amount, as a 2 letter dictionary word .com is extremely rare. One would think that the proceeds of the sale would have provided enough funds for the seller to create a better brand name, other than Snappville (which has a ton of likely typos). read more »

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.

As reported by domainnews

When you read the minutes of ICANN’s Board meeting on April 30th, you come accross a section that describes RegistryPRO, the registry responsible for the .pro domain extension, and their request to change its registration agreement with ICANN.

The minutes indicate that, “The TLD has had limited success to date, with registrations in the low thousands.” Only a few thousand .PRO domains have been registered to date, primarily d read more »

New record for .ca sales: $41000 for banks.ca at Pool.com today.

Previous high .ca sales:

savings.ca $36,050 2006-03-28 Pool
cruise.ca $33,363 2006-05-23 Pvt Sale

Some argue whether banks.ca is really worth much because there are only 6 banks in Canada, although I think it’s an excellent finance related domain and its value will only rise as the .ca registrations approach 1 million.

Banks.com is a developed site so it’s possible that they had interest in banks.ca as well.

Other reports suggest that the winning bidder was ready to pay as much as $112K!

Now it’s official

ALL NNNNN.com Have Been Registered

The registrations rates were crazy in the past few days, even higher than with LLLL.com

Lets see how the prices rise now and how fast we can get to a minimum of $20-$25 for NNNNN.com. If there will be enough trading activity going then probably within a few weeks!

I’m going to start a priceguide on NNNNN.com’s soon.

See the historical countdown here

NNNNN.com’s are running out by 2K registrations per day and around 6K are remaining right now.

Here is a list of better quality NNNNN.com’s that don’t have . All 5N’s with ‘0′ at the end are already registered and ‘0′ in other places, other than the last digit, is considered not good.

Download the list here

Also all NNNNN’s starting with 1,2 and 9 have been wiped out.
Please note that ‘4′ is considered a bad digit as it supposedly brings bad luck in Chinese culture, but adding other digits, like 5,6,7 depending on the number might neutralize that effect. From that point it’s getting too complicated to be covered here, but you’re welcome to read up on numerology, thanks for the link to replic8te.

For me an easy way to get higher quality NNNNN’s is by simply checking google results for the number. Here are number of google results for the first 100 NNNNN’s from the list, sorted:

41758 154,000
41691 156,000
41679 236,000
41892 364,000
41738 365,000
41783 365,000
41857 365,000 read more »

Only 13.37% .eu Websites Active/Unique - .eu is a disaster zone

from WhoisIreland Review

The latest WhoisIreland.com .eu web survey shows that the .eu ccTLD is in serious trouble. Out of 1723638 websites checked, only 13.37% of sites were active/unique. As a ccTLD for Europe, it is a disaster zone. Brand registrations accounted for 7.78% of registrations. The percentage of duplicate content sites was 6.02%. The percentage of websites that redirected elsewhere was 16.68%. The percentage of PPC/warehoused websites was 14.22%. The percentage of holding page sites was 16.79% read more »