KeyDrive S.A. Acquires Moniker and SnapNames from Oversee.net (PR)SummaryAs first reported by DNN, Keydrive bough Monikter and Snapnames from Oversee.net. The official Press Release was published today and can be found after the jump. KeyDrive S.A. Acquires Moniker and SnapNames from Oversee.net Luxembourg and Los Angeles, Calif. (February 1, 2012). KeyDrive S.A., an internet solutions holding company with subsidiaries providing domain registration, monetization [...]
LIVE : DomainFest Global 2012 Auction ResultsSummaryWe were are remotely live blogging the auction results of the DomainFest 2012 SnapNames Moniker Auction. One domain name has sold before the auction began, Marriages.com for $36,000. Out of 60 domain names, 10 names had already met their reserve at the start of the auction. Please note that while we do our best to provide [...]
Breaking: Keydrive buys Moniker & Snapnames from Oversee.netSummaryAccording to industry sources, Keydrive S.A. will announce this morning that they have purchased Moniker & Snapnames from Oversee.net. Information about the sale has already been posted on the companies website and was also added to ICANNWiki yesterday. KeyDrive S.A./Luxembourg includes the Key-Systems Group in St. Ingbert/Saarland (Germany), the NameDrive Group (Luxembourg/USA) as well as [...]
GoDaddy Lists Sedo’s Fixed Price Domains through SedoMLSSummarySedo, today announced a new partnership with Go Daddy. Domains that are listed at Sedo with Buy Now prices are now available to Go Daddy customers through the SedoMLS Network. This partnership between two industry-leading companies gives domain investors the ability to distribute their domains at Go Daddy, and end users the chance to purchase [...]
100 Million .Com Domains RegisteredSummaryAccording to DomainTools.com, a provider of domain name research and whois information, the number of .com domains under management by the registry has eclipsed 100 million domains. In a statement issued earlier today DomainTools claims that through their research they “calculated the current total of domains managed by Verisign to be over 100.2 million” DomainTools’ [...]
HuntingMoon.com Brokers The Sale Of Pornstar.com For $1.5 MillionSummaryHuntingMoon.com announced that they have successfully brokered the sale of the website Pornstar.com for $1.5 Million dollars.
This sale follows HuntingMoon sale of Eric Borgos’ adult domain portfolio for $1.3 Million.
Lets point out right away that PornStar.com is an operating site not just a domain and the sale included all content, affiliates and members.
The sale transaction started in 2010 and after a year and a half of payments, the buyer is now taking possession of all of the assets and plan to redevelop the site according to Evan Horowitz, CEO of Hunting Moon.
Some other interesting facts Evan shared with us is that he along with this partner Michael from HuntingMoon, originally bought pornstar.com from L & H Apparel/Pornstar Clothing Company in 1999.
Evan and Michael sold the domain direct to Mallcom for the second pornstar.com transaction a few years later — and, then brokered the name via HuntingMoon for a third transaction on the same domain!
HuntingMoon’s founders have handled over $2.5M related to this domain.
A second interesting tidbit about this sale is the fact that the lead was generated via HuntingMoon’s partnership with the GFY.com community. Not long after the partnership was forged, did the sale happen. Any question marks about whether the adult community would continue to buy top web properties, during a reported contraction of the adult site market, were erased with this sale right off the bat in August of 2010.
A third factoid that is of note, is that the domain was sourced by David at HuntingMoon within a few short weeks of his hiring. So, a new member of the team brought in a $1.5M sale during his ramp-up period of his employment contract.
HuntingMoon.com ongoing AVN Internext Adult Domain Auction featuring hundreds of adult domain names is taking place thru February 9.
For more information on the AVN auction or to bid please visit: bid.huntingmoon.com.…
BuyDomains.com Beats Back UDRP on Solanum.comSummary[Buydomains.com, just beat back a UDRP on the domain name solanum.com][1]
[1]: http://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/searc h/text.jsp?case=D2011-1950
Here are the relevant facts and finding from the three member panel:
“The Complainant is a Mexican individual who founded a business named Solanum Laboratories in Mexico in 2003.”
“The Complainant is the owner of a variety of Mexican registered trademarks for the word mark SOLANUM, the earliest registered of which is trademark number 901,941 registered on September 28, 2005″
“At the date of this Decision, the website associated with the disputed domain name consisted of a parking page which stated that the disputed domain name was for sale and provided hyperlinks described as “related searches” including “Resveratrol Juice”, “Colageno msm”, “Energy”, “Fusion” and “Best Resveratrol Brand”.”
“In the present dispute, the Panel is satisfied that the Complainant has made out a *prima facie *case that the Respondent has no rights or legitimate interests in the disputed domain name based upon its submissions that the Respondent is not known by the name “Solanum”; the Respondent neither has the Complainant’s authorization nor the Complainant’s license or franchise to use the disputed domain name; and there is no relation between the Respondent’s name and the disputed domain name from which any right or legitimate interest can be inferred. The burden of production accordingly shifts to the Respondent.”
“The Respondent’s submissions focus squarely on the fact that it was making a bona fide offering of goods or services at the disputed domain name (within the meaning of paragraph 4(c)(i) of the Policy) via pay-per-click parking directly related to the generic nature and definition of the word which comprises the disputed domain name, namely “solanum”, a genus of plants. ”
“In the present case, the Respondent provides a sworn statement averring that it is a professional domainer which regularly engages in the business of using domain names to display advertising links.”
“It also provides evidence demonstrating that the disputed domain name is a dictionary word. ”
“Furthermore, there is neither any evidence that the disputed domain name is identical or confusingly similar to a famous or distinctive trademark nor that the Respondent had actual knowledge of the Complainant’s mark when it registered the disputed domain name. ”
“The Panel notes in addition that the advertising configured by the Respondent to appear on the website associated with the disputed domain name (at least when viewed from the Respondent’s jurisdiction) is related to the dictionary meaning of the word “solanum”, namely the relevant plants or extracts derived from them, and does not appear to relate to the trademark value of the Complainant’s SOLANUM trademark.”
“In the circumstances of the present case, given that the Respondent was seeking to register a dictionary word, albeit by automated means, the Panel considers that the Respondent’s actions can be considered to be sufficient good faith efforts to avoid the registration and use of a domain name that was identical to a mark held by another.…
Today We Call Out Sedo For Including Escrow Only Transactions In It’s Sales FiguresSummarySedo.com has been including domain names it acts only as escrow agent for in its weekly and annual reports of domain sales.
This information came to light this week when Sedo inadvertently reported a sale that was supposed to be confidential and Francois from Domaining left a [comment on TheDomains.com][2] telling us that not only should have the sale been confidential but that Sedo.com only acted as Escrow agent for the transaction.
[2]: http://www.thedomains.com/2012/01/31/sed o-com-sells-1-68-million-in-domains-led- by-sofi-com-at-45k/
We reached out to Sedo which confirmed that its served solely as the escrow agent in the domain name in question.
In our opinion Sedo should not include domain names in their weekly sales report in which they only act as escrow agent.
There are two major problems IMHO with including escrow only sales in their weekly sales reports.
For one the Sedo weekly report as it is transmitted to blogs and other news sources weekly, including TheDomains.com always starts with the following language:
“”Please find the weekly sales list attached. This past week there were a total of …….. sales through our marketplace, totaling over $………”
For us when someone handles solely the escrow function of receiving the funds and transferring the domain, its misleading to say the “sale took place through our marketplace”
It would be like Escrow.com claiming it sold $X number of dollars of domains every week because they cleared the transactions.
Unless a domain is sold through and by virtue of a broker or the online sales and purchase system, commonly referred to as a marketplace, the domain should not be claimed to be sold through the marketplace.
Secondly including such sales in Sedo numbers can result in the double reporting of sales.
For example if we at MostWantedDomains.com sell a domain for $5K and uses Sedo rather than Escrow.com to act as escrow agent the sale will be reported by us to us to DnJournal.com and it will be reported by Sedo.com as well. Obviously if we sold the domain through Escrow.com instead of Sedo there would be no chance of double reporting.
We reached out to Sedo this week to discuss the issue who issued the following response:
“”Sedo has a policy of transparently sharing the percentage of external transfers that take place at our marketplace, and we publish those numbers as part of our quarterly and annual reports. ”
“In 2011 just 6% of all transactions were external transfers, which translates to only 2.3% of our published sales value (in dollars) for 2011.”
“External transfers are part of the marketplace, and we will continue to report them in our weekly marketplace report, and will also continue to transparently show the percentage volume in our quarterly and yearly reports (2011 report).”
“We will of course also continue to honor clients’ confidentiality requests, independently from the source of the transaction.…
I Wouldn’t Want To Be in The Domain Registrar Business Serving Domain InvestorsSummaryI was going to write this long comment/rant in response to a couple of the comments left in the Moniker sale post, but I believe it merits its own post. I can only imagine the domain registrar business would suck if the primary target audience is domain investors. As a domain registrar catering to the [...]
Video: Lana Del Rey on LettermanSummaryBy this point, I would bet you’ve heard of Lana Del Rey. Lana has a new album called Born to Die, and here’s the video of her singing her hit song Video Games last night on the Late Show with David Letterman. I know it’s not domain name related, but there are a lot of [...]
After the Sale, Are You More or Less Likely to Use Moniker?SummaryI’m sure you’ve already read the news that Moniker and Snapnames were acquired by KeyDrive in a private transaction. I am very surprised that neither Oversee.net nor Key Drive sent an email to Moniker / Snapnames clients, and I don’t see anything that would indicate that either company issued a press release to announce the news yet. [...]
| Occupy.com domain name sellsSummaryDomain has new owner but identity is unknown. Occupy.com, which was pitched for sale to the Occupy Movement last year, has sold. It’s not clear who purchased the domain name since its whois record is protected by whois privacy. But the buyer definitely wants to capitalize on the movement. It started a logo design contest [...]
How Twitter was named and bought Twitter.com for $7,500SummaryBiz Stone discusses the naming of his company. Today at DOMAINfest in Santa Monica, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone talked about how they named the company and bought the domain for $7,500. Stone and his co-founders wanted a name that showed “urgency”. They came up with Jitter, but thought that sounded negative. One of his partners [...]
Tucows launches Ting mobile phone serviceSummaryTucows branches out, enters mobile phone business. Tucows, which owns one of the world’s largest domain registrars, officially launched mobile phone service Ting today. In a press release, Tucows CEO Elliot Noss said: “What people are forced to put up with from mobile service providers just doesn’t make sense. It’s too complicated, too opaque, too [...]
James Brown estate doesn’t “feel good” after domain disputeSummaryGodfather of Soul’s domain name can stay with management company. The estate of James Brown has lost a domain arbitration case for the domain name JamesBrown.com. The domain is owned by LAC Management, Inc., which manages “RJ & The James Brown Band”. LAC argued that James Brown gave at least his tacit consent for it [...]
KeyDrive acquires Moniker and SnapNamesSummaryOversee.net sells off domain marketplace, expiring domain, and registrar companies. KeyDrive, which owns domain name registrar Key-Systems as well as NameDrive, has acquired SnapNames and Moniker from Oversee.net. Combined, KeyDrive says it is now the sixth largest ICANN accredited registrar. Rumors about the acquisition have been swirling around DOMAINfest this week. KeyDrive has now updated [...]
KeyDrive S.A. Acquires Moniker and SnapNames from Oversee.net (PR)SummaryAs first reported by DNN, Keydrive bough Monikter and Snapnames from Oversee.net. The official Press Release was published today and can be found after the jump. KeyDrive S.A. Acquires Moniker and SnapNames from Oversee.net Luxembourg and Los Angeles, Calif. (February 1, 2012). KeyDrive S.A., an internet solutions holding company with subsidiaries providing domain registration, monetization [...]
LIVE : DomainFest Global 2012 Auction ResultsSummaryWe were are remotely live blogging the auction results of the DomainFest 2012 SnapNames Moniker Auction. One domain name has sold before the auction began, Marriages.com for $36,000. Out of 60 domain names, 10 names had already met their reserve at the start of the auction. Please note that while we do our best to provide [...]
Breaking: Keydrive buys Moniker & Snapnames from Oversee.netSummaryAccording to industry sources, Keydrive S.A. will announce this morning that they have purchased Moniker & Snapnames from Oversee.net. Information about the sale has already been posted on the companies website and was also added to ICANNWiki yesterday. KeyDrive S.A./Luxembourg includes the Key-Systems Group in St. Ingbert/Saarland (Germany), the NameDrive Group (Luxembourg/USA) as well as [...]
GoDaddy Lists Sedo’s Fixed Price Domains through SedoMLSSummarySedo, today announced a new partnership with Go Daddy. Domains that are listed at Sedo with Buy Now prices are now available to Go Daddy customers through the SedoMLS Network. This partnership between two industry-leading companies gives domain investors the ability to distribute their domains at Go Daddy, and end users the chance to purchase [...]
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