Category Archives: .biz

Not everything is about .COM

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.COM is king but not everything is about .com. There are still many opportunities in other gTLDs and ccTLDs. I had an intense 24 hours in domaining and my day didn’t involve too much of .com.

At first I got a call from one of the top 5 companies in the world (US based) that wanted to buy one of my .info domain names. My wife answered the call and gave me the phone to talk. The caller only told me his name, so I didn’t know for what company he was working for at that time. When he told what domain name he was interested in I knew he wouldn’t like my price. I can’t disclose the domain name but it wouldn’t be so hard to guess.

I asked him if he had an offer and he said that he wanted to hear my price first. I started telling him that I have declined a lot of 5 figure offers for this domain in the past few years. He interrupted me and told me that he only had an offer for $5,000 USD. So we left it at that and hung up. Don’t think for a moment that the 5 figure offers were a sales pitch. I have actually received these offers.

Then I got back on my PC only to find an email that the caller had send before he called me. He had send the same offer but it was then when the company he was working for was revealed. I didn’t know the company when I talked to him on the phone but my price was and is going to be the same. No matter who calls, my price will be the same for this particular domain. I don’t think this is over just yet…

On the same day I got an offer through DomainNameSales.com for a .org domain from one of the largest and most known UK associations. They are interested in buying a .org domain name I own.

Again on the same day I sold a .net domain at Sedo to a US individual and got a decent offer on a 3 letter .biz domain.

Finally I got an inquiry for a 3 letter .org that I am not willing to sell as it relates to my wife’s line of work. I am currently negotiating a lease for this domain.

And because most of the domains above haven’t produced any results yet here is what domains I have sold so far this year:
3 .com
3 .info
2 .org
1 .net
1 .us

All sales were for $1500 and up and only 4 of the 10 domain sales have been reported. All the others were private.

I must admit that I have a pretty diverse portfolio and that my .info portfolio is at least above average but my results must be very interesting. Don’t you think?

.COM is king and will be for many years to come but not everything is about .com.

.biz 10% price increase coming on September 1st 2013

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Today, February 22 2013, Neustar Inc. announced to all of the .biz accredited registrars and ICANN that they will be increasing the annual wholesale .BIZ domain registry fee, effective September 1, 2013, following the required six month notice to Registrars. The annual domain name registration and renewal fees will increase by USD $0.78 from the current USD $7.85 per year to a maximum of USD $8.63 per year. That is an almost 10% price increase.

Neustar Inc., the .biz registry, a per the ICANN registry contract can increase the price of .biz up to 10% every year. The previous increase was done last year on February 1, 2012 ,from $7.30 to $7.85, including the ICANN fee. That was about 7.5%.

In December, PIR, the .org domain name registry, announced a price increase in .org effective July 1st 2013. Registrar price for .org will increase from $7.45 to $8.19. If you add the $0.25 ICANN fee the .org wholesale price will be at $8.44 in July.

Verisign announced that the .net registry fee will be increased from $5.11 to $5.62 effective July 1, 2013 as well.

On November 30th Verisign, Inc., the registry operator for .com, got it’s contact renewed for another 6 years but although Verisign got the contract renewal, it lost the right to raise the wholesale price of .com for the next 6 years. .com price will stay at $7.85 plus the ICANN fee.

Does my (dropping) domain worth the backorder?

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I didn’t renew usedrobot.biz and it is dropping today, 28th of August. I bought the domain name in 2006 and this year I felt that it wasn’t worth the renewal fee.

My expired and now dropping domain usedrobot.biz is on Pool.com’s HOTLIST. This is supposed to be a list of the best dropping domains of the day. I guess there is a shortage of quality dropping domains as most of the top registrars are auctioning their best expired domains before they drop. But including usedrobot.biz is a bit of a stretch. The domains usedrobot.org and usedrobot.info are available to register and also usedrobot.biz didn’t get much traffic either. Of course I got zero offers to sell it.

So, does my dropping domain usedrobot.biz worth the $60+ backorder? I say it isn’t worth it. Let’s see if this is caught, by what service and by whom.

Pool’s Hot List from today includes other “hot” domains as well. These 2 caught my eye at first glance:

  • wwwtripadvisor.com (This is a typo of tripadvisor.com that would be very easy to be lost in a UDRP complaint)
  • jewlery.info (This is a typo of the U.S. spelling of the word jewelry. This would only get some typo traffic if the correct spelling jewelry.info was developed but it is actually parked at Sedo.)

There is a “www” problem under.gTLDs

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I saw the under.me ad featuring Bar Refaeli just everybody else.

I have not invested in .me at all but it was very impressive. The only thing is that I was kind of shocked at the end. Huge letters appeared writing “under.me” and just below it wrote “www.under.me“.

What? Isn’t that the same thing? Why did they write the same thing twice? Did they write it because most people don’t understand that writing “under.me” in your browser with get you to a website? You don’t have to use .com at the end every single time. Apple, Amazon, Microsoft don’t use their web address at all in their ads. Everybody assumes .com  and finds them. Probably the people behind under.me are trying to educate us. And they are right to do so.

A couple of weeks back, Conan O’Brien on his show “Conan” wanted to promote his new conan.xxx parody website. His started the pitch by saying that last year a few new extensions were introduced: .biz .info and .xxx. Well yeah but .info was introduced in 2001 and .biz in 2002. Conan was off by a decade or so on these 2. And he has a team of writers behind him, let alone his web design firm that develops teamcoco.com and now conan.xxx. What about all the other people? Are they supposed to know all the gTLDs? Or even know that there are other domains except .com, .net, .org and .gov? Of course not, but someone can help them know about the new gTLDs.

This will be a huge problem with the thousands of new gTLDs that will be active in the next few years. ICANN must do something to create awareness for all these new gTLDs and the old ones as well! The registries can’t do it on their own. ICANN has millions of dollars coming in as we speak and they can’t spend all this money on conferences and hors d’ oeuvres. Actually they can but they shouldn’t.