AOL acquired the Games.com domain over six years ago when the company bought the domain from Infogrames, Atari’s parent company, as they tried to save themselves before going out of business permanently. People have waited … and waited … and waited to find out what AOL planned to do with the domain and speculation ran rampant for a year or two until everyone gradually lost interest.
Now, AOL is finally going to do something with the domain and as usual for AOL, it’s a pretty ambitious plan. Their goal is to be the number one online gaming portal, although they seem a bit late to the party on that one. The site launched yesterday with over 5,000 online games and a bunch of mobile games. The games are cross-platform compatible browser-based games built using HTML5. They pledged to have a “mobile-first mentality” when they announced the launch at a game developer’s conference in Texas.
It Ain’t Reverse Domain Hijacking if You State Your Intentions
The case of the dispute over GoodUniverse.com had all the hallmarks of a classic reverse domain hijacking. The complainant was a newly formed company and admitted freely that their company hadn’t even been formed yet when the domain was registered. The complainant even came out and stated that they knew the case was a long shot. Must have been an open and shut case, right?
Wrong. Believe it or not, the panelist, W. Scott Blackmer did not find the complainant guilty of reverse domain hijacking. Speculation around the web is that Blackmer bought the ridiculous story the complainant had of claiming that since the domain holder had advertised the site for sale but didn’t take their offer for the site, then the respondent was showing bad faith.
I don’t know about that. Blackmer has to be an intelligent person to be chosen to handle these type of cases. Maybe he let the complainant off the hook simply for making him laugh at the silly and illogical argument given.
Project 94
When Public Interest Registry (PIR) took over the operation of the .ORG extension in 2003, the company held back a chunk of one and two character domains for the future and never allowed them to be registered. Now they’ve decided the time has come and they’ve partnered with GoDaddy and eNom to facilitate the sales within the guidelines PIR has given.
In order to be considered for buying one or more of these memorable domains, the registrant has to show their commitment to the .ORG brand, have a plan in place to use the domain and demonstrate they have the resources to follow through on that plan. PIR has a website set up at Project94.org where prospective buyers can view the domains available but it has no information there about how to meet the guidelines.
Hot Domain Sales and Interesting Registrations
Blizzard Entertainment registered WarcraftBattles.com on Oct. 10. Speculation is rampant but the company has not revealed any plans and as of now, the domain does not resolve to an actual page.
Vogel.com went for $75,000 on Sedo. With private registration before and after the sale, nothing is known at this point about the buyer. Interestingly, the domain did not show up in escrow.
Move, Inc. just added Relocation.com to it’s stable and they only had to pay $11.5 million dollars to do it. The company already owns Move.com and Moving.com. Relocation.com is a full-fledged business already so the sales price was more than just the domain name.