Top Domain Registrar Poll and New ICANN Proposals Brand Protection
Namecheap: LifeHacker’s Best Domain Name Registrar
Lifehacker’s reader poll for Best Domain Registrar ended this morning with Namecheap being the winner with 37.84% of the 17,311 votes cast this week. Name.com took second place with 28.54% of the votes and Hover was close behind with 27.68% of the vote. The two lowest of the five finalists were way, way lower with Gandi at 3.23% and Dreamhost at 2.71%.
Elliot Silver, of the well-known domaining blog called Elliot’s Blog, reported this today and went on to give his opinion on the main factors that would make a domain registrar be a better choice. He stated that these would “include customer service, price, user interface, security, ease of transfers and account changes, extra fees, and additional services available”.
As a domain investor, Silver posted that he would be interested in knowing who investors would vote as their top choice. The Lifehacker poll was for all readers, not just domainers. Silver said that he would put up a poll with the top ten nominees given by his readers. It will be interesting to see if there are any differences in the nominees and the voting from professional domainers compared to webmasters in general.
More Detail Released in Last Week’s Big Domain Acquisition
Pixel Capital Pty Ltd announced last week that they had acquired both Accommodation.com and Accommodation.co.uk from a British company for a total of $528,000 USD. Yesterday, Roland Bleyer, founder of Pixel, revealed to Domain Name Wire that the company is making payments on the acquisition and that the deal was owner financed over several years.
The domain pair was a package deal so there was no individual pricing, but Bleyer said that he estimated the .com to be about five times the price of the co.uk domain. Pixel has a history of paying big bucks for the domains it wants. In 2009, the company paid $160,000 AUD for CreditCard.com and then bought CreditCard.net last year for $138,000 USD.
Dice Holdings Acquires Geeknet for $20 Million
The announcement came today that Dice Holdings bought Geeknet, an online media business, for $20 million. With the purchase comes Slashdot, SourceForge, and Freecode, all highly popular and well-trafficked tech sites. SourceForge boasts 40 million unique visitors every month, while Slashdot is currently pulling in 3.7 million unique visitors per month, with Freecode bringing in a respectable 500,000 uniques monthly.
Senior VP of Dice Holdings, Michael Durney, told TechCrunch today that the sites will continue to be pretty much the same. Durney says the sites “will keep their look and feel” but “over time
the Dice.com site will operate more seamlessly connected to these sites”. He also stated that the sites would retain their editorial independence.
3 New ICANN Proposals for Stronger Rights Protection with New gTLDs
In the hectic atmosphere of new gTLD registry applications that should start launching late in 2013, the group that represents commercial webmasters with ICANN has put forth one of the 3 new proposals that are all aimed at improving brand protection at the second level. The Business Constituency proposes that the Claims Service should run indefinitely, notices should be sent to rights owners if a domain is registered containing a trademark, and that new gTLD registrars should have to comply with the upcoming Registrar Accreditaton Agreement.
MelbourneIT, one of the largest registrars in the world, would like to increase protection on a limited set of what they call ‘High At-Risk’ trademarks. Opponents of this proposal say that it would only protect a very few brands and therefore is too narrow.
Brand Owner Summit, a conference made up of major brands, also sent in a proposal to strengthen brand protections. Part of the proposal is very like that of the Business Constituency proposal but the Brand Owner Summit goes further. They want registries to offer blocking for exact-match trademarks during the sunrise periods.
Domains Sold This Week
Top winner for Afternic week ending September 16 was CashLady.com which sold for $36,000. Not far behind it was optiontrade.com for $30,000 and then chinaindustry.com for $20,540. All told, Afternic sold $973,508 in domain names this past week.
Some of Afternic’s domains that were interesting include OuterSpaceTourism.com which sold for $1,000; gipple.com which went for $1,294; orrange.com for $1,500; and SEOisDead.com which sold for $1,817. Our personal favorite was Diddler.com which sold for $5,000 – we can’t wait to see what develops on that domain.
Sedo had an even better week, with $2.7 million in sales. Top winner was pizza24.com bringing in $13,000. Class3.com fetched a cool $10K and asiatica.com netted $9000. Sedo had one of the longest domain names sold recently with a 6 word phrase, HowToBecomeAPoliceOfficer.com – 25 letters. The domain sold for a very respectable $5,500.