How we got a 3-letter domain on a startup budget | Mux.com

How we got a 3-letter domain on a startup budget

Buy time and do the right legal things.
Structure your holding lease to buy you time and optionality. Outline a clear payment schedule, and terms for the right to purchase. Use a verified escrow agent to facilitate the transaction (we use escrow.com).

Final words of advice:
Don’t be afraid of a high purchase price in 5 to 10 years in a lease-to-own arrangement. At the risk of sounding stoic, it’s likely that it won’t matter in the end, no matter which direction your companies goes. But with a great domain name, organic traffic and SEO is on your side.

We outgrew the .io

After more than five and a half years of being heads down, focused on building the sales communication platform of the future with our customers, we’ve become a relatively mature business—and we now know that we’re here to stay for a very long time.
Right off the bat when we got started in 2013, we of course wanted to own the close.com domain name. Who wouldn’t?

Big announcement! We’ve purchased close.com and rebranded as Close

Why They Hate Us

From DotWeekly

GenpactCora.com which was registered July 1, 2017 and was owned by Home Of Domains, has transferred into CSC Corporate Domains. The Genpact Cora trademark was filed on June 28, 2017.

I have pointed this out on many situations. Trnames / Home Of Domains tracks newly filed trademarks and checks the terms as .com domain names. If the domain is available, they register it and list the domain name for $950. Since it cost $1,500 at a minimum to file a UDRP, the TM filer is in a bit of a pickle. It is also the filers fault, that they didn’t register the domain prior to filing the publicly listed trademark, which would end up saving them some money or legal hassle.

Amazon will shutter Quidsi, owner of Diapers.com | CNET

Amazon will shutter Quidsi, owner of Diapers.com

The company confirmed Wednesday it plans to shut down its Quidsi business, after Amazon struggled to make it profitable over the past seven years. Bloomberg first reported the change. Amazon bought Quidsi in 2011 for $545 million. The business runs seven specialty retail sites: Diapers.com, Wag.com, Soap.com, BeatyBar.com, Yoyo.com and Casa.com.

Hackers Stole My Website…And I Pulled Off A $30,000 Sting Operation To Get It Back | freeCodeCamp

Hackers Stole My Website…And I Pulled Off A $30,000 Sting Operation To Get It Back

For several days not so long ago, RamshackleGlam.com — the domain name that I have owned and operated since March of 2010 — did not belong to me, but rather to a man who goes by the name “bahbouh” on an auction website called Flippa, and who was attempting to sell off the site to the highest bidder (with a “Buy It Now” price of $30,000.00). He promised the winner my traffic, my files, and my data, and suggested that I was available “for hire” to continue writing posts (alternatively, he was willing to provide the winner with “high-quality articles” and “SEO advice” to maintain the site’s traffic post-sale).

Martin Shkreli keeps buying up the personal domain names of journalists who write about him | Business Insider

Martin Shkreli keeps buying up the personal domain names of journalists who write about him

Former pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli is trolling journalists who have written about him by purchasing the internet domains associated with their names.

And Now A PREDATOR To Fight DNS Domain Abuse | DARKReading

They described the tool as an evolution of existing domain reputation systems that work by first observing domain use and then assigning a reputation score to it based on type of content hosted and other factors.

The goal with PREDATOR is to equip security professional and domain registrars with the ability to do such reputation scoring before the actual domain registration takes place by observing and evaluating so-called time-of-registration features.

And Now A PREDATOR To Fight DNS Domain Abuse

The Truth About Thesis.com

There are many ways to protect trademarks, but these were the most appropriate options given my situation:

  • Send a cease and desist to Automattic asking them to stop forwarding the domain (cheapest option, but it relies upon the other party being compliant in order to work). If I did this, I was worried Automattic would just sue me so they could pick their court.
  • Open a Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP) hearing and attempt to have an ICANN forum rule on one or both of the following:
    • Require that Automattic stop forwarding the domain
    • Determine that Automattic acquired and was using the domain in bad faith, and based on that, grant the domain to the trademark holder (me)
  • File a federal trademark infringement suit against Automattic. Frankly, I did not want to push this far. I was hopeful that if the board of Automattic saw what had happened, they would at least agree to stop infringing on my mark.

Source: The Truth About Thesis.com

Where Has the Domain Name Growth Gone?

For those for whom speculation means buying a cheap asset, hoping to sell/exploit it later for a higher price there are also a number of things happening at once.
There will be fewer buyers in future, as those buyers will have a wider range of TLDs to choose from. This makes selling harder.
They will try harder to talk up their existing portfolios and the brand of the TLDs they have invested in, in order to protect their assets.
Further investment decisions become more complicated as the competition is now between existing brands, new brands and investing outside of the industry.
This suggests slowing growth but also increasing market support aimed at protecting existing portfolios.
The conclusion from this is that this growth has gone as the speculative money has left the industry and now that the market has permanently changed, it is not coming back.
By Jay Daley, Chief Executive of .nz Registry Services

Source: Where Has the Domain Name Growth Gone?

Domain inquiries : Quotes are valid for 3 business days | Acro.net

I’ve now changed the rules of my commitment to a quote, and all domain quotes are valid for 3 business days. I am not willing to wait out on such byzantine scenarios of “behind the scenes” negotiations. At the same time, I will be making any inquiries agree to a statement that they are personally and directly involved in the inquiry, and not as brokers, co-partners or other types of men in the middle.

via Domain inquiries : Quotes are valid for 3 business days – Acro.net – A Domain Investing Blog by Acroplex®.

Why Domain Extensions Matter for Online Success | Interbrand

Can the right—or wrong—domain extension impact your brand’s online success?As it turns out, it probably does. The results of Interbrand’s U.S. study indicate that the right domain extension may be just as important as the right domain name when it comes to branding a memorable and effective web address. A few of the highlights from Interbrand’s study are outlined in the infographic shown below.

via Why Domain Extensions Matter for Online Success – Interbrand – View – Interbrand.

GoDaddy accounts vulnerable to social engineering and Photoshop | CSO Online

“If [the attackers] wanted to be slick about it, they could gain access, insert their code, create backdoor admin accounts, and return access back to the original owner before they even knew what had happened. The owner would receive the confirmation email, see that their website is still online, and consider it a Phishing attack and just delete it,” Mr. Troia said.
GoDaddy isn’t the only major domain registrar to use photo ID as a last resort. Network Solutions also has an ID-based verification, but unlike GoDaddy, the ID and required documents must be faxed over, instead of uploaded. Interestingly enough, one domain registrar, Hover.com, doesn’t allow photo ID as a form of verification, because “anyone could just whip something up in Photoshop.
“Using GoDaddy’s DomainControl and privacy features, which are offered as a value-added service for an additional cost, would only slow a determined attacker. While the public can’t see the registration details, the support staff can. So an attacker armed with public information could abuse the change of account form.
Mr. Troia hopes that by exposing the logic flaw in their security model, GoDaddy will implement tougher verification procedures, but admits it’s a paradoxical situation. A valid government-issued ID should be an acceptable form of verification, but it’s clearly not enough.

via GoDaddy accounts vulnerable to social engineering and Photoshop | CSO Online.

We Have Acquired Buffer.com: Here’s How and Why We Did It

Deciding on transparency for buying the domain
We then had a long discussion about how to go about possibly acquiring Buffer.com, after just having established contact with its owners. We asked some mentors for advice and also Googled about the topic. We found a few articles from domain acquirer experts and stories of how they did it.
A lot of them involved tactics like emailing from a Yahoo address, to hide your true identity to make yourself appear like a smaller company or letting a different entity altogether work on getting the domain. Of course all of this was aimed towards getting the smallest possible purchase price.

via We Have Acquired Buffer.com: Here’s How and Why We Did It.

DirtySpokes.com Returned To Co. | TheDomains

The one member panelist Hector Ariel Manoff found that the company which had owned the domain for some 8 years had gained common law rights to the domain name and that the term was not generic, which I would agree with.
The panel also placed great weight on the fact that the new owner was a domainer owing some 1,400 domain names and has lost several previous UDRP and asked $10,000 to buy the domain back.

via DirtySpokes.com Returned To Co. That Let It Drop 1 Week Earlier W/O Registered Trademark.

Dock Name: Crowdsourced Domain Name Finder for Startup

More precisely, according to the website, “Dock Name is a crowdsourced service that helps startups find a domain name, by describing their business/product and get proposals from people that have suitable domains for their needs.” Dock Name allows people to promote their domain name requests, which is how the company makes money.

via Dock Name: Crowdsourced Domain Name Finder for Startup.

At Art Basel, A Collector Just Bought This URL For $5,000 | Fast Company

But what Gorczynski’s camp sold isn’t a painting, or a sculpture, or even what one might consider a traditional installation. It is a digital piece of multimedia hosted on a URL, smokeinmirrors.net.
Its selling price, purportedly the first of its kind at a major international art festival, is $5,000.
“After Dark,” pictured above on the right, was created and presented on the art-sharing platform NewHive. We’ve written about NewHive before—it’s essentially a collection of webpage tools designed for creatives with big imaginations to build whatever beautiful/demented thing they’d like, the only limitation being it has to fit in the browser.

via At Art Basel, A Collector Just Bought This URL For $5,000 | Fast Company | Business + Innovation.
via TheDomains.com

DNIB and Domain Name Industry Brief – Verisign

Domain Name Industry Brief

The second quarter of 2014 closed with a base of 280 million domain name registrations across all top-level domains (TLDs), an increase of four million domain names, or 1.4 percent over the first quarter of 2014. Registrations have grown by 18.6 million, or 7.2 percent, year over year.1

via DNIB and Domain Name Industry Brief – Verisign.

How to Snatch an Expiring Domain – Brad Frost | Andrew Allemann | Mike Davidson

Following a thread that starts here: BradFrost.com

Capture failed.
“It couldn’t be!” I thought to myself, as I opened a new tab and visited bradfrost.com. My stomach sank as I saw a domain parking landing page stuffed with ads…

That Andrew Allemann on DomainNameWire.com picked up. How Most People See Domain Investors

Revisited by Brad Frost
How Most People See Domain Investors

Who reminds us of a couple of great posts on how ‘the Drop’ works.

After 40 days are up, the domain’s status changes to “redemption period”. During this phase, all WhoIs information begins disappearing, and more importantly, it now costs the owner an additional fee to re-activate and re-register the domain. The fee is currently around $100, depending on your registrar. When a domain enters its redemption period, it’s a good bet the owner has decided not to renew.
Finally, after the redemption period, the domain’s status will change to “locked” as it enters the deletion phase. The deletion phase is 5 days long, and on the last day between 11am and 2pm Pacific time, the name will officially drop from the ICANN database and will be available for registration by anybody.
The entire process ends exactly 75 days after the listed expiration date. For an even more detailed explanation, read the article Inside a Drop Catcher’s War Room.

via Mike Davidson – How to Snatch an Expiring Domain.

Frank Schilling Wins UDRP On TableForTwo.com; Complainant Didn’t Like The 89K Price

Frank Schilling’s Name Administration won a UDRP on the domain name TableforTwo.com who was defended as usual by John Berryhill.
The complaint was brought by Julie Wampler of Washington, D.C. back on September 15th who runs a blog at TableForTwoBlog.com and got a trademark on the term TABLE FOR TWO on March 13, 2013.
The Domain Name TableForTwo..com was registered on September 8, 2004.
The Complainant argued that Name Administration’s asking $89,000 for the domain name was proof of bad faith within the meaning of the UDRP.

via Frank Schilling Wins UDRP On TableForTwo.com; Complainant Didn’t Like The 89K Price.

New Research: Keyword domains still work, despite what Google says | CanIRank Blog

KEY FINDINGS

Using each of these data points, we can put together a fairly nuanced picture of how keyword domains perform differently than non-keyword domains.

  • Keyword domains rank on average 11% higher than brandable domains
  • Brandable domains needed an average of 40,000 more links to hit #1, and 35,000 more links to reach the Top 10
  • Brandable domains needed 69% higher Domain Authority and 22% higher Page Authority to rank in the Top 10
  • Keyword domains were able to hit #1 with half as much content, and only using the keyword half as frequently
  • Looking at all Ranking Factors, it’s clear that keyword domains rank more easily due to higher Website Relevancy and Website Ext Relevancy scores

via New Research: Keyword domains still work, despite what Google says | CanIRank Blog.