Cathie Jung may have the world’s smallest waist, but that didn’t stop her from filing a court lawsuit over the domain CathieJung.com. Jung, who has worn a corset every day for the last 12 years, wanted to transfer the name’s ownership away from a corset company. The owner was using it to redirect visitors to his site.

Naturally, she won. Hopefully this lawsuit didn’t cause her too much stress, because her waist is already a tiny 15 inches. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, that’s about the size of a mayonnaise jar.

Source | Domain Name Wire
Photo | Flickr

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Never failing to draw criticism, ICANN has included a controversial new step to the gTLD application process: a terrorism background check. The new policy is listed in the latest edition of the gTLD handbook under “Section 1.2.1 Eligibility and 2.1 Background Check.”

Background checks at both the entity level and the individual level will be conducted for all applications, to confirm eligibility. The background check may include, but is not limited to any of the following areas:
• Corruption and bribery
• Terrorism
• Serious and organized crime
• Money laundering
• Corporate fraud and financial regulatory breaches
• Arms trafficking and war crimes
• Intellectual property violations

This has caused quite an upset in the Middle East, where some are afraid background checks by the American-run ICANN could turn into racial profiling. Either way, something tells me that terrorist groups would much rather invest $100,000 in missiles instead of the gTLD application fee.

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Don’t ask me what’s so special about the number sequence 029, but it must be important to someone because 029.com just sold for $110,000 USD at auction. Two more number domains, 980.com and 123123.com, fetched $40,000 and $20,000 each.

There were a number of other miscellaneous odd sales. RandomActsOfKindness.org sold for $25,000, which is quite a bit for such a long name. Kinderspiele.de (German for “Kids games”) garnered €16,000. Two more long names, IndependentFinancialAdviser.co.uk and DressUpGamesForGirls.com, sold for £9,975 and $15,000, respectively. Booking.travel also fetched $11,000– one of the best sales ever for the forlorn .travel TLD.

Generally very long names are not thought to have significant value. But these sales show that a domain is always worth what a buyer is willing to pay. In this case, it was quite a bit.

Photo | clix

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CreditCards.com and NetQuote announced this week an upcoming acquisition of sites CreditCards.com and NetQuote for $350 million USD. The former contributed $145 million to the deal, while the latter made up $2205 million of the sales price.

The sites sold for so much because of their high traffic and revenue, but the sites’ enormous success is no doubt due in part to the use of premium domains. Quality, single-keyword domains convey a sense of confidence to visitors and are easy to remember.

Although it can be hard to justify a high price tag of a premium keyword domain, these domains really do pay off in the long run.

Source | Newfound News

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When domain owners list names for sale, one of the last places they think to list names is Facebook. But domainer Mike Mann made a smart move when he decided to list his generic .co domains on his Facebook page. He sold Flying.co for $3,500.

Some of the other domains Mann has listed include news.co and bank.co. My guess is his strategy is so successful because he is friends with a large number of domainers. I would not list domains on Facebook or Twitter unless I had an extensive network of domain contacts.

Photo | Flickr

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The .edu domain is very popular among educational institutions and carries a strong sense of authority. Some SEO professionals even believe that links from .edu sites carry extra weight on Google. With this in mind, doesn’t registering a .edu domain sound like a smart idea?

Unfortunately, .edu registration is heavily restricted. Only American post-secondary educational institutions are eligible to register on the .edu TLD. Universities outside the United States are not eligible to apply.

While such a restrictive policy is unfortunate for domainers, the .edu registry has been able to keep the quality of its extension high. As a result, thousands of universities in the United States pay hefty renewal fees every year for their .edu names.

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If you live in Ireland or have a company that does business there, it might be worthwhile to register a domain on the country’s .ie extension.

The ccTLD has experienced slow growth due to strict registration requirements. Only individuals living in Ireland or companies with trade ties are allowed to register a .ie name. There is an exception to this rule for Community Trademark holders, however. Registrants are also not allowed to register names for resale.

So why register a .ie domain with all these restrictions attached? Because there are so few registrations, a number of premium names are still available. While few good .coms are still available and other countries have sold off their domain gold, there is still a lot of gold left in .ie’s pot. But only if you’re Irish, of course.

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Domainers have registered more than 200,000 .co domains, many with the intention of reselling the names for profit. It is normally easy to see a domain for at least the registration fee, but will this be the case with .co?

One challenge .co presents to sellers is its high renewal fee. At around £20 a year, the names aren’t cheap to hang onto for long periods of time. The same is true with many other ccTLDs. Some cost upwards of £200 or more to renew!

These high renewal fees provide a major incentive for sellers to sell the name as fast as possible. They also turn away buyers. As a result, many .co registrants are looking to sell their names as fast as possible. This drives down market prices across the board. Before registering a ccTLD for resale, take the renewal fee into consideration.

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Following the lead of Poker.ca yesterday, OnlineCasino.dk has sold for $580,000 USD. This is an enormous sum considering the low level of attention Denmark’s .dk extension normally receives. It’s a good end to a week that has seen an unusually high number of large ccTLD sales.

The sale itself took place on July 19, but wasn’t announced until today. The buyer is an online gaming company in Malta. Part of the reason for the high sale price could likely be Denmark’s decision to liberalize the online gaming market.

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Columbia has been pushing .co as an alternative to the overcrowded .com TLD, and now Google has given the registry a boost by agreeing to treat the name as a generic extension in search results. This means that .co domains will not be limited to the Google Columbia search engine and will rank well in any locale.

Other domains Google treats generically include .tv and .me. A Google spokesperson stated:

We will rank .co domains appropriately if the content is globally targeted. Webmasters will soon have the functionality to be able to specify this by using the geotargeting options in Google Webmaster Tools.

This news is very good for early adopters of .co as Google’s announcement will surely increase the market value of .co names .

Source | PC Pro
Photo | Wikimedia Commons

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