Bankruptcy.net sells for $56,250

Bankruptcy.net sold this week for a solid £33,932 ($56,250 USD)– a price some would have to go bankrupt to afford.

At auction, the .com version of the name would likely sell for at least ten times the aforementioned amount. Bankruptcy law is a very profitable and in-demand niche, after all.

I think the seller got a fair price for the domain, but the buyer should develop it ASAP. Unless the economic conditions continue to worsen, there will be fewer and fewer bankruptcies declared as time goes on.

Microsoft Working with PHP

Microsoft, which has long offered proprietary alternatives to open source web platforms and scripting languages, is now offering a toolkit that will make it easier for PHP developers to utilize it’s .NET data services. PHP, which stands for PHP Hyptertext Processor and is sponsored by the commercial organization, Zend Technologies. It is licensed under a free software license.

PHP is used by hundreds of thousands of websites running various web applications and content management systems. Microsoft’s ASP scripting language has often been considered a direct competitor. For Microsoft to now be extending a hand to PHP shows that the software giant now realizes they cannot stamp out open source technology, which continues to spread in business, with many web servers and websites adopting it.

Zend Technologies and Microsoft have also formed agreement to ensure that PHP will run on Windows, a concession Microsoft is undoubtedly willing to make because most PHP application developers prefer to develop for a Linux environment. This move by Microsoft comes just weeks after it announced plans to submit GPL code to the Linux kernel, something Microsoft once described as “a cancer”.

Source: Microsoft
Photo: Flickr

Report: average .net auction price exceeds .com

A popular domain auction site recently released a report detailing statistics about more than 9,000 auctions in the last three months. Surprisingly, the average sale price for a .net domain came out to $1,775 USD, a wee bit higher than the average .com value of $1,768. This is a sharp decline from the $2,527 figure calculated in the last reporting period.

If .com is supposedly king, why are .net domains selling for more? The answer is quite simple: all the good generic .com names are taken. According to the report, 75% of domain sales were .coms– mostly less desirable names, however. Now that the cream of the crop has already been sold, premium .net names are becoming more desirable.

Does this mean .coms are now worth less? Such a statement could be no further from the truth. People are simply buying .nets because there are no good .coms available. Since so few are out there, .coms are now worth more than ever before.

Source | DN Journal

Jesus.net sells for £73,442

Not only can Jesus turn water into wine, but he can sell domains, too. Jesus.net sold a few hours ago for a whopping £73,442 ($124,337 USD).

There seems to be quite a few religious domains selling at auction lately. Last month, Rosary.com sold for £48,388 and Biblical.com netted £10,000.

The sale of Jesus.net breaks the record previously set by Rosary.com for the highest-price Christian domain. Normally religion is a niche few pay attention to and there doesn’t seem to be any particular reason why these three premium names all sold within 30 days of each other.

If I had to guess how much Jesus.com is worth, I would say somewhere around £2 million, maybe more. Normally a .net is valued at 5% of the latest sale price of a .com, but in this case I don’t think the formula gives an accurate figure. Either way, whoever owns Jesus.com is sitting on a goldmine. Could it possible be worth more than Sex.com, the most valuable domain ever sold?

Source | Domain News

Photo | Flickr

Woman changes name to Princess-Rainbow.com

A twenty-four-year-old woman in Manchester, formerly known as Claire Forshaw, has officially changed her name to Princess-Rainbow.com. She had apparently been contemplating such a move for quite some time, but her boyfriend dissuaded her, arguing that it would cost a lot of money. She finally investigated and found that she could do it for only £10.

The young woman does own the domain name princess-rainbow.com and plans to use it to sell her art online. Her reason for changing her name, however, is quite simple. She wanted to be the first to have a domain name as her name.

“When I realised it actually cost as little as £10 my boyfriend said that Princess-Rainbow.com was ideal for me because I am mad on rainbows!”

While it is amusing, the story does raise some questions. As the legal owner of princess-rainbow.com, which she intends to make a business, does she also have some right to the name? Can another person change her name to Princess-Rainbow.com? What about Princess-Rainbow.net or .org? Furthermore, it does open up a whole range of possibilities about other domains. Can I change my name to Internetblog.org.uk?

Source: The Independent
Photo: Flickr

183 Million Domains Now Registered

There are now 183 million domains registered on the web, according to The Domain Name Industry Brief (PDF), a quarterly report authored by Versign.

Last quarter, domain registrations rose 3%. So far this year, an average of 2.4 million new .com and .net registrations are made each month. These two TLDs alone account for a little under half (92.4 million) of all names registered.

There was also a 4% incease in ccTLD registrations, which account for 74.1 million of domains. The top 10 country extensions accounted for 64% of this number.

In all, 11.8 million registrations were made last quarter. A sign of the times, this was a 17% drop from the same time last year. Things are getting better, however, as the number marked an increase of 17% also from last quarter.
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