In an effort to boost profits, the Nigerian Internet Registration Association (NIRA) has announced the release of some 1,200 “premium” generic keyword .ng domains. The question is, does anyone care?

Sure, ccTLDs are on the up, but only in developed countries and not in places with bad reputations for spamming and scamming. Names like casino.ng or sex.ng might fetch several hundred or perhaps several thousand dollars at auction, but not much. And I suspect few domainers are scratching to get their hands on cars.ng. Vacation.ng might be a goldmine, if it weren’t for the fact no one goes on vacation to Nigeria.

If NIRA were smart, it would hold most of these “premium” names until a sufficient market exists to garner high sale prices. But as it stands now, does anyone really give a hoot about .ng?

Photo | cgarbiano

Continue reading: Nigeria to release "premium" domains

Earlier this month, a number of .cm domains sold for very high prices at auction. This includes sex.cm for $51,300 and free.cm for $17,800.

In an apparent lack of confidence for the .cm extension, many buyers in these domain auctions have backed out. As a result, a decent number of previously reported high sale prices turned out to be quite low.

Sex.cm originally sold for the aforementioned $51,300, but after the two top bidders refused to pay up, it ended up garnering only $21,700– less than half the original sale price.

Continue reading: Premium .cm auctions fall through

After 30 bids and 7 days, gangsters.com has sold for $16,100 USD on eBay. While the seller did meet his reserve price, could he have gotten more for the name?

In short, yes. As I’ve mentioned before, eBay is not a good place to buy or sell a domain. Names frequently sell for too much, too little, or not at all. I think the name could have possibly reached as much as $100,000 USD– if marketed properly.

The problem is, end-users and domainers interested in a premium name like gangsters.com won’t be looking on eBay, but on domain auction sites. In this instance, the seller failed to reach his target market and the sale price shows this.

Photo | Flickr

Continue reading: Gangsters.com auction ends at $16,100- Could it have sold for more?

Some people like shopping, others don’t. Apparently German web company Unister GmbH does, however, because it just bought shopping.de for a whopping £1.72 million, or $2.85 million USD.

Unister owns a number of other premium domains, including news.de and auto.de. It must have wanted shopping.de very badly, because while it is a very excellent name, I think the sale price was too high. “Shopping” is not a German word and does not fit the .de extension.

The domain will become the home of one of the largest online stores in Germany. Similar to Amazon.com, it will sell all sorts of products, including perfume, electronics, kitchen items, and toys.

Source | Domain Name News

Continue reading: Shopping.de sells for $2.85 million

These days, it sometimes seems as though every good domain is already taken. Rather than settle for a less common extension or shell out big bucks for a parked domain, why not get creative? Wordoid is a free tool that lets you do just that.

Enter any word or phrase, and the tool will come up with all sorts of savvy variants. A search for “internet,” for instance, came up with internettle.com. A lookup for “soup” gave me results like soupoose.com, soupled.com, and soupside.com.

Not all the names generated are what I would consider usable, but if you look around you will find something that works, or at least get a little inspiration.

Wordoid supports English, French, Spanish, and Italian. For best results, I recommend playing around with the various options, including “hardly natural.”

Photo | biewoef

Continue reading: Register a creative domain with Wordoid