It has always bothered me that URL shorteners are taking over the web. As many people have pointed out, your entire linking history is subject to the lifeline of a third party service. And with many URL shorteners operating on questionable country code domain names, the risks are prevalent.
This weekend I set out to get my own URL shortener. After all, I plunked down five figures for my short domain name DNW.com, so I may as well get as much value out of it as I can. I came across Your Own URL Shortener (YOURLS), and it does the trick.
There are a couple steps to using YOURLS. First, you install it on your web server. This process is painless, assuming you have PHP 4.3 or better, MYSQL 4.1, and mod_rewrite enabled.
Once installed, you can manually create short links. You can also link it to WordPress to automatically create short URLs for your new blog posts using the WordPress plugin.
The WordPress plugin automatically shortens URLs for each of your posts and posts them to Twitter. Like most shorteners, YOURLS also keeps stats to help you understand how much traffic each short URL or tweet delivers. For example, the short URL to this post is dnw.com/6.
You can also open up your shortening service to friends, but that presents plenty of risk.
If you follow Domain Name Wire on Twitter @DomainNameWire, you’ll see YOURLS in action. Here are the benefits:
1. Not reliant on third party service
2. Sends link juice to your domain, not a service provider
3. Customize your short links
4. Build your brand (showing your URL)
A look at selling points for domain name registrars.
Price and security are the most important characteristics customers consider when choosing a domain name registrar, according to a survey of over 500 people in the 5th Annual Domain Name Wire Survey.
171 respondents selected the security of their domain names at the registrar as the most important factor, while 153 said price was the primary concern. However, when the weighted average of all factors shows that price is the top concern.
The third most important factor was customer service, with account management tools coming in at number four. The ease of transferring domain names between accounts, which is important when selling domain names, ranked fifth.
Of relative little importance is what the domain name registrar does with its domain names when they expire. Some registrars auction off expired domain names, others keep the domains themselves, while still others have a hybrid model. The availability of value added services such as web hosting and domain privacy were also of relatively little importance. However, these value added services are where registrars make most of their profits.
When you consider the opinion of only owners of 1,000 or more domain names, security is clearly the most important factor, with 52% of people selecting security as most important. Account management tools also weigh more heavily for registrants with more than 1,000 domain names to manage.
Cable News Network, aka CNN, wants to get its hands on the CNN.es domain name. There’s just one problem: it was registered back in 2005. So the company has filed a domain dispute with World Intellectual Property Organization to try to get the domain name.
At the time of writing CNN.es doesn’t resolve to a web site. But the domain’s owner appears to be based in the United Kingdom if his email address is any any indication. (.Es is the country code for Spain.)
This isn’t the first time CNN has challenged domain names through domain arbitration. It filed 8 cases last decade, winning all 8 of them. However, this appears to be the first challenge the company has made for a second level domain name merely containing “CNN” in a country code domain.
CNN knows the value of a good domain name, even if belatedly. In 2008 the company ponied up $700,000 for the domain name iReport.com. CNN had made the iReport brand valuable thanks to its crowdsourced news program by the same name.
Getting buzz from Super Bowl commercials isn’t the only thing domain name registrar Go Daddy does well.
For the fifth year in a row, the registrar has been rated best registrar in Domain Name Wire’s annual survey. This year 41% of those survey said Go Daddy was the best domain name registrar.
The rankings remain mostly unchanged from last year, with one major addition: Name.com. Making the top five is especially surprising given that it isn’t a top 20 registrar in terms of registrations. That means it wasn’t even an option on the survey, and all votes it received were write-ins. The registrar is popular amongst domainers and has a presence at most domain shows.
Just off the list is another write-in registrar: DynaDot.
Although the selection list is limited to 20 registrars, next year we’ll add Name.com and DynaDot given their positive showing as write-in candidates.
When looking only at domain owners with 1,000 or more domains, GoDaddy still takes top honors. Moniker and Fabulous swap places.
Communications company settles lawsuit over typosquatting.
Verizon has reached a tentative settlement with 2Cool Guys, LLC, Warren Weitzman, and Arnold Trebach over alleged trademark infringement from domain name typos.
The communications company filed the complaint in October, alleging that the defendants parked typos of its popular Verizon trademark in order to earn pay-per-click revenue. The terms of the settlement have not been disclosed, but two of the three domain names in question have been transferred to Verizon as of this morning. Verizon was asking for $100,000 per domain name plus fees and recovery of pay-per-click revenue earned.
Typo domain names involved in the case included varizon.com, vierzon.com, and virazon.com.
Verizon has frequently sued entities that allegedly register and monetize typos of its trademarks. In 2008 it won a default judgment of $33 million in one such case. However, Verizon happens to be one of the biggesttyposquatters in the world itself.
Mardi Gras plus Saints celebration makes New Orleans the place to be this week.
Last month I interviewed Domainer Mardi Gras Executive Directory Michael Ward about this year’s conference. After the interview, he sent an email to me about how important it was that people reserved their hotel rooms early. Here’s what he wrote:
The hotel is already fully booked and they plan on selling out any rooms that I give back to them. We ran into this problem last year where attendees tried to book a room last minute and found that they could not find one. This is New Orleans and this is Mardi Gras and if the Saints end up going to the Super Bowl (the week before DMG 2010) and winning even MORE people will come to New Orleans to celebrate. Don’t say that last part because I don’t want to jinx the Saints
Well, now that the Saints won, I’m sure Michael won’t mind me printing that!
By the way, if you haven’t yet registered for the event, Michael might be able to hook you up with a hotel room or other accommodation for Domainer Mardi Gras. Send an email to him at mward (at) domainermardigras.com.
Two “extended” domain name auctions concluded this week. The results were underwhelming.
In the Rick Latona auction, only 9 of 600 domain names sold. The Moniker extended auction sold 79 of about 2,000 domains.
So what’s the problem? Too many domains, and especially too many poorly priced domain names.
I won’t profess to be an expert at picking which domain names will sell. But I assume auction houses apply some mathematics to it. You take the reserve price times the odds it will sell to come up with an expected value. Of course, you also consider that you want a high sell through rate, so you don’t just accept million dollar domains with a 1% chance of selling over $5,000 domains with a 90% chance of selling.
If auction houses are using a similar selection process, it just isn’t working. I think the problem is too many domains in the auctions.
Moniker set the high water mark a few auctions ago with 5,000 domains in the extended auction. It has since lowered the number, with about 2,000 in the latest auction. This is still too many, as shown by the less than 5% sell rate.
When there are too many domains in an auction, it turns off buyers. Some buyers like that, because they can run their analytics and find a few gems. But it’s bad for sellers if buyers don’t show up.
In addition to the number of domains, if a buyer sees any outrageously priced domain names, they’ll assume all of the domain names are overpriced. If I see a .ws domain name with a reserve over $5,000, I’m not going to waste my time looking at other domains in the auction. I’m going to assume everything is overpriced.
To be fair, part of the problem is too many submissions. If an auction company asks people to submit their ten best .com domains, they’ll end up with submissions of 50 .cc domains instead. That’s a mess to sort through.
We’re still at the early stages of domain auctions. But the results are becoming frustrating.
Zenni Optical, LLC, a retailer of eyeglasses, has been found guilty of reverse domain name hijacking by a World Intellectual Property Organization arbitrator.
Zenni Optical filed the complaint to get the domain name Zenni.com. But its dates didn’t add up. Zenni.com was registered in May 2002. But Zenni Optical didn’t register trademarks in Zenni and Zenni Optical until 2008 and 2009 respectively.
That’s where things get interesting. In a supplemental filing, Zenni Optical submitted a trademark licensing agreement between the trademark holder (which was apparently an individual) and Zenni Optical. That licensing agreement appeared to have been signed in September 2002, but referred to trademarks not obtained until 2008 and 2009. How could that be? Here’s what the arbitrator wrote:
…the license agreement is purportedly signed and dated in September 2002. At the same time, the agreement refers to the marks registered in 2008 and 2009. From this alone, it is self-evident that the agreement cannot, in fact, have been made in September 2002 but that, at the earliest, it must have been made after the registration of the second trademark in March 2009. The agreement could conceivably have been made any time up until the Complainant’s supplemental submission. Neither the Complainant nor the terms of the license agreement indicate when it was made. As such, it is not possible for the Panel to rule out the possibility that it was made after the filing of the Complaint.
Hmm. What makes the situation even more interesting is that, even if the trademarks were first used in September 2002, that would still be after the domain name was registered.
Amount in question may be below $5 million required for class action case.
U.S. District Judge Margaret M. Morrow is asking the plaintiffs bringing a class action against Snapnames over the insider bidding scandal to show that the controversy exceeds $5 million.
Under the Class Action Fairness Act, the amount at issue in a lawsuit must exceed $5 million (not including interest and costs) to qualify for class action status.
In the case of Stewart Resmer vs. Oversee.net (SnapNames’ parent company), the judge says that the plaintiff hasn’t given enough facts to show that the SnapNames case is a dispute that exceeds $5 million:
Plaintiff has alleged that the amount in controversy, exclusive of interest and costs, exceeds
$5,000,000. This allegation, unsupported by facts, is not sufficient to satisfy the $5,000,000 amount
in controversy requirement. To satisfy his burden of pleading jurisdiction, plaintiff cannot rely only
on conclusory allegations.
In fact, the lead plaintiff allegedly lost $20 in one auction thanks to bidding against ‘halvarez’. If that’s the typical amount lost, the total amount would be far less than $5 million:
Although plaintiff alleges that the defendants have engaged in shill bidding in approximately 50,000 auctions, the plaintiff himself suffered a monetary loss of only $20 due to one inflated bid. If $20 is typical of the loss suffered by the winners in the 50,000 auctions, then the total losses at issue would be approximately $1,000,000—far less than the requisite amount. While it is possible that the losses suffered in the 50,000 auctions exceed $1,000,000, plaintiff’s complaint does not explain why this is so.
Judge Morrow has given the plaintiff until February 8th to show otherwise, or the action may be dismissed for lack of subject matter jurisdiction.
Marketplaces find the correct price for paying for content production.
Earlier this week I wrote twostories about Demand Media, a company that has found a way to make money with online content. I noted that the company will have a hard time getting fair press coverage since many journalists probably feel threatened by its model.
Here’s one example, aptly named “Demand Media Can Go To Hell“. In the post, author Tony Silber complains about what he calls Demand Media’s low pay to writers. There are a few times in my life I’ve told someone to go to hell, and it’s usually when I feel threatened.
Through Demand Studios, Demand Media is bringing market efficiency to content production. That’s scary to some people that are afraid of change. Call me a capitalist (the horror!), but that’s the coolest thing about Demand’s model.
Now, am I just some smug blogger who laughs at the peril of others? No. My wife is a professional journalist. My family gets its regular paycheck from her job. It’s our only source of health care, too. But one of the things that most impresses me about my wife is her ability to adapt.
She graduated college 10 years ago. The next ten years saw perhaps the most upheaval the journalism world has ever seen. When she interned for BusinessWeek in the late nineties, there was a clear wall between print and online. Online was second rate. That quickly changed, and she changed with it. A couple years ago she left the print world for an online blog.
I’ve also experienced the effects of increasing market efficiency. When I graduated college I landed a nice, high paying job as a financial analyst for a software firm. Then the dot com bubble burst and the company had to cut costs. First, it moved almost all of its development to India. A little while after I left, it hit closer to home: the company moved almost all of its finance jobs to India, too.
Those affected could have bitched and moaned. But one smart guy in the finance department saw an opportunity. He started a financial analysis company where he interfaced with companies in the U.S. but had a team of analysts in India.
Oh, and that same software company has subsequently moved much of its development to China. It was cheaper.
Now, back to the Demand Media model. First of all, I don’t think it pays as little as people like Silber claim. Sure, a magazine may pay $1 a word for freelance writing. But to get that job you have to pitch stories. Once accepted, you have to write the story. Then you have to invoice the publication and wait 30-60 days to get paid.
Demand Media writers have an unlimited flow of work. No pitching. Payments by PayPal twice a week. So they may earn about $25 an hour on average, but they get paid for each hour they work. To put it in perspective, when I do domain name consulting for companies I usually charge about $400 an hour. But if you consider how much time I spend on the sales call and keeping up to speed on everything I need to know, I’m not earning close to $400 an hour.
Is Demand Media paying too little? Apparently not, since thousands of writers are willing to write for it.
In fact, if you want to see some truly scary market efficiency at work, try this idea. Perhaps Demand shouldn’t pay a set price for articles. It should hold a reverse auction, letting writers say how much they’ll write the article for. Now that would show us the true price of the content.
Escrow.com offers service for domain name purchase payment plans.
I caught up with Escrow.com president Brandon Abbey during DOMAINfest last week. When I asked him about current trends in sales, he said the company is seeing more people wishing to do payment plans when they acquire domains.
Escrow.com has a service for these customers. It runs similar to its traditional domain escrow service, except that Escrow.com takes control of the domain name and facilitates multiple payments from buyer to seller. Once all payments are received, ownership of the domain name is transferred to the buyer.
In most cases, the buyer makes monthly or quarterly payments, which are then disbursed to the seller.
To set up a payment plan escrow, users create the transaction on Escrow.com as usual. They then contact Andee Hill (ahill at escrow.com) with the payment terms. Escrow.com then sends agreements to both parties for signature. Next, the seller transfers the domain name to Escrow.com’s account at Go Daddy.
For extended payment transactions, Escrow.com generally accepts transactions of $75,000 or more. It is currently managing transactions ranging from 8 months to 5 years.
The cost is reasonable — just the standard fees plus a $500 annual fee.
There’s more controversy with GoDaddy’s Super Bowl commercials, but this time it actually may not have been planned.
The company planned to air an ad called “movies” during Sunday’s game. The ad showed Danica Patrick performing a couple scenes from iconic movies. But apparently GoDaddy ran into licensing problems with some of the movie studios with scenes portrayed in the commercial. So the company yanked the commercial.
Instead, GoDaddy will run an ad called “Spa“. In the ad, Danica Patrick is getting a massage, but the masseuse realizes who she’s working on and asks for a chance to be a GoDaddy Girl herself.
Although the ads will certainly drive a lot of traffic to GoDaddy’s web site on Sunday, the company has already received a nice ROI thanks to the usual pre-game press coverage.
Fight shows complexity of new top level domain name process, and a city council that just left money on the table.
“Not so fast”, says a competitor who wants the chance to operate a .Vegas top level domain name.
Dot Vegas Inc. has struck a deal with the City of Las Vegas to launch and operate a .vegas top level domain name when (if) ICANN approves new TLDs. It has an optimistic view on how much money it can bring in to the city.
But the owner of Vegas.com wants in on the action, and offered the city more than the 75 cents per domain or 10% that Dot Vegas Inc. is offering to run the registry.
Too late for .Vegas? Well, Vegas.com has an ace up its sleeve. Clark County says the City of Las Vegas shouldn’t have exclusive rights to launch the .Vegas TLD. After all, The Strip is located outside the city limits, and many people think of The Strip as Vegas. So now Vegas.com is trying to work with the county on a deal to launch the new TLD.
ICANN’s current plans for releasing new TLDs offer special privileges to governments of cities, states, and countries for TLDs. It makes things really complicated, especially since capitals may get even more special rights. This is one example where the proper authority to approve a location TLD could be in dispute. After all, the group that “approved” this TLD should probably only have rights to approve .LasVegas, not .Vegas.
According to an article in The Las Vegas Sun, which is a sister company of Vegas.com, competitor Dot Vegas Inc. told the Las Vegas City council it needed to act quickly because ICANN was going to require “Expressions of Interest” in new TLDs in a week. If Dot Vegas Inc. really said that, then the city just got snookered.
Here’s my advice to the City of Las Vegas and to Vegas.com, if it’s not too late.
To the city: You’re getting ripped off. You’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars of your time evaluating a proposal that may earn you very little. You should be asking for 30%-40% of each registration. You should also ask for a guarantee rather than just a percentage of profits.
To Vegas.com: You win either way. If Dot Vegas fails, then you dodged a money trap. If it succeeds, you’ll get a lot of spillover traffic from people typing in Palms.Vegas.COM by mistake.
Extended online domain name auctions from TRAFFIC and DOMAINfest end today.
Two extended online domain name auctions from recent conferences end today.
First, the extended auction from TRAFFIC concludes on Proxibid at 1 PM EST. With less than 3 hours to go, a few domains have bids but haven’t met their reserves. This may indicate there are some buying opportunities since bidding is light.
Closing today at about 3 PM EST is Moniker’s extended auction on Snapnames from the DOMAINfest conference. KZ.com has already attracted two bidders, bringing the domain up to $122,650. (Moniker extended auctions start at the reserve price.) CheapPaydayLoans.com is attracting the most bids, with 34 from 11 bidders. The domain is currently $1,324. There are also a few .tel domain names receiving bids, with Taxes.tel, Healthcare.tel, and Lisa.com all receiving bids in the mid 3 figure range.
IBM files patent application for overcoming limitations of tagging.
The past few years on the web have been all about tagging. Tagging blog posts, tagging products, tagging pictures, etc. Blogs often times represent their tags in tag clouds. But what is that, other than a collection of links weighted by the number of times the content has been tagged?
IBM wants to improve upon tagging, bringing the idea of the semantic web to tag clouds. And it just filed a patent application for the idea.
U.S. patent application 12/184,731 (pdf) describes what’s wrong with traditional tag clouds, and how IBM wants to apply ontology and relationships to make them more useful. According to IBM, here are the limitations of tagging:
“Although tagging can help users find content, there are some disadvantages associated with tagging. For example, tags are generally single words, as most tagging technologies do not allow multiple word (phrase) tags. Also, users cannot associate a context or description with the tags. For example, a user may tag a picture as “dog”. Alone, this tag (dog) could have a variety of meanings (e.g., animal, food, person, etc). Adding context to the tag (e.g., John’s dog plays in the garden) could give users a better understanding of what to expect when they click on the tag. Additionally, different users can use the same tag with different meanings, thus making tags semantically imprecise. For example, a user interested in computers may search for content tagged “Apple” only to receive results related to the fruit. Current tagging technology also does not allow tags to be associated with their synonyms. For example, pictures tagged as “dog” will not show up when a user searches for content associated with the tag “puppy”. Therefore, as the tag space grows, the value of tags may diminish.”
But IBM has the solution, it says: a way to apply the semantic web to tag clouds by creating an ontology. Here are some of the benefits:
“Once this ontology (classification) is generated, it can provide users with a better way to visualize the tag environment and describe how individual tags are related to one another. The ontology can also enable users to add description to their tags, thus making tags more understandable, informative (semantically rich), and easy to locate. Additionally, it also results in more precise and specific searches and captures the users’ behavior, usage of words, etc. For example, consider two tags—one that reads “sunset at Pompano beach”, the other that reads “sunset at Miami beach”. A user may search for content with tags “sunset in Florida”. Using the ontology and the semantic web, the machine may identify that Pompano Beach and Miami Beach are both in Florida and hence display both results. However, the process of generating such a classification is very time consuming, requires people with a lot of programming expertise, and a variety of domain experts. Moreover, users tend to use colloquialisms and people’s vocabulary changes over time.”
The patent application includes a number of methods that can overcome the challenges of relating information in tags.
New gift card lets retail shoppers pick up a domain name on impulse.
You can register domain names through web sites, twitter, and text message. So why not buy one with your latte?
A new gift card from Canadian domain name registrar WebNames.ca lets customers buy a voucher for a .tel domain name at the cash registrer and then redeem it online. The card is apparently being offered (or soon will be) at CanTalk Wireless and Blenz Coffee in Canada.
A number of domain name registrars, including heavyweight GoDaddy, offer online gift cards. But I’ve yet to see domain name gift certificates offered in retail stores, at least not in the U.S. If you’ve seen something like this elsewhere, please post a comment.
Time is running out to give your thoughts on the domain name industry.
The response period for the 5th annual Domain Name Wire Survey concludes Thursday at midnight, Central Standard Time.
Make your voice heard as you give your important opinion on these topics:
-Which domain name registrar is best
-Where the value of domain names is headed
-The best domain research/management software
-The most important factors when selecting a domain name registrar
-How ICANN is doing
-What the biggest story in the domain industry was in 2009
-Who the most influential person is in the industry
-Which domain parking company is best
As a thank you, five respondents will receive a free copy of David Kesmodel’s “The Domain Game” book.
Please join the over 500 people who have already responded by completing the survey now. It only takes five minutes.
Registrar explains its expiration notification policy.
A lot of times domain name registrars get the blame when their customers forget to renew domain names. “I didn’t get the notice” is a common line.
Of course, you can easily say the opposite. Really, how many emails does GoDaddy need to send me about my expiring domain names? It may seem like they trip all over themselves to get you to renew domain names. And that’s exactly the point.
We start sending domain renewal notices 75 days from the expiration date, then again on day 45, day 20 and day 10. If we get a bounce back from the email address that’s on file on day 20, then we send a written notice to the registrant’s physical address on file.
Sending postal mail based on a bounce back is great — and something most registrars don’t do.
In the case of South African Airways, it appears their outsourced technical team was actually the group to drop the ball. The email address in whois is dns(at)itnt.co.za, which is a South African web company.
ICANN has been looking into how domain names expire. My message has always been that more notifications to registrants aren’t necessary. The reason valuable domain names expire is because the registrant has incorrect contact information. More bounced emails won’t solve that problem.
It has always bothered me that URL shorteners are taking over the web. As many people have pointed out, your entire linking history is subject to the lifeline of a third party service. And with many URL shorteners operating on questionable country code domain names, the risks are prevalent. 
Zenni Optical, LLC, a retailer of eyeglasses, has been found guilty of reverse domain name hijacking by a World Intellectual Property Organization arbitrator.
I caught up with 
The past few years on the web have been all about tagging. Tagging blog posts, tagging products, tagging pictures, etc. Blogs often times represent their tags in tag clouds. But what is that, other than a collection of links weighted by the number of times the content has been tagged?
You can register domain names through web sites, twitter, and text message. So why not buy one with your latte?