I would like to wish anyone who should stumble across this blog a Happy New Year.
As far as the new year, I plan on doing a lot more development of the sites and domains that I currently have.
That basically means no new domain acquisitions for 2011 and beyond.
Just as I decide to give up domaining, I discover this great techmeme type site for domainers, domaining.com
Which in turn lead me to this funny cartoon by domainshane.com

Received this email today

Recently, SnapNames discovered that an employee had set up an account on the SnapNames system under a false name and, under this name, bid in SnapNames auctions. This is a clear violation of our internal policy and was not approved by the company. We deeply regret that this conduct has impacted our customers.

Extent of impact

This conduct affected a small percentage of SnapNames auctions:
Bidding affected approximately five percent of total SnapNames auctions since 2005, most of which occurred between 2005 and 2007.
The incremental revenue from the bidding represented approximately one percent of SnapNames’ auction revenue since 2005.
No matter the level of impact, SnapNames takes this matter extremely seriously. When the matter was discovered, the company immediately closed the account in question and began a thorough investigation. The employee has also been dismissed from the company.

SnapNames further discovered that, on certain recent and limited occasions, when the employee won an auction, the employee secretly arranged to refund from SnapNames to the fictitious account a portion of the winning bid amount.

Remedy to affected customers

Though on some occasions the employee won the auction, in many instances the bidding caused the ultimate auction winner to pay more for a name than had the employee not participated in the auction.

SnapNames neither condones this conduct nor wants to be perceived as benefiting from the conduct. Accordingly, we have decided that regardless of the circumstance, in every auction where the employee’s fictitious account submitted a bid which resulted in a higher price being paid by the winning bidder, SnapNames will offer a rebate, with 5.22% interest (the highest applicable federal rate during the affected time period), to affected customers for the difference between the prices they actually paid and the prices they would have paid, had the employee not bid in the auctions. The rebate will be available in cash or in credit on the SnapNames platform, at your discretion.

SnapNames has moved quickly to address this situation. The company has retained Rust Consulting, an independent third party, who will administer the rebate offer. Within the next week, Rust Consulting will contact affected customers to provide details regarding the offer.

Seriously, it is surprising that this could go undetected from 2005 to 2009, but I have to give them kudos for admitting the problem and trying to make good on the problem. Hopefully I qualify for a refund
Looks like email should go out in around a week. Although some people already know how much of a refund they are entitled to.
Snapnames.com used to be the pioneer in the expired domain industry. If you were the first person to get a backorder in, you used to be able to get it for US$69 which is very cheap. Then I think pool.com came along and started auctioning domains that expired and were successful in obtaining. They had very good registry connections and won a lot of great domains which they auctioned for very high prices. Michael Arrington who was involved in starting Pool.com mentioned figures of about a million dollars a month.
So then snapnames.com started with the auction process like pool, instead of a fixed price. But they were not good in competing with Pool.com
Then snapnames.com regained their crown as the king of domains, by striking a deal with Network Solutions. The majority of the very best domains that expired and were worth a lot of money were originally registered with Network Solutions. But that crown was lost in my opinion, when namejet.com took over the agreement to auction expired domains with Network Solutions. I believe namejet.com are the new kings of expired domain names.
For a very interesting take on this subject, I recommend reading the comments in the following post. Yes, anybody who knows anything about domaining, knows that Michael Arrington, due to his involvement with Pool.com is a legend in the industry, it is funny to see people question his knowledge in the industry.

Dnjournal reported that jobs.ca sold for US$600,000. Whilst that may sound a lot, it is certainly a domain with a lot of potential. The domain was purchased by ogopogomedia.com I would have thought that a company that could afford US$600,000 for a domain could afford a better branding for their main site. They are apparently quite prominent in the domaining industry and own such gems as jobsearch.ca and resumes.ca
Jobs.ca as a fully developed website could easily sell for many millions of dollars to a traditional media outlet like a newspaper or television station.

This was one of the more impressive domain auctions I have seen at snapnames.com Dreamlife.com selling for US$171,750 at snapnames, my first impression was, whoever paid that much for this domain must be bonkers, well turns out it was bonkerstwo, the undefeated king of domain auctions who has access to what seems like an unlimited flow of cash on tap. I think it is overpriced. Inevitably some kind of parking page will pop up, and of course the ppc revenue will come nowhere close to matching the price paid for the domain, well at least I dont think so. So what is the strategy for a domain like this? overture shows that it has a search volume of 556 with the extension. Their is a hasbro game called dreamlife. Then of course there is the branding potential of a name like this, good for a film production company, dreamlife studios, or perhaps a challenger to the incredibly popular secondlife.com

Also on this weeks dnjournal sales chart, connected.co.uk was reported to have been sold for 80,000 pounds which is equivalent to around $159,400 US dollars.  Personally I think they payed too much, but the buyer netbasic from the UK appear to be quite a professional outfit and I am sure they will recoup their costs. What makes this particularly interesting is that the domain was purchased in January 2006 for $3,500 which is quite a nice return for such a short period of time.

According to the weekly dnjournal sales report, the domain iran.com was sold for US$400,000.  The domain was purchased by Rick Latona of digipawn.com. Now my first reaction was, that is not a domain that I would personally pay US$400,000 for, it is not exactly a top holiday destination at the moment. But if you look further, according to overture stats, the word iran for January 07 was searched for 367,397 times.  It already has a reasonably respectable alexa ranking of 229,928. On the site it says “Iran is the 18th largest country in the world and home to 70 million ”.  A little research of my own, not sure how accurate these figures are, show that Iran has the third largest oil reserves in the world. So basically, if somebody has US$400,000 to spend on a domain in the first place, I will assume that they must know what they are doing.

Read about this at Frank Schilling’s blog, it appears Mike Mann bought the domain seo.com the absolute ultimate domain for anyone in the seo industry. This is one domain that I would really like to own, as I am sure thousands of others would as well.  Not sure what the actual price paid for this domain was, I would have thought it would be somewhere in the six figure range, but this site lists the purchase price at a reported purchase price at US$5 million.  That price is definitely within his capability given that he sold buydomains.com for US$65 million plus. It appears he is using the site for his seo company webtargeted.com Guess I will have to content myself with my lowly seocompany.com domain which I registered back in 2003.

According to a post at domainnamewire, moniker sold domains at an auction totalling US$4.3 million.  Families.com was the highest selling domain at US$650,000. Greeting.com sold for US$350,00 although I think greetings.com would be worth more. The domain that struck me as being a bargain was et.com at $225,000. Apart from being short for extra terrestrial and the name of one of steven spielberg’s most famous movies et, it is also the commonly known abbreviation for entertainment tonight. It will be interesting to see who the buyer turns out to be.
Another interesting sale is blogster.com. This domain was purchased in 2005 for US$100,000 which at the time appeared to be quite a high price for such a domain. Well at the moniker auction, it was on sold for US$275,000. It is not sure whether the site was included with the domain name. The site has a PR5 and an alexa ranking of 25,250 which is fairly respectable, so it is hard to assess what was paid for the actual domain and site components.

Dnjournal reported the final exchange of three high value adult domain names which were sold via moniker at the internext adult expo. Interracialsex.com sold for US$150,000 handjob.com sold for US$90,000 and kinkysex.com sold for US$88,500. Proof that there is still a lot of money being made in the online adult industry.

According to the dnjournal weekly sales report, the tandberg.com domain sold for US$1.5 million to a company that had a revenue of US$131 million in the fourth quarter of 2006.