Another note from the recently concluded Domain Roundtable conference San Francisco - at a press conference held just before the show opened April 18th, Charleston, South 

Carolina domain investor/developer Stephen Webb announced the launch of a new shopping portal with a charity component at WeAreCity.com. The site, which will serve as the front door to a network of more than 125 related sites, has color coded districts for Shopping, Travel, Entertainment, and Health and Beauty. Webb said that a charitable donation will be made for each purchase made from one of the network's merchants. Those who shop on the site will vote each quarter to choose the charity that will receive that quarter's charitable funding (the first donation is to be made July 1). The current ballot lists the American Cancer Society, Doctors Without Borders and the ASPCA among the organizations shoppers can vote for.

Webb said, “We have been working on this project for almost three years. Our goal has been to enable everyone to give back, no matter how little they have. When I was young,

Stephen Webb (WeAreCity.com) 
at the Domain Roundtable conference
in San Francisco (April 2008)

we would have penny drives in school.  This enabled all the children to be able to participate in raising funds. It gives me great pleasure to say, WeAreCity.com is a penny drive on a global scale.”   
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Several tidbits for you today. In case you missed it when it went up yesterday, our comprehensive review of the Domain Roundtable conference that ended last week in San 

Auctioneer David O'Shaughnessy directing 
last week's Domain Roundtable live auction.

Francisco has been published here. In that article we mentioned a minor flap had developed between organizers of the Roundtable live auction and new appraisal firm DomainConsultant.com who was called on to help select domains for the sale. After the auction concluded with a large drop off in total sales compared to last year's event, DomainConsultant offered their view of what went wrong in an article on their site published April 23. Today they followed up with another article. 

Though the auction didn't go as well as last year (for a number of reasons) there was still a lot to like about the DRT show, including a great venue, strong educational program and excellent networking opportunities. We take you through the conference hour by hour in our exclusive wrap up article.

Following the LH.com fiasco yesterday, it was good to get news today that the British owners of MySpace.co.uk are getting their domain back. Even though they registered the name six years before MySpace.com even existed, Nominet's Dispute Resolution Service (DRS) took the domain away from them in January. Now, an independent appeals panel has stepped in and reversed that poor DRS decision. 

I have to join the chorus of boos aimed at a UDRP panel's outrageous decision to take a generic two-letter domain, LH.com, away from its rightful owner, Future Media Architects,

and hand it over to Lufthansa Airlines because...well because Lufthansa is a big corporation I guess. There is no logic behind this decision - just further evidence of extreme bias against domain owners in the UDRP process (85% of decisions go against domain owners).

FMA is known for both developing domains and not selling domains they own. They refused to sell to Lufthansa so the airline decided to try a reverse hijacking instead and, at least at the UDRP level,  they succeeded by a 2-1 panel vote. To his credit, one panelist, David Sorkin, showed some common  sense and tried to do the right thing. The good news is Lufthansa hasn't gotten away with this theft yet. FMA

has filed suit against them in a New York federal court and if there is any justice in this world, they will win the suit and keep the domain. It's just a shame they have to spend a massive amount of money to keep what is rightfully theirs but that is the world we live in.
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This has been a very busy week, so apologies in advance for email and phone calls that have not yet been returned. I didn't get back from Domain Roundtable in San Francisco until Tuesday night, then spent Wednesday and part of Thursday getting our weekly domain sales report out. The past 24 hours have been spent clearing away some of the backlog that built up while I was away and starting work on our comprehensive Roundtable wrap up article that we 

expect to publish no later than Monday (my weekend will be spent writing it). I'm going to close the Lowdown week with a variety of items that have came in over the past few days that I haven't been able to get to before now. 

First, congratulations to Steve Morales and Skip Hogland from Simply Geo, LLC who just announced their acquisition of GeoDomain.com and GeoDomains.com. They released their plans for the domains on the SimplyGeo.com blog today. 

Despite that good news, Hoagland's day was marred when he learned that some con artist had placed his Atlanta.com up for auction at Sedo. Hoagland took quick action and had the auction deleted and the offender's account removed at Sedo. He also called on the auction house to more carefully vet the identities of those who sign up to bid on their platform. This is actually a problem across many of the auction venues. Deadbeat bidders and other miscreants slip through the door much too easily and face few if any consequences for their behavior. 

Skip Hoagland
Simply Geo, LLC

The enterprising folks at Pingdom.com just posted an exclusive inside look at Google's domain portfolio that is worth taking a look at. It turns out the search giant owns thousands of

domain names of their own and, if you thought some of your domains were bad, it should make you feel good to learn that a lot of Google's are even worse! Their inventory includes such gems as az-on-url-je.com and 1p0g0og1e.com.

Pingdom neatly breaks highlights from the Google collection into categories including Typos (a la glougle.com), Names Totally Unrelated to Google (i.e. TheSecretOfBurritos.com), Possible New

Services (GoogleAuction.com among others), Possible Offline Services (GoogleGym.com), Potential Merger Partners (GoogleWarnerBros.com) and many others.

Check it out - Pingdom even offers a free Excel file download with the whole list! Might help you while away a few hours the next time you are stuck at the airport waiting for a delayed flight!
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Domain Strategies, a Monster Venture Partners company that partners with domain owners, entrepreneurs and capital investors to develop high quality domain names has named three key

executives to new positions on their management team. Scott Fasser moves up to President and Chief Operating Officer and Natalie Grinblatt replaces him as EVP of Corporate Development. The company owns or manages thousands of domain names and recently acquired Wifi.com, with John Maffei selected as CEO of Wifi.com. Other names that Domain Strategies is building into successful businesses include HealthCare.com, Patents.com and Alerts.com.

I met Scott Fasser at the Domain Roundtable conference in San Francisco this past weekend. He has over 16 years experience in building successful businesses. Prior to joining Domain Strategies, Fasser led the development of the paid search and SEO programs for RealNetworks through his consulting company, Brand Digital, and is considered an authority on SEM, website development & optimization, 

Scott Fasser, Domain Strategies President and COO at the Domain Roundtable conference last weekend
in San Francisco.

traffic acquisition, customer retention and developer relations. Scott received his MBA from the University of Washington and BA from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas .

Mr. Fasser and John Maffei will be based in the company’s Bellevue, Washington offices while Ms. Grinblatt will initially be located in Phoenix, co-located with IDN Options, a company she co-founded that gained Monster Venture Partners backing earlier this year. IDNoptions has one of the worlds largest IDN portfolios and is involved with IDN consulting and IDN business development. Grinblatt has both her MBA and BA from the University of Michigan .
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I'll by flying all day tomorrow (en route to the Domain Roundtable conference in San Francisco) so there won't be a Lowdown post Friday. However, starting Saturday I will post a daily item from the show at the Palace Hotel. The event runs through Monday with a big live auction scheduled for the closing day. 

Soon after Roundtable ends, the spotlight shifts to London where the UK's largest web related conference, Internet World will be held April 29 - May 1. The domain business will be represented there by Sedo, Nominet and Edwin Hayward's MemorableDomains.co.uk. Hayward, who has one of the best .co.uk portfolios, plans to put 2,000 of them up for sale at Internet World, including such gems as Britain.co.uk, SearchEngine.co.uk and Maps.co.uk.

Earl's Court - London
Site of the Internet World show starting Apr. 29

In a press release issued today Hayward said "A generic domain name is an investment that can bring more online visits, leads and sales by driving recognition and recall of a company's web address, building credibility and market presence, improving website usability and lifting the results of search promotions." If you're going to the show you can visit Hayward at Stand E277 in the Earl's Court exhibition hall. 

Elsewhere, Sedo's latest monthly GreatDomains.com online premium domain auction got underway today (it closes April 24). Names on the block this time aorund include Sociology.com, Chianti.com, Bond.com and Won.com to name just a few. 

Philip Reynolds, the General Manager at Thought Convergence, has joined the Board of Directors of the Internet Commerce Association (the domain industry trade association based in Washington, D.C.). Under ICA bylaws each class of members is allowed to elect someone to 

represent their class on the organization's board. Reynolds was unanimously selected by Gold Members ($25,000 donors) as their board representative.

At Thought Convergence Reynolds is responsible for the management and oversight of the company’s day-to-day operations, and participates in strategic planning for its TrafficZ, LeaseThis.com and Idea.net divisions. In addition to his managerial duties, Reynolds serves as an in-house counsel and advises the company on various bodies of law, including intellectual property, corporate and contract.  

Through his tenure at Thought Convergence, Reynolds has developed a deep understanding of the unique position of domain asset holders and the critical importance of securing and 

                   Philip Reynolds
Thought Convergence GM has joined 
the Board of Directors of the Internet Commerce Association

protecting their rights. As a member of the Internet Commerce Association Board of Directors, Reynolds is working to protect and promote the interests of the domain name community and seeks to influence the fledgling body of laws and regulations that govern the industry. 

Reynolds earned a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science, with honors and distinction in major, from the University of California, Santa Barbara and holds a Juris Doctorate from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law.
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When I opened my local newspaper, The Tampa Tribune, this morning there was news that the paper's parent company, Media General, was going to offer buyouts to staff members at

both the Tribune and the local NBC-TV affiliate that Media General owns, WFLA Channel 8. Of course, it is all part of ongoing downsizing of newspapers around the country (and increasingly TV stations too) as their advertisers spend more and more money online instead of in traditional media.

While the newspapers are getting clobbered what does that mean for makers of newspaper printing presses? Are they today's version of buggy whips? That is how reader Rob Sequin (of SearchDomainsForSale.com) characterized them when he sent me a link to another story about a convention of newspaper equipment suppliers (NEXCO) held in Washington, D.C. over the weekend.

Panel moderator Dennis Nierman, president of AlfaQuest Technologies Inc., referring to the steady revenue declines that are plaguing the newspaper  industry said, "We, too, are feeling

the pain."  Nierman, whose company makes a product that allows printing plates to be made from digital files, said it was "discouraging" to see the exhibition floor relatively empty, as it was for part of the day Saturday, the first day of the show.

Nierman had to feel a little better when George Irish, president of Hearst Corp's newspaper division, noted that his company had $250 million committed to printing press updates, with more on the way, and Dean Singleton, CEO of Denver-based MediaNews Group Inc. said his company spent $500 million on press-related products over the past three years. As Sequin said, "Wow, that is a HUGE investment in buggy whips!" Amen, brother. I'm sure owners of web media properties are thinking they could get a pretty good hosting account or buy a new server or two for that kind of money!
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Australian domainer Ed Keay-Smith has been posting some top-notch podcasts on his OzDomainer.com website. The latest one posted over the weekend features Michael and 

David Castello (who were featured in our December 2006 Cover Story). I just finished listening to the 60-minute program and it was a very engrossing show, even though I was already very familiar with David and Michael's background and their domain business. There were still plenty of interesting anecdotes I had not heard before.  

I was also struck by the exceptional sound quality of the 

David Castello (L) and Michael Castello
Castello Cities Internet Network, Inc.

program - as good as I have ever heard on a podcast. Though Ed conducted the interview over trans-oceanic phone lines, both he and the Castello brothers sound like they are sitting next to you in your living room. Check it out, I'm sure you'll find the time well spent. 

If you like what you hear you will also want to check out the other five podcasts Ed has posted since he started in early March. Those featured Michael Gilmour (WhizzbangsBlog.com), Elliot Silver (ElliotsBog.com), Rick Latona (RickLatona.com), James Martell (AffiliateMarketersBootcamp.com) and the dynamic duo of Dan Kimball and Sean Stafford (DNZoom.com). 
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I'm going to close out the week with a few interesting tidbits that came in over the past few days that I haven't had a chance to run before now. First, I just got a note from top-notch 

domain attorney Ari Goldberger today telling me that his sister and long-time personal assistant Leora Garret was featured on the local CBS-TV station (Channel 3 in Philadelphia) after losing 140 pounds in just 9 months on the Smart For Life Cookie Diet! Leora's story is also available on the TV station's website. Ari (who was the subject of our June 2006 Cover Story) said he tried the diet too and lost 25 pounds. That certainly caught my attention and I'm sure I'm not the only one whom the sedentary business of domaining has negatively affected weight wise over the past few years. The special cookies at the center of this diet are laced with proteins that help kill hunger pangs according to program advocate Dr. Scott Greenberg. As the TV station's article notes, other doctors have concerns about the cookie diet so it would be wise to do your own due diligence before trying it yourself.

Ari Goldberger

Oversee.net (the parent of DomainSponsor.com, Moniker.com and SnapNames.com) made a key appointment to their executive team this week adding David Subar as the company's Chief Technology Officer. He will be responsible for building and implementing technology that supports Oversee’s core activities in its Domain Services and Marketing Services divisions, while 

Subar has over 18 years of experience in software development and product management for start-ups and mature companies. Previously, he was CIO at Interthinx, a fraud detection and risk mitigation company serving the financial services industry. He has held numerous technology leadership positions in startups for venture capitalists and was CTO at PeopleLink, an idealab! company. Of course, I am most impressed by the fact he is an Ohio State University graduate (I also went to OSU - Go Buckeyes!).
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Score one for the good guys. Back in February we told you about the owners of Kooks.com (Global DNS LLC) filing a lawsuit against a company called Kooks Custom Headers that was 

attempting to reverse hijack their domain by filing an unwarranted WIPO action against them. Knowing that the WIPO and UDRP decks are stacked against domain owners (who lose over 80% of the time) Global DNS decided to go on the offensive and haul the header company into court. While that case continues to wind its way through the system, a decision has just come down in the WIPO action and Kooks.com won. 

While we firmly believe that valid trademarks should be respected, people need to realize that there are bad actors on both sides of the field. 

Many trademark holders have tried to literally steal domains they have no right to through the UDRP process or in the court system (where they hope to bleed their victims financially until they are forced to surrender the domains the attacker wants). This was one of the few instances where I've seen a domain owner turn the tables by filing suit against the TM bully first. Perhaps the favorable WIPO decision will now help Global win the court battle as well.

As a follow-up to yesterday's post, as I expected a widely quoted news article that claimed ICANN CEO and President Paul Twomey had made anti-domainer comments at a conference in 

Dubai last week proved to be false. ICANN Media Adviser Jason Keenan dropped me a note today saying "I have discussed the Gulf News report with Paul Twomey and he has asked me to clarify that the article incorrectly suggested that he has concerns with domainers. 

Keenan wrote, "As Paul said to me: "When asked to look ahead at what might happen on the Internet, I did say it was likely domainers would move increasingly into the ccTLD space. In no way did I say or suggest that domainers were a negative force in any way and certainly did not refer to them as "a downside." The many domainers I have met and chatted with at meetings across the globe will know I would never say such a thing. As I noted in my closing remarks at the Dubai meeting, the marketplace has evolved and domainers are a part of the robust domain name market that exists today."

Dr. Paul Twomey
ICANN CEO & President

That statement is consistent with everything I have heard from Dr. Twomey in the past, which is why I did not believe what I read in the article. His comment that domainers would increasingly move into the ccTLD space is a valid observation and certainly not one that should surprise anyone.  Just as land investors will put their money where they sense good opportunities for growth, those who think domains have a strong future will invest their money in areas they expect to expand. Domains are no different than any other kind of proven asset. People will invest their money where they see value. The idea that there is something somehow wrong with this - especially since it is the very basis of free world economics - has always baffled me. My belief is that this odd prejudice against domain owners that is not directed at those who invest in other asset classes stems primarily from jealousy.

Critics don't want to acknowledge that domain owners put a lot of capital at risk (especially years ago when registration fees were far higher than they are today) buying assets that everyone else told them they were idiots to buy. Now that those people have proven to be not as stupid as a lot of people thought those who missed the boat are trying to rewrite the rule book and get their hands on the assets they ridiculed a decade ago. Part of their hijacking strategy is to constantly demonize domain investors. Whenever this happens the offending parties should be called on it as the facts clearly speak for themselves.
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Did he really say that? I wasn't going to comment on this until I hear what ICANN CEO and President Paul Twomey has to say about it, but since many other sites are already buzzing (and possibly jumping to conclusions) about it, I'll offer my initial thoughts on the developing 

brouhaha. 

It started when an article at GulfNews.com (a site that covers developments in the Middle East) had Twomey lumping domainers into the same category as cybersquatters  and typosquatters when he spoke at an Internet conference in Dubai last week. When commenting about the possible introduction of new TLDs and IDNs that would allow local languages to be used on both sides of the dot,  reporter Scott Shuey quoted Twomey as saying that while many would welcome the ability to have domain names in their native languages, there are a number of downsides, including cyber-squatting, typo-squatting and domaining. 

Shuey added (and the absence of quotation marks in his article leads me to believe these are his words, not Twomey's) "Domaining, which is technically legal, is still somewhat controversial. Domainers purchase non-trademarked domain 

Dr. Paul Twomey
ICANN President and CEO

names in the hopes of either reselling the name at a profit. Some websites have resold for millions of dollars. Other domainers "park" the domain in order to generate advertising revenue. A parked site usually reroutes users to a website that contains ads. While a number of international laws and internal procedures discourage squatting, domaining is going to be an issue, Twomey said."

My initial reaction when I read this article is that Dr. Twomey would not say something so appallingly ignorant and I think that will turn out to be true. Twomey is familiar with the domain business and I had a front row seat when he delivered a solid keynote address at the 2006 Domain Roundtable conference in Seattle.  

WashingtonVC partners Eric Litman and Michael Mann were featured in a Washington Post piece by Zachary Goldfarb today titled Building His Own Start-Up Ecosystem. The article 

Eric Litman (left) and Michael Mann
WashingtonVC.com

focused on Litman who started working with Mann  after each helped found companies (Proxicom for Litman and BuyDomains for Mann) that were sold in multi-million dollar transactions. At WashingtonVC they are funding and helping build a wide variety of new companies, many of which are based on killer domain names like SEO.com and Phone.com. 

Litman told the post, "There's the perception that the Internet is done in terms of  

innovation (but) we're still at the very beginning in terms of human-computer interaction models in terms of opportunities."

Goldfarb wrote, "In addition to the cash, WashingtonVC provides important corporate back-end services that many start-up companies can't afford or don't know much about, such as marketing strategy, human resources, legal advice, etc. Litman, who spent several years investing in and commuting to East Asia calls the concept "keiretsu," a Japanese word referring to a company that's at the center of a business ecosystem."
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Moniker's latest live domain auction was held today at the Casino Affiliates Convention in Amsterdam. The going was slow this time out with total sales coming in just a bit above

$100,000. The top sales were Winnings.com ($27,000), Roulette.mobi ($15,000), OnlineCasino.at ($7,500) and CasinoGuests.com ($5,100). Michael Berkens monitored today's auction and has a complete list of auction results on his blog. The names that did not sell in the live auction and hundreds of additional domains are still up for bid in an accompanying online silent auction that will conclude on April 10. You can download a copy of the complete auction inventory list from the Moniker website.

One other note today - we ran one more set of 1st quarter 2008 sales numbers to round out the information we posted Wednesday April 2 (total value of all reported domain sales, which hit an all-time high) and Thursday April 3 (average price of the domains sold, also a new high). Today we can add the median sales price of all of the sales reported to us in 1Q-2008 (the median price is the price at which 50% of sales were higher and 50% were lower). That number for 1Q-2008 was $2,750, just a hair above the $2,700 median price in the same quarter a year ago and exactly the same as the median for all of 2007. If you look at .com sales only, the median price in 1Q-2008 was $3,000, almost unchanged from 1Q-2007 when the number was $3,100.
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As a follow-up to yesterday's post about the first quarter of 2008 reaching a new high for domain sales I took a look at another metric today after a commentator at Michael Berken's blog wondered if the average selling price of individual domains had done down even though total volume went up. I just ran through our sales database again to find out.

In the first quarter of 2008, 3,764 sales were reported to DN Journal making the average sale reported $10,103. In the first quarter of 2007, 3,086 sales were reported to us but the average price was only $6,886. For all of 2007, 13,888 sales were reported to us and the average sale for the year was $8,698. So 1Q-2008 showed a significant rise in both average sales price and total dollar volume reported.

1Q-2008 did have one exceptionally large 

domain sale - Fund.com at just under $10 million - but that has happened in previous quarters as well - including 2Q-2007 when Porn.com sold for a similar price, $9.5 million. Still no previous quarter on record matched the one just ended. Even if you pretended the Fund.com sale did not happen and just threw it out of the data, total sales in 1Q-2008 would still have been 32% higher than the same quarter a year ago when the general economy was in much better shape than it is now.

I think the news from the economy at large is so bad that we all get the feeling that everything is coming apart. But at least to this point in time, the sales data shows the domain aftermarket is more than holding its own. I'm honestly a little surprised by that because I would have thought that plummeting PPC returns would have affected aftermarket sales more than they have. I think this shows that people buy domains for more reasons than PPC revenue, especially end users who often overlook PPC revenue completely. In my own experience virtually all of my sales are made to small business end users. For those buyers the idea that a domain could have traffic before they develop their website on it is something that never even crosses their mind. 
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The domain market is still defying the widely reported downdraft in the general economy. Our latest weekly domain sales report released early this morning concluded the first quarter of 2008. I was anxious to see how 1Q-2008 would stack up against previous quarters because a lot of people have been opining that domain sales seemed to be slowing - basing that 

observation on lower total sales figures than usual at live domain auctions. My opinion, as I wrote several weeks ago, was that the total volume of sales had not changed at all and the total dollar volume was simply getting split among a larger number of live auction venues. 

Now that the final numbers are in, the data bears that out - or to be more accurate it shows that the reality is exactly opposite of the pessimistic opinions that have been expressed. The first quarter of 2008 wound up being the best domain sales quarter reported since we started tracking the market back in the fall of 2003. A total of $38,029,543 in domain sales were reported in 1Q-2008, a spectacular 78% jump over the $21,253,105 reported in the first quarter of 2007 - before the current dislocations in the general 

economy started appearing. 1Q-2008 was also 12% better than the $34,089,484 registered in the fourth quarter of 2007. For all of 2007 $120,805,509 in sales were reported - an average of $30,201,377 per quarter. So the latest quarter was 26% higher than the average quarter last year.

The data shows that the domain market continues to be a beacon of strength in an otherwise deteriorating economy. Will that continue? Who knows - but right now I think we all have reason to be thankful to be in the business we are in.
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Sedo has a lot of nice one-word and 3-letter .com domains in their latest monthly GreatDomains live online auction that is scheduled to end Thursday (April 3) around 2pm U.S. 

Eastern time. The 800-pound gorilla on the list is Pizza.com. The supporting cast includes names like Bobblehead.com, Exhibitors.com, Applicant.com and Assistants.com. The 3-letter domains include CTR.com (great acronym for Click Through Rate - a major metric is the domain monetization business) and 

DRT.com which would be a natural for the folks who run the Domain Roundtable conference as its is frequently referred to as DRT. 
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deo.us was sold in a Pool.com auction