For the past decade domain conferences have played an indispensable role in building profitable  individual and corporate relationships. The only drawback, particularly for those on limited budgets, has been the substantial travel and registration costs involved in going to the big events.

As most if you know when more than one registry operator wants to run a particular new gTLD, an auction is usually conducted to determine who gets the contested extension. The fate of one of  the more attractive new gTLDs was announced today when Top Level Domain Holdings Limited revealed that they won rights to operate the coveted .wedding extension at a cost of over $2.2 million. At the same time, TLDH reported that they had bowed out of an auction for another highly sought TLD, .green. 

Boxing bride image from Bigstock 

Mondays are almost always a busy news day but today has been busier than usual. Of course, the incoming tsunami of new gTLDs is accounting for a large portion of the expanding headline count. To bring you up to date, here's a quick trip around the horn (including links to source material for more details).

After making his name (and fortune) as a domain investor, Frank Schilling has spent the past couple of years building new companies that have become leading providers of services to his fellow domain investors. After making a huge impact in parking and domain name sales, he added new gTLD registry operations to his portfolio with Uniregistry.com.

General registration for Uniregistry's first  two 

offerings, domains in the .sexy and .tattoo extensions opens at 11am (U.S. Eastern time) tomorrow (Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2014). If you are interested in either of those TLDs, you will need to go to one of the Uniregistry accredited registrars that will be offering them (a full list is here). Uniregistry has  several more new gTLDs scheduled to launch as 2014 unfolds.

Today RightOfTheDot announced that they and their partner Escrow.com have facilitated the contention set auction to determine who gets to operate the new .One extension. The winning bidder was One.com. The .One TLD auction marks the first time the “Single Sealed Bid Second Price” auction method was used to resolve contention between competing applicants wanting to run a new TLD.  The new method, developed by RightOfTheDot™, is unlike traditional  auctions in that it provides what the company says is "complete customization and flexibility in when the auction will be held, how the funds will be disbursed, payment timing, application withdrawal, auction type, and more." RightOfTheDot also said, "The results from a Single Sealed Second Price Auction generally yield fairer and lower winning bid prices, less bid rigging, less confusion, and less time to determine a winning applicant."

Earlier today DomainNameWire posted an article about how crowded the 2014 domain conference and meeting calendar has become. Less than an hour after the DNW piece was published, dates for another important domain get together were announced on DBR FunFest's Facebook page. The 3rd Annual DBR Funfest will be held June 25-28, 2014 at a location to be announced soon.

DBR Funfest is an invitation-only event that is staged by industry veteran Donna Mahony (who was one of the experts featured in our 2014 State of the Industry Cover Story) and members of her private industry forum, DomainBoardroom.com. 

Last year's event was held during May in the scenic Southern California waterfront community of Dana Point (just outside of Los Angeles). When FunFest returns this summer, it will have at least one major new feature - presentation of the Domainers Choice Awards on June 28. This will be a revival of the DCA program that Donna founded in 2008 with the inaugural awards handed out at that year's Domainfest conference in Los Angeles. You can find out more about the Awards (and sign up to receive informational updates at the Domainers Choice Award website. 

Web.com Group, Inc.,  a leading provider of Internet services and online marketing solutions for small businesses, announced today that the company will be expanding its Feet on the Street direct sales initiative to eight new markets, including our hometown - Tampa, Florida, in the months ahead. 

Along with Tampa, Web.com (who is already in 16 local markets) will open new offices in Chicago; Central/Northern New Jersey; Portland, Oregon.; Providence, Seattle; San 

David L. Brown
Chairman, President & CEO, Web.com 

Diego and Salt Lake City. The local offices allow Web.com personnel to work with small businesses in-person to create customized Internet marketing and lead generation solutions designed to boost online presence and help them succeed online. 

Web.com Chairman, President and CEO David L. Brown said, “Each small business has unique needs and our Feet on the Street initiative allows Web.com to deeply understand a business’ goals and develop customized Internet marketing solutions to maximize visibility and growth."

Brown added, "In the evolving small business marketplace, as customers use the Internet to shop for products and services, online marketing is imperative to acquiring and retaining customers. Web.com has the expertise to help small businesses of any size and industry make the transition from traditional print marketing to succeed online.”

Speaking of growth, .ORG, the popular TLD operated by the Public Interest Registry (PIR) is continuing to gain ground despite the arrival of a flood of new gTLDs. On Wednesday PIR released its bi-annual domain name report, “The Dashboard,” detailing the increased growth of .ORG throughout 2013. The report said that 

206,542 new .ORG domains were registered from January to December 2013, bringing the total number of .ORG domains under registration to more than 10,346,000 globally.

Domain sales and monetization giant Sedo released their annual Domain Market Study covering 2013 today. The study helps identify industry trends and changes based on the tens of thousands of sales made over the past year through the Sedo platform. 

.Com image from Bigstock

Those figures cover all extensions. The numbers for .com alone are even better. Sedo said .com easily remained the world's most popular extension and grabbed a considerably bigger share of the market than it had the year before, rising from a 48% share in 2012 to 53% of all sales in 2013. In addition, the mean average sales price for .coms rose from $2,148 to $2,235 year over year and the median sales price also jumped from $642 to $650.   

Even so, Sedo believes .com's overwhelming dominance may finally start to recede this year. The report said, "As hundreds of new gTLDs begin to launch in 2014, this may be the last 

year that .com remains on top by such a wide margin. Market data shows that some 167 different TLDs were already traded on Sedo in 2013, showing that the market is primed and ready to take advantage of new domains as they are released."

The report also underscored the increasing use of Buy it Now pricing (offering domains at a set price with no negotiations), saying "Buy Now accounted for 44% of all sales in 2013 (up from 41% in 2012). As more and more sellers realize that end users want to be able to purchase domains quickly and simply, the number of Buy Now domain listings and sales has steadily increased."

Some other highlights from the 2013 Domain Market Study include:  

Buy Now image from Bigstock

Oversee.net's Domainfest conference always manages to come up with unique, headline grabbing party ideas for the popular annual show in Los Angeles. In previous year's they've attracted attendees with everything from soirees at the Playboy Mansion to dinner under the Endeavour space shuttle. Over the weekend, Domainfest organizers announced that for their upcoming conference March 31-April 2, 2014 Grammy award winning rock band Stone Temple Pilots with Chester Bennington, will play a private concert for show attendees. The 

conference itself will be held at the Loews Hollywood Hotel, but the Tuesday night (April 1) concert will be staged at a different private location that won't be disclosed until check-in. 

The annual Domaining Spain conference will be returning to the beautiful seaside city of Valencia in less than 90 days. Today I got a note from show founder Dietmar Stefitz filling me in how how things are progressing for the 2014 event that will run May 8-10 at the Hotel Sorolla Palace. 

This being Valentine's Day, Dietmar included a show related love story I had not heard before.  Stefitz noted that he had a meeting at the start of this week with Nuno Soares (the former Sales Director at EuroDNS who is now the CEO at Hotel.mobi). Nuno has especially fond memories of the 2010 conference in Valencia. That year Stefitz had hired an exchange student from Poland to serve as one of the hostesses at the show. She and Nuno found they were a perfect match and, four years later, they are still together and very happy that their paths crossed that week at Domaining Spain (the show was known as DomainingEurope at the time, which is a topic we will come back to in a moment as it as at the heart of the hard "lesson learned" I referred to in the headline. 

Nuno Soares
CEO, Hotel.mobi

Dietmar Stefitz
Domaining Spain Founder 

Before we get to that I want to pass along the main reason Dietmar wrote - to let me know that the 2014 conference agenda is almost complete with many of the key speakers already lined up. Both traditional and new gTLDs will be given a lot of attention in Valencia. Ingrid Baele, a Vice President at electronics giants Philips will be there to talk about how the company plans to use its new brand gTLD - .philips. 

Ronald Schwaerzler (from .wien) and Anja Elsing will also be there to offer insight into what is happening with geo gTLDs and Carolin Silbernagl will discuss her group's community use of a new gTLD - .hiv. Many other speakers will be confirmed in the weeks ahead and registration is already open. 

Now, let's circle back around to that hard lesson learned. For years I have been telling people to never let a website designer (or anyone else) register your business domain in

their name. I have seen too many people who have hired someone to build a website for them and also given them access to their domain (or even worse, let them register the name the company wanted in the vendor's name, assuming it would make things easier). Huge, colossal, don't ever do it mistake! In too many cases, after a business is up and running, the owner may decide to get someone new to keep their site up to date only to find that the original vendor won't turn over the domain - and once it is in their name or control getting it back can be very expensive if you can get it back at all.

After selling his previous company, Advertising.com, for half a billion dollars  John Ferber entered the domain business as co-founder of DomainHoldings.com. John has decided now is the time to make another big splash in  the internet advertising game, prompting him to launch a new company called Bidtellect that will focus on the red hot "native advertising" sector (native advertising is based primarily on branded content which can be presented in articles, videos, photos, music and other media).

Ferber brought veteran digital media entrepreneur Lon Otremba on board as CEO to oversee a new platform they have built that will allow brands to buy native advertising placements in bulk automatically. In an AdWeek article about the new company published Wednesday, Otremba told reporter Mike Shields, "Based on the history of this business, when a medium can rapidly scale is only when advertisers can buy that way. That’s when things really take off."

Shields noted that it seems logical that a scalable native advertising solution could come from the world of domain selling, particularly given its direct response heritage and Otremba confirmed that he envisions both brand dollars and performance revenue coming to native advertising.

Ferber, who was profiled in a March 2011 DN Journal Cover Story) told AdWeek, "We are lining up a strong offering. Even on our domains, the ads fit the form and function of the way users are experiencing it."  After the mind boggling success John and his brother Scott had with Advertising.com, I doubt if you will find much smart money betting against his new endeavor.

Lon Otremba
Bidtellect CEO 

John Ferber, Co-Founder
DomainHoldings/Bidtellect

CitiesPlanet.com, the popular domain development platform founded by longtime geodomain industry leader Fred Mercaldo (who was profiled in our March 2013 Cover Story) has just signed the largest development deal in the company's history. Under a new contract with iDigitialRussia.com, CitiesPlanet and Tallwave, the venture development company they partnered with last year, will launch and develop over 4,700 websites, all aimed at the Russian market and utilizing Russia's .RU ccTLD extension

Mercaldo, who also serves as CEO at CitiesPlanet, said, "This incredible portfolio includes many category killer domain names, along with supportive names, in lucrative vertical markets such as insurance, travel, legal, clothing, employment, automotive, food, investments, medical, shopping, technology, jewelry, and many more."

Mercaldo added, "While we have historically been strictly a GeoDomain development and marketing company, we have come to the realization that many of our existing clients also have significant generic portfolios in need of development, and utilizing the expertise that our partnership with Tallwave brings to the table, we have now entered into relationships where these portfolios will support and enhance our City.com brands, and in turn our City.com brands will enhance the generic vertical brands we will be building."

Fred Mercaldo
Founder & CEO, CitiesPlanet, Inc. 

Being from Florida I usually don't pay a lot of attention to outdoor winter sports, but when the Winter Olympics roll around every four years I join millions of others around the world who tune in to watch the action. Of course, like a lot of domainers, whenever I'm watching something, 

ideas for related domains pop into my mind. Even though I barely know the difference between a luge and a lugnut, the current Games in Sochi, Russia have been no exception (and, by the way, Russian domainers must LOVE seeing that Sochi.ru web address plastered on the TV screen practically around the clock - even though the domain redirects to Sochi2014.com).

Of course, domain sales giant Sedo knows about this domain tunnel vision we have so they

Starting line image from Bigstock 

have teamed up with the new .CLUB gTLD to stage a Winter Sports Domain Auction that will run February 19-26, 2014. The sale will offer 25 previously unreleased premium winter sports-related names with the .CLUB extension, including Snowboarding.club, Skiing.club,  FigureSkating.club, IceHockey.club and others (the full list and more details about the auction are available at  www.sedo.com/club).

Tim Schumacher and Ulrich Essman, two of the four college friends who founded Sedo back in 2001, have gotten involved in an ambitious new venture - helping build a "Sedo for Apps" at Apptopia.com. Sedo grew into a domain trading and monetization powerhouse that the founders eventually sold to United Internet. Now Schumacher and Essman think they can replicate the Sedo model in the booming apps world by getting involved as investors and advisors at  Apptopia, a rapidly growing marketplace where buyers can purchased fully developed apps, just as domain buyers can purchase domains and developed websites through Sedo.

While smartphone and tablet users buy a copy of an app to run on their mobile device, Apptopia sells all rights to the app itself, with the buyers then able to market and sell the apps in the Apple and/or Android stores (where they are already offered by the current owners).  Buyers include income investors who are buying an existing revenue stream, marketers who think they can take a good but perhaps little known app and increase sales and developers who think they can make an existing app better to boost sales and profit in that way. 

Boston-based Apptopia is also a great place to cash out for people who are more interested in developing new apps rather than marketing ones they have already built. Apptopia has already paid out more than $5 million to developers who have sold thousands of apps through the marketplace.

To get involved, Schumacher and Essman, who were named 'Entrepreneur of the Year' by Ernst & Young Germany in 2007,  made an unspecified cash investment in an Apptopia bridge financing round that also included Eric Kagan, Telegraph Hill Capital and Rothenberg Ventures among other investors.  In a join statement, Schumacher and Essman noted, "Apps have become the prime mobile navigational items, just like domain names on

Tim Schumacher

Ulrich Essman

the web. Apptopia.com and its awesome team are in a market-leading position to capture this market. We are proud to now be part of this story."

A lot of different views about new gTLDs are expressed by the 17 domain industry experts featured in our latest annual State of the Industry Cover Story that was published Friday. Some think they will do well, and perhaps even  completely upend the current pecking order ruled by .com.  However others believe the hundreds of new gTLD "bullets" just now starting to come online will have no more effect on .com dominance that slugs do on Superman. 

The best-known and most vocal skeptic is Rick Schwartz, the "Domain King" who has made millions buying and selling domains. Schwartz, who also co-founded the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. conference, is one of the experts featured in our new Cover Story but he had some additional comments to share with us that are not in the article.

While Schwartz thinks a few of the new TLDs have a chance to break through the clutter he thinks the best short strategy is to take a wait 

Rick Schwartz 

and see approach. "The question is do you buy the stock during the frenzy or wait until after the frenzy is over and you can buy much more for much less if that stock still has a chance?" Schwartz said. "They all need it to happen in 2014 to survive. As an investor many of us have the luxury of time and history and with a little patience we can wait before placing bets or not."

"Some don't want to hear these things, but with 900 horses in a race, how many can really finish in the money and be meaningful, effective, long lasting and worthy of a business building a future on? Aren't those the first questions to ask and figure out? Handicap the race. How many will be trampled out of the gate? How many will die before they leave the gate? What does it do to a train of 900 when a .sucks shows up on the scene and a barrage of negatively with it?  Will ICANN enforce their own contracts? Will there be collisions and confusion? Will email work correctly? What type of lawsuits will begin to fly and what will the outcomes be? Will it look .good in print or confusing if there is a .typo? Will the consumer even want it? Is there really a need, want and desire or is it manufactured to lure domain investors that have already got caught holding the bag on more than one occasion? What type of studies and focus groups did these new registries do? My hunch is not much."

Rick Schwartz (right) and new gTLD proponent Frank Schilling of Uniregistry.com debating new gTLDs at the October 2013 T.R.A.F.F.I.C. East conference at Fort Lauderdale Beach, Florida.

"On branding, what does .Apple put left of the dot? I have yet to find one combo that even sounds normal that would be a main entrance. Now I do see it as a platform for internal or even vendor use. But we will see. And will anyone actually abandon their .com? Close it down to go to one of these? Seems unlikely. Let's see who will be first to walk the plank."

"I think 2014 is a year of questions that will be answered one by one," Schwartz continued. "Questions some folks don't want to hear asked and certainly don't have solid answers for because the answers are simply unknown at best and a repeat of history at worst. It could be very ugly and not to at least acknowledge that possibility is surprising. Making up answers that don't hold water really makes you scratch your head. Once you lose credibility, game over!"

"They talk about sales like some newbies talk about traffic as if it were a given. "Oh we're not worried about that". Well worry, because sales are not as easy as you think when there are 900 alternates. Again, some don't like to hear that, but they need to come back down to earth. The numbers will bring them and everyone else back into reality sooner or later."  

"Everyone points to .co. But when they point, they forget to mention the differences," Schwartz noted. "First of there was a premise for testing the extension. Maybe the public would adopt ".co" for "Company". It was also shorter than .com and then there could be some mistaken typo traffic. So there were reasons to buy into that possibility."

"Put those aside. The .Co registry spent a a boatload of money for their introduction and rollout. What I see here is exactly the opposite. As business people, how much do you think each has to spend on advertising and shows and ads and all the rest to get their message out? If they are depending on the Registrars to do it for them, they are going to get a loud and ugly wake up call."

DNSeattle, a new meetup for Seattle area domain investors and entrepreneurs, was held for the first time Thursday night (January 30, 2014) with a sellout crowd on hand for the first event held in a meeting room atop Seattle's iconic Space Needle.

DNSeattle was the brainchild of DomainSherpa's Michael Cyger, who lives on Bainbridge Island, directly across Puget Sound from Seattle. Michael, who is a regular attendee (and often a speaker or moderator) at the major domain conferences, T.R.A.F.F.I.C., Domainfest and NamesCon, decided it was high time that the tech mecca of Seattle join places like Los Angeles and South Florida that have active local domain meetups. 

Many of the industry's leading companies are based in or have offices in the Seattle area and they quickly got behind the idea through sponsorships or staff members snapping up the 65 tickets available for the debut event. Tickets (which cost just $15) had to be limited to the amount of space available atop the Needle. Though the location may have capped ticket sales the world famous symbol of Seattle was the ideal spot for making a big splash in DNSeattle's first time out of the gate.

DNSeattle Founder Michael Cyger welcoming 
attendees to the 1st meetup Jan. 30, 2014.