New Orleans based Directnic.com is one of the industry's longest standing domain registrars. In fact today they are celebrating their 16th birthday - a landmark occasion that coincides nicely with their home town's biggest annual party - and one of world's most famous spectacles - Fat Tuesday at Mardi Gras. 

Like Mardi Gras, Directnic, who has customers around the globe,  knows no bounds. So they decided to spread some Sweet 16th sugar far beyond Bourbon Street by sending out some gigantic King Cakes for others to enjoy. The one we received came from a famous maker of the traditional New Orleans treat - Manny Randazzo - in a box (complete with beads) big enough for two large pizzas to sit side by side. 

There are many different business models among the hundreds of new gTLD registries that have launched over the last three years but few  have put a lot of effort into courting domain investors. It's true that many veteran investors simply don't believe a viable new gTLD aftermarket is going to develop. Others are turned off by the high registration and renewal prices typically charged for the most attractive new gTLD domains. With the future direction of the market still uncertain, high carrying costs make holding names such names too risky for most.

Still, there are some investors who believe the new gTLDs will steadily build an audience in the years ahead. That group would buy and hold more domains if registries gave them a better chance of making a return on their investments. The .GLOBAL registry has recently taken some major steps in their direction that CEO Rolf Larsen showed me when we met up at last month's NamesCon conference in Las Vegas.  

The clearest signal .GLOBAL is sending investors is a new program in beta that allows third parties to list their .GLOBAL domains for sale on a registry-operated website - Domains.global -  free of charge.   

Rolf Larsen
CEO, .GLOBAL Registry 

While you are at Domains.global checking out the third party sales service, you will find many more new features geared to domain investors. Those include lists of both keyword and 3-letter domains that can be registered for the first year at the standard prices in effect at a variety of .GLOBAL registrars. The names of those registrars and the prices they currently charge are all shown when you click the buy now button, with those offering special promotional pricing listed at the top of the list. When we checked today Name.com had the best price at $7.99. Among others, there are also lists of dropping and deleted domains at standard pricing. Many registries charge high premium prices for the same keyword or acronym in their extensions.

We've already seen many changes in strategy and pricing across the new gTLD space and that will no doubt continue. I'm surprised that more registries haven't put greater effort into engaging domain investors but if .GLOBAL's overtures (and those from some similarly proactive registries) bear fruit more will follow suit.  Eventually we may see renewal prices that remain the same as initial low registration prices, even for the higher quality domains - an environment a lot more investors would find to their liking.

Serial entrepreneur and domain industry veteran Rob Monster has long been a proponent of the "go big or go home" approach to business. When he founded domain registrar Epik.com in 2009 he quickly turned it into a one-stop shop for establishing a complete web presence: domain name, hosting, monetization and web development services. Monster has since taken on another, even more ambitious enterprise as CEO of a public company called DigitalTown Inc. ((OTC PINK: DGTW).

Monster started working on his latest project in September 2015 and just went public with a key part of his master plan, SmartWeb, at last month's NamesCon conference in Las Vegas.  Monster told us, "Shortly after coming on board with Digital Town I laid out a plan for creating a Global Smart City platform that would allow any city to become a Smart City using an integrated set of cloud-hosted technologies for making cities work better by keeping more money in the local economy while partnering with residents and visitors to improve quality of life."

"During 2016, DigitalTown completed and integrated four acquisitions of operating companies that had developed components of the Smart City ecosystem that would allow us to accelerate time to market," Monster said.  

Rob Monster
CEO, Digital Town Inc.

"On the domain front, we rounded up what has since grown to more than 22,000 of the .CITY domains as well as pursued strategic discussions with a number of new TLD registries about a concept that we call “SmartWeb”. I believe this notion of a Smart Web may become of great relevance to the future of the domain name industry."

"In short, the big idea of SmartWeb is to bundle descriptive TLDs with (1) TLD-specific content management systems (CMS) and (2) a single-sign-on Smart Wallet.  A domain name registrant gets a free CMS bundled with their domain. The free CMS maps to the logical use-case implied in the TLD. The CMS monetizes through transaction processing that are mediated through the end-consumer’s Single-Sign-On Smart Wallet.  The free CMS service from DigitalTown can integrate with any registrar, i.e. it is NOT Epik-specific."

Regarding DigitalTown's extensive usage of new gTLDs Monster said, "The DigitalTown SmartWeb initiative aims to greatly expand the adoption of the new domain extensions through bundling of turn-key websites that combine intuitive web applications, and mobile applications, with a unified single sign for secure access to personalized services. Descriptive domain extensions represent a logical progression of the consumer-facing web. The missing ingredient for rapid adoption of new extensions, particularly by small businesses has been the availability of cost-effective solutions that turn domains into great user experiences that are intuitive, secure and personalized.  Although DigitalTown does not own any of the new registries, DigitalTown is building win-win partnerships around a shared SmartWeb architecture for powering Smart Cities around the world.”

Rob Monster in the Epik booth at the January 2017 NamesCon Conference in Las Vegas.

In closing Monster noted, ""This is not your classic geo domain platform. Rather, DigitalTown is intended as a consumer-centric operating system for Smart cities. The DigitalTown platform is already getting traction with cities, notably in Europe.  In addition, our vertical solutions for lodging and dining are garnering the interest of State trade associations and Destination Marketing Organizations in cities as these legacy civic organizations work to stay relevant in the Digital Age."

For a detailed account of the DigitalTown platform you can read this DigitalTown Product Overview (.pdf file). You can also read Digital Town's latest quarterly 10-Q SEC filing here if you want to learn more about the company's recent and projected financial results.

ParkingCrew has made a key addition to their management team. Industry veteran Sam Tseng has come on board as Director Business Development, Publisher Products. Tseng has previously served as Director of Sales at DomainSponsor/RookMedia and Account Executive at Uniregistry. He will add another 10+ years of deep industry knowledge to the Parking Crew sales force.

ParkingCrew CEO Nico Zeifang said, “We have known Sam since the early days at DomainSponsor and kept in touch with him while building out our ParkingCrew platform. Having a long running relationship, we are thrilled to have him on board."

Tseng said, "I wanted to work in a non-corporate environment on a very technology driven product and this is exactly what Team Internet with their products ParkingCrew and TONIC.  stands for.”

Tseng will be stationed in Los Angeles, catering to the needs of ParkingCrew and publisher TONIC. customers in the United States, Canada  and Chinese speaking countries.

Sam Tseng
Director of Business Development
Publisher Products

Domain forums have long been popular hunting grounds for investors looking to bag attractive names at bargain prices. However, there are so many domains for sale at the massive NamePros.com forum it can be hard to find the diamonds you are looking for in what seems to be an endless "mine". 

Glasgow, Scotland based domain industry veteran Martin Kellerman decided that providing an affordable solution to that problem could be a good business opportunity, so the professional programmer has built and launched a new service at NameThreads.com. With it, Kellerman says, "You can easily search all of the domains for sale at  Namepros. We have well over 100,000 domains in our database. Domain re-sellers trade their domains cheaply on Namepros.com but until now it has been very hard to search for specific domains according to your requirements."

NameThreads let's you search by domain keyword, TLD (.com, .net, .co.uk, etc.), domain length, number of letters, digits and hyphens in the domain, number of vowels and consonants
and many other factors. Kellerman noted, "If you are starting a website or business in a certain niche, you can search for domains in your niche. If you are looking for a short 

Martin Kellerman
NameThreads.com Founder

brandable domain that is a 5-letter long .com with a certain pattern of vowels and consonants, you can find it. If you are a domain re-seller looking for a numeric domain without 0 or 4, you can find it."

NameThreads.com offers two levels of service and both come with a 7-day free trial so you can "try before you buy". After the trial period a Basic Membership costs $9.95 per month or $99.95 for one year. An Advanced Membership is also available a $29.95 per month or $299 annually. The latter option comes with a lot of extra search criteria including number of letters, numbers and hyphens in the domain, any consonant/vowel combination such as CVCV, CVCVC or any other you can think, keyword the domain begins or ends with, Western premium and Chinese premium domains and the ability to export results to a .csv file for further analysis.

Domain brokerage and consultancy GGRG.com has just released their latest  free quarterly report breaking down aftermarket sales of "liquid domains" (short .com domains that are relatively easy to sell at prevailing market prices). The new report (.pdf file) covering the 4th quarter of 2016 that I received from GGRG founder Giuseppe Graziano noted, "China continued to gain significant market share in the last quarter of 2016. Chinese registrants were the only net gainers of liquid domains, with owners in the US, Europe and rest of the world losing approximately 10% of their share. The biggest ownership change came in the 4L .com category ("L"= letter, "N" = number), with China adding over 45,000 domains, or 10% of the category."

Graziano added, "While China is leading the market with over 50% of the registrations in 2N, 3N, 4N and 5N .com, the US is still the market leader for 2L and 3L .com domains, the two most developed categories . This suggests that while Chinese investors are clearly leading investor demand, US companies are still the ultimate end user of liquid domain names."

The report's Executive Summary section includes some interesting sales data. It notes, 

GGRG Founder Giuseppe Graziano

"Disclosed sales increased 12% to 5,455 domains sold, and total sales volume increased 7.7% to $5.48 million. Transactions of top tier domains typically remain undisclosed with the exception of HG.com (rumored to have sold for $3,770,000 to a Chinese company). There were no recorded transactions of LL, NN and NNN .coms in Q4-2016."

"The increase in sales volume came mostly from lower tier categories like 4L and 5N .coms. As predicted in our Q3 forecast, these categories seem to have reached a support level: 5th percentile values increased 6.51% for 4L .com and 8.27% for 5N .com. Transactions of 3L .com domains registered a notable 57% increase in number of units sold; the increase in supply however translated into a sharp 17% decrease of the 5th percentile values, which decreased from $18,200 to $15,100. The number of disclosed 4N .com transactions was unchanged from last quarter (11 domains sold), but sales volume almost doubled, increasing from $259,936 to $512,983."

While there are now well over 1,000 domain extensions (TLDs) on the web, one of the world's most important markets, China, has fully accredited only 32 of those. The latest to make the exceptionally short list are TLD Registry's .在线 (Dot Chinese Online) and .中文网 (Dot Chinese Website) extensions. The company got the good news over the weekend from China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), the state agency of the Chinese government that regulates the Internet from within China, after MIIT gave TLD Registry's Beijing-based WFOE (wholly foreign-owned entity) company full accreditation status.

The accreditation means that Chinese citizens and organizations who register .在线 and .中文网 can now obtain an Internet Content Provider (ICP) license that must be displayed in the footer of any website hosted within China. Non-accredited TLDs can only be hosted outside of China. For domain developers, being able to host a site within China greatly reduces the risk of getting blocked or shut down without notification due to the lack of a valid ICP license. It also means that foreign companies who wish to market their products and services on a website within China will experience much faster access to their sites by Chinese citizens, due to their websites now having the option of resolving from a host inside of China, thus bypassing the firewall and other latency issues that can block access and sales.

When I came back from NamesCon a couple of weeks ago I mentioned the extraordinarily large number of new company launches, service improvements from existing companies and personnel changes that were announced during the show. There were far too many to get to while covering events at the conference itself so I will continue to share some of those developments with you in this column over the next couple of weeks. 

One of them was the beta launch of domain monetizer Above.com's new Portfolio Manager. Above,.com/Trellian President David Warmuz tolf us, "The Portfolio Manager is designed to help domain investors more efficiently manage portfolio data, make more informed decisions, and quickly take actions to improve earnings. For example, Portfolio Manager's dashboard offers insights on revenue boosting opportunities associated with Above’s AutoPilot platform. AutoPilot drives revenues higher by finding the highest earning monetization channel for each domain visitor. The AutoPilot Maximizer feature provides a substantial revenue boost by offering domain traffic to our premium direct advertiser channel, fully seamless and integrated with Trellian’s Direct Search Network, where advertisers compete for your traffic."

Warmuz added, "Portfolio Manager’s dashboard also offers a Registrar Consolidate feature, which pulls together data required to make timely, ROI-based domain renewal decisions. 
Domain investors can also manage offers and counter-offers, generate BuyNow prices

Above.com President David Warmuz

based on domain and revenue stats, and get domains posted quickly for sale on Above’s Marketplace. Portfolio Manager truly offers everything a domain investor needs, all in a single dashboard. I encourage domain investors to check out the time saving, revenue boosting, and cost reduction opportunities offered by the data and tools in our new Portfolio Manager dashboard."

You can also get more insight into the capabilities of Above.com's new Portfolio Manager in this video at YouTube: https://youtu.be/wt6YJ0npAmM.

The Above.com leadership team at their booth during the 2017 NamesCon conference in Las Vegas. Left to right are Aaron Kvitek (SVP Strategic Marketing), Liz Corona (Senior Account Manager), Nancy Bianchi (Executive Vice President) and David Warmuz (Co-Founder/President).

The founder of SumoMe, a popular website services company that has operated from SumoMe.com, finally has his dream domain and new brand name after acquiring Sumo.com for $1.5 million. Austin, Texas based serial entrepreneur Noah Kagan, the founder of both SumoMe and AppSumo, filled us in on how the sale came about before he publicly announced it today. Our interview is below:

DNJournal: Premier domains like this are not easy or inexpensive to come by and I understand your quest to acquire it was a particularly stomach churning ride. Take us through it from the beginning – when and why you decided to pursue the name, how you made contact with the owner and how the negotiations played out.

Noah Kagan: We started to pursue the name on April 3, 2010!  It's taken nearly 7 years to acquire it. The owners were unresponsive so we found an introduction to them through a mutual contact on LinkedIn. The owners would respond and then stop for a few months. We hired 3 brokers and none were able to get the owners to budge on selling. When we got on the phone and then made the 7-figure offer, 

Noah Kagan
SumoMe Founder

things started to get more serious. I kept persisting as the owners would be unresponsive. Ultimately I gave them the large offer and a strict deadline which helped motivate the situation to a close.

DNJournal: I understand the owner had asked for as much as $10 million at the height of last year’s Chinese buying boom. While you got it down to $1.5 million that is still, obviously, a very significant investment. How do you expect having Sumo.com to recoup that investment for you? 

Noah Kagan: They did ask $10 million for Sumo.com and I told them they were crazy. I look at the domain as a long-term investment. The brand value, improvement on recruiting and personal satisfaction should recoup our spend within a year in my opinion. We also structured the purchase with monthly payments so we didn't have to spend it all at once which made the investment much more digestible. There's a large value on happiness and being the de facto Sumo brand on the market now and forever is nearly priceless to me. 

DNJournal: Hundreds of new domain extensions have been released over the past two years. Did you ever consider using one of these new extensions rather than making the large cash outlay you did to get the .com?

Noah Kagan:  Holy moly. You don't realize how many places and logos your name appears. We've spent about 2 months transitioning the name. There are things anyone buying a domain should do as well is leverage the purchase for PR exposure. Specifically we've:

• Updated our logo to go along with our new name

• Reviewed every place where SumoMe is mentioned

• Updated all our LinkedIn profiles

• Attempted to get the social accounts of the new domain

• Setup articles with relevant press sites like your own and more.

DNJournal: Are there any other details you think would be of interest to our readers regarding this major acquisition?

Noah Kagan:  Persistence beats resistance. For anyone else out there really wanting a specific domain, figure out the leverage you can get to acquire it and start the process earlier. Two major changes if I had to do it again would be to use a fake email address personally if you have an online presence. This would have not let the seller necessarily know why we are using it and potentially charge us a premium. Second, I would have pushed harder to purchase the domain sooner, likely would have been able to save a million dollars doing it that way!

DNJournal to readers: Thanks to Noah, who was one of the first employees at Facebook, for sharing his experiences with this sale. He is probably right about saving a lot of money had he pressed to close the sale years ago. Rob Barbour of MarketingFools.com, the mutual friend who introduced us (a big thank you to Rob for that as well), told me the previous owner of Sumo.com had acquired the domain in 2008, just two years before Noah first contacted him, for $150,000.

Public Interest Registry (PIR), the not-for-profit operator of the .org, .ngo and .ong domains and Nonprofit Tech for Good released an interesting new survey this week, their 2017 Global NGO Online Technology Report. This 2nd annual report reveals how non-governmental organizations (NGOs) worldwide use web, email and mobile communications, online fundraising tools, and social media. 

While the report is specific to the not-for-profit category, the results should be of interest to anyone who is developing a website and trying to figure out the most effective ways to interact with visitors and clients.

The report details the key findings from a survey of 4,908 NGO respondents from 153 countries across Africa, Asia, Australia & Oceania, Europe, North America and South America. Compared to the 2016 survey, the report nearly doubled in the number of participants. Findings in the report include regional comparisons of how NGOs use the internet to build awareness and raise funds, as well as whether NGOs find specific online and mobile communication tools to be effective for their communications and fundraising strategies.

Key findings globally include: 

• 92% of respondents have a website. Of those, 78% are mobile-compatible.

• Only 38% regularly publish a blog.

• More than 68% of survey respondents noted that their organization uses the .org domain, compared to 9.2% that use the .com domain.

• Email dominates as the preferred form of communication to donors, with 71% of respondents regularly sending email updates, whereas 15% regularly send text messages to supporters.

• 67% of respondents accept online donations. 

• While 95% agree that social media is effective for online brand awareness, only 66% of respondents say that executive leadership supports prioritizing social media in their online communications and fundraising strategy.

• Facebook leads as the preferred social media platform with 92% of respondents having a dedicated page, followed by Twitter (72%) and YouTube (55%).

Heather Mansfield, the founder of Nonprofit Tech for Good, said “As internet infrastructure continues to improve worldwide, we expect that future results of this survey will demonstrate that NGOs around the world are becoming more equally empowered to use the internet to inspire philanthropy and create social change. The NGO Online Tech Report is groundbreaking in that it is the only annual research project dedicated to studying how NGOs use online technology on a global scale and reveals the technological gaps across regions."

With respect to North America, key findings include: 

• When communicating with supporters, only 3% of respondents in North America regularly send mobile text messages.

• 85% of respondents accept online donations.

• 38% of respondents in North America have been using social media for 3-4 years and 36% percent have been using it for 5-9 years.

• 50% percent of respondents in North America have used social media to report live.

On the same day the 2017 NamesCon conference opened in Las Vegas (January 22) the .CLUB registry launched two new initiatives designed to boost sales - a five-year free financing program for premium domains priced at $1,000 or more and a new Broker Program

that helps brokers profit from .CLUB sales. The first week of results are now in and .CLUB is delighted with how well the programs are working.

After staging three successful annual domain  conferences in India DomainX Events has decided to make their next step an international one. Plans are underway for a one-day London edition of DomainX to be held Sunday, April 9, 2017 in the UK capital. The conference venue has not yet been announced but the show website already shows an initial list of speakers and a preliminary event schedule. The roster of speakers currently listed includes Jon Yau (StockPhoto.com), Tommy Butler (Glasow.com), Zak Muscovitch (DNAttorney.com) and DomainX Founder Manmeet Pal Singh, as well as several other well-known industry figures. 

Singh launched DomainX with a 2014 conference in Hyderabad, followed it in 2015 with an event in Bangalore, then went to New Delhi for the 2016 show last August. 

Singh told us, "We are hoping to bring together over 100 professionals to exclusively meet and greet each other while networking with some of the best in the Domain Name business in Great Britain." Tickets are priced in three categories - Regular Conference Ticket (£99), 2 Regular Conference Tickets (£149) and VIP Conference Ticket (£199).  As more details are finalized you will find updates on the DomainX London website here: http://www.domainxevents.com/london/.