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The
Lowdown
October
2022 Archive |
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Welcome to the The
Lowdown from
DN Journal - your source for notable news
and information from all corners of the global
domain name
industry!
The Lowdown
is compiled by DN Journal
Editor & Publisher Ron Jackson. |
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ICA
Releases Preliminary Agenda for January Event in
Las Vegas - Monday is Last Day for Early Bird
Ticket Deal
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Earlier
this month I told you about the Internet
Commerce Association's decision to
stage their 2023 Member Meeting at
Hilton's Resorts World in Las Vegas
January 22-24. Plans for the big event are
continuing to come together nicely with the ICA
releasing a preliminary agenda today
via a blog
post from Executive Director Kamila
Sekiewicz. Kamila noted that the agenda is
expected to continue evolving in the weeks ahead
but this will give you a good idea of what to
expect. Some of the
early highlights include an Opening Dinner
Reception Sunday evening (Jan. 22), a Policy
Briefing from ICA
General Counsel Zak |
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Muscovitch Monday morning
and an Ask Me Anything session with GoDaddy
President for Domains Paul Nicks Monday
afternoon. That day will also feature a panel
discussion covering UDRP Reform Proposals.
Networking opportunities and multiple social events
will also be part of the appealing three-day
mix.
If
you want to go, time is running out to take
advantage of an Early Bird ticket offer that
will knock $100 off the price, cutting it to
just $199 (members can buy a ticket for a plus-one
guest too). On Tuesday, November 1 the price
goes up to the standard $299. That's a great deal
but here is one that is even better - a free
ticket for for anyone who joins the
ICA and pays for an annual membership. If you
are a professional in this industry you really should
be a member of this 15-year-old non-profit
organization that has consistently demonstrated its
ability to effectively fight to protect domain
owner's rights. Like the early bird deal, you will
need to act fast to take advantage of the
free ticket offer as Monday is the last day
for both promotions.
One
other thing, the ICA announced they have been able
to add more rooms at Resorts World to the ICA
block that will allow you to book your room for just
$100
a night (+ taxes and fees). If
you are looking for a great way to kick off the New
Year and get your domain enterprise off to a fast
start, the ICA Annual Meeting is just the ticket!
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(Posted
October 26, 2022) To refer
others to the post above
only (and not the full
Lowdown column) you can use this
URL:
https://www.dnjournal.com/archive/lowdown/2022/dailyposts/20221026.htm
*****
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Good
Aftermarket News, a Great New Book, the Rise of
Radix, Sunrise for .Giving and Epik's New
CEO!
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I
normally like to do an individual post
for each item in The Lowdown, but I have
had so many interesting items come in I decided to
bring them all together for this end of the week
wrap up. I'll give you the basics about each item,
along with a link to get full details - information
that I hope will set you up for some very enlightening
weekend reading. |
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For starters, with
all of the turbulence in the general economy,
domain investors are paying close attention to aftermarket
results in an effort to get a handle on how
domain sales are being affected. The latest Liquid
Market Report from GGRG
brokerage (the 23rd quarterly issue in this
series) covering the 3rd quarter of 2022 included
some encouraging news for at least one
important segment of the market. "Liquid
Domains" is GGRG's term for short acronym
and numeric domains that, due to steady
demand, tend to have more liquidity than
most other domain categories. These are .com
domains comprised of 2-4 letters, 2-5 numbers
or a combination of 2-3 characters mixing letters
and numbers. GGRG Founder Giuseppe
Graziano reported
sales disclosed by |
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ShortNames.com
doubled from $10 million in the
previous quarter to $20 million in
Q3-2022. Not only that, sales volume at Escrow.com
went up from $5.5 million to $23.2 million,
a remarkable 313% increase! Be sure to
check out the full
report for a detailed breakdown of how
the individual categories within the liquid class
fared.
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Now,
if you want to dig into some serious reading
about the current tenuous state of geopolitical
cybersecurity, a well-known figure in
our space, Khaled
Fattel, Chairman and CEO of the
Los Angeles-based Multi-Lingual Internet
Group (MLi
Group) has a best selling new
book out. The synopsis for Survivability
(Confronting the Unprecedented Risks of
Today’s Geo-Poli-Cyber™ Threatened World
to Competitively Thrive in the 21st Century)
notes "In 2020,the COVID-19 pandemic
exposed western democracies’ systemic
failure to prepare for a precedented
threat. This cost too many lives that could
have been saved. Moreover, it exposed grave
malfunctions in the current global world
order—and its economic, legislative,
regulative, and democratic models and
institutions. It also crystalized that cyber
security defenses and designs accepted as
gospel are no longer fit for the purposes of
defending the nation, businesses, and
protecting the citizen.
Consider governmental failures to
prepare for a pandemic they were warned
about. Will yours be ready for cyber
terrorism? Election meddling? Fake news? How
about |
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sinister exploitations
of IOT, AI, and quantum computing? Overall,
is your government prepared to mitigate Geo-Poli-Cyber™
attacks? This book explores those
certainties and new paths forward."
You can get
Khaled's timely new book at Amazon. |
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As most of our
readers know, new gTLD domain registry
operator Radix
is currently commemorating their 10th
anniversary with a big We Are X celebration.
The latest twist in the party is a trip down
memory lane by way of a 10 Years of
Radix infographic
(.pdf file) the company built to highlight
Radix's milestones and key achievements over
the past decade. It all began in 2012 when
Radix applied for 31 new TLD extensions.
They emerged from the competition with the 10
solid TLDS that have underpinned Radix's
rapid growth - .online, .tech, .site,
.store, .host, .website, .fun, .space,
.press and .uno. Happy Anniversary Radix! |
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Speaking
of new TLDs - another one just launched
this week! The latest newcomer is .GIVING,
a new TLD launched by the Public
Interest Registry (PIR), who is
already known far and wide as the
administrators of .ORG. .GIVING
entered Sunrise Thursday (October 13,
2022), giving holders of a trademark
that has previously been verified by the Trademark
Clearing House an opportunity to secure
their name before General Availability
begins on January 20, 2023.
.GIVING can be used by any mission-driven
organization – including for-profit
entities – to establish a standalone
website dedicated to a specific
fundraising effort, serving as a
complement to its primary website. For
example, a for-profit entity could create a
separate website or microsite using the
.GIVING domain |
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for
a purpose-driven
fundraising campaign conveying a strong,
dedicated commitment to supporting
mission-driven purpose distinct from their
for-profit operations. |
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Last but not
least (though definitely late on my
part), I want to share the news
that was released during NamesCon
Global last month about domain
registrar Epik
getting a new CEO in veteran technologist
and entrepreneur Brian Royce. Brian
steps in for Epik Founder and previous CEO Rob
Monster who decided to move into a
non-executive role as Chairman of the
Board. Rob noted that Brian had joined
Epik earlier this year as EVP Operations and
quickly made an impact across several areas
of the business. You can expect Brian to
keep Epik on the proven track that Rob
blazed. Brian said, "We are committed
to our mission of helping entrepreneurs and
domain investors make a profit and be
successful!”
I
had actually gotten the news about the
changeover directly from Rob when he
introduced me to Brian at an evening social
event at NamesCon the night before the
official press release went out. I was tied
up covering the show that week so didn't
have a chance to write about anything else
until after the conference. Then, shortly
after I had gotten home and started catching
up, Hurricane
Ian |
Brian
Royce
CEO, Epik |
appeared in the Gulf of Mexico, heading
north and predicted to smash directly into the Tampa
Bay area where we are located. We started battening
everything down for the storm that we all now know
took an unexpected early turn into the Fort
Myers area, 75 miles south of us. We wound up being
unscathed here but our hearts ache for our friends
and fellow Floridians further down the coast who
have been devastated by Ian. It will be a long road
back for that beautiful part of the Sunshine State
but the region and its people, working together,
will get the job done.
Wishing
you all blue skies and a great weekend and we'll be
back here next week, same time, same channel!
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(Posted
October 14, 2022) To refer
others to the post above
only (and not the full
Lowdown column) you can use this
URL:
https://www.dnjournal.com/archive/lowdown/2022/dailyposts/20221014.htm
*****
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CryptoExchange.com
Introduces Crypto Domain Escrow + Crypto to $
Conversion for Secret Brokerage Sales
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In one of our
bi-weekly domain sales reports last
month you may recall seeing three of
the top ten sales jointly credited to SecretBrokerage.com
and CryptoExchange.com
- Rake.com at $175,000, Hot.co.uk at
$99,500 and
Stretcher.com at $35,000. In addition to
being impressive sales, I noted in that report
that in each case the buyer wanted to pay with
cryptocurrency but the seller wanted to receive US
dollars. The extra
hoops that creates can derail a deal but all three
sales were completed in friction free escrow
protected transactions thanks to a
partnership SecretBrokerage (SB) |
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Founder Arif
Sengoren formed with Crypto Exchange. As part of
that agreement, Arif also became Senior VP
of a new Domain Division at Crypto
Exchange. |
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This is the
kind of service a lot of people
have been looking for since the Covid-fueled boom in
domain and digital asset sales began a
couple of years ago. That surge resulted in a
lot of veteran domain owners who weren't
sold on crypto finding
themselves in a marketplace where
crypto-rich buyers wanted to use their preferred currency to diversify
into domains. That is where Sengoren, who is intimately familiar with
both camps, saw an opportunity to team up
with Crypto Exchange (CE) to help currency of both
kinds flow smoothly through this
increasingly busy intersection of old and
new. |
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Arif
Sengoren
Founder, SecretBrokerage.com |
I've now had a
chance to circle back
around to Arif and get more details on
exactly how the service works. It
starts when a CE client who has set their sites on a
particular domain decides they also want SecretBrokerage.com's
(SB) help to acquire that domain. In that
case, if the buyer wants to pay with
cryptocurrency but the seller will only
accept US $, SB pays for
the domain in dollars from their own
account, with that transaction typically
done through Escrow.com. Then,
effectively becoming the seller, SB accepts cryptocurrency
payment from the buyer through CE who also provide a
new cryptocurrency
escrow service to protect both
parties.
Arif noted,
"SecretBrokerage uses
CryptoExchange.com (CE) for our crypto
transactions and CE sends us their
clients who want to acquire domains.
Rake.com was a good example of this. The
CE client wanted Rake.com and we were able
to acquired it for them and allow
them to pay for it with
cryptocurrency."
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As
most of our readers know, crypto prices have fallen
significantly this year, so we had to wonder if that
has impacted the number of domain transactions SB
and CE are handling. Sengoren said, "No,
the price of crypto hasn't affected the volume of
transactions we do. People buy or sell domains with
crypto for several reasons. One bears repeating - Privacy
Privacy Privacy! Two, it is difficult for a lot
of people to cash out crypto. Three, taxes.
In a lot of jurisdictions using crypto to buy a
domain creates no tax on the crypto profit. Four, diversification of their assets while
keeping them digitally based. In the end, it is the
overall economy that decided how many transactions
are being done."
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CryptoExchange
handles transactions involving physical
goods as well as digital assets. Their Bitcoin
Marketplace allows consumers to
buy products with bitcoin and product owners
to sell their items for cryptocurrency.
While domains have been the top sellers at
CE, watches are a strong number two,
followed by cars and real estate.
Most transactions remain private, so the few
domain sales that have been reported from
SB/CE have been made public only because
both the buyer and seller allowed the
information to be released.
You can learn
more CryptoExchange.com
and SecretBrokerage.com
on their respective websites. Also, as
someone who has never owned or used
cryptocurrency, I found the Learning
Center at CryptoExchange.com to
be a very useful resource. It covers
every aspect of cryptocurrency, including definitions
of the dozens of terms the crypto field has
spawned. |
Image
from Bigstock |
(Posted
October 12, 2022) To refer
others to the post above
only (and not the full
Lowdown column) you can use this
URL:
https://www.dnjournal.com/archive/lowdown/2022/dailyposts/20221012.htm
*****
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ICA
Returning to Las Vegas for 2023 Meeting in January
With Free Ticket Offer for New Premium Members
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The
Internet
Commerce Association (ICA),
the non-profit organization that fights for domain
owner rights, will be returning to Las Vegas
January 22-24 for the group's 2023
Member Meeting. The upcoming event will be
held at the new Hilton-owned Resorts World
complex that opened in June 2021, just a few
months before the ICA hosted their 15th
Anniversary meetup at the Green Valley
Ranch in nearby Henderson. Early
bird tickets for the 2023 Meeting are
$199 through the rest of October but will increase
to to $299 on November 1. If you are not
yet an ICA member, you can get a free ticket
to |
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the
event by joining at any of the premium membership
levels, including the Individual level.
That offer also expires at the end of October.
You
can also now book your discounted
hotel rooms at Resorts World for just
$100 a night + taxes and fees. The cut-off date for
booking rooms in the ICA room block is December
30th, however space is limited and could
sell out before then.
The
ICA has designed their annual meetings to be fun
events that include networking opportunities,
educational sessions, member meetings and social
activities. All industry participants are
invited to join
and attend and if you go you can count on a warm
welcome from current members and the ICA staff.
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(Posted
October 4, 2022) To refer
others to the post above
only (and not the full
Lowdown column) you can use this
URL:
https://www.dnjournal.com/archive/lowdown/2022/dailyposts/20221004.htm
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