All 3-letter .US domains are now gone! First the 3-letter .infos disappeared, then the 3-letter .biz. Now .US takes its place on the endangered species list. The last available 3-letter .US was taken Thursday night, June 10. Earlier in the week, more than 2,000 were still available. That changed rapidly after one of the largest holders of  3-letter .US domains started a thread at DNForum.com alerting other domainers about the diminishing pool of .US 3's. That sparked a round of frantic buying that didn't end until the last domain was gone. Prices for .info and .biz 3's quickly jumped after Thunayan K. AL-Ghanim bought all of the remaining combinations earlier this year. You're likely to see the same pattern with .US now that they're gone...  More proof of a booming domain market - one of our new advertisers, DotcomAgency, shared some interesting sales data with us. Until recently they average 40-50 domain sales each month, but in the last 30 days (as of June 1) they have sold 279 domains at an average price of $1,789 per domain! Another interesting fact is that the domains sold averaged 13.7 letters in length, considerably longer than we would have guessed...Sedo.com has announced a major price reduction in the commission they charge for selling domains on their site. The original $100 base fee has been cut in half. On sales above $500, the commission due will be 10% of the sale amount...Namewinner.com has announced a huge price increase effective Friday, May 28. The minimum bid jumps from $15 to $40. Existing customers will be grandfathered in at a lower rate, but their costs will still jump from $8.75 to $30. In an email to their customers Namewinner said the move was necessary so they could pay registrar partners enough to remain competitive in the drop catching business...Rick Schwartz (the Domain King) is organizing T.R.A.F.F.I.C 2004, a major domain owners conference, that will be held Oct. 20-23 in Delray Beach, Florida with DomainSponsor.com as the lead sponsor. Registration information and the itinerary for the event at the Delray Beach Marriott can be seen at a special website set up to provide details at TargetedTraffic.com. Schwartz said T.R.A.F.F.I.C. 2004 is the first trade show of it's kind and will bring together domain owners, sponsors and search engine companies along with registrars and experts on creating, driving and targeting traffic...You can now sell your domains at Pool.com. With the high prices commanded in Pool auctions we have often heard domain owners comment that they wished Pool would let them list their domains there. Well now you can. The popular auction venue has opened a new Marketplace section on their site where you can list your domains for sale. Listing fees range from $8-$20 and there is one major catch. To list there you have to agree to transfer the domains you want to sell to Pool's registar, Namescout.com... Competition continues to grow in the domain parking market.  Kanoodle is the latest to enter the fray. The search engine company has launched a new site called DomainHop.com that is offering some nice enticements to get you to park your domains there. Those include a guarantee they will pay you at least what you are making with your current PPC (Pay Per Click) provider while you try them out. They have developed some very attractive landing pages, including this example at f0nancial.com... Eurid (European Registry for Internet Domains) has announced the rollout schedule for the European Unions's new .eu extension. A four-month sunrise period (for trademark holders to claim names) is slated to begin in December 2004. The general public would then be allowed to start registering names in April 2005...      SnapNames.com has just added .info to the list of extensions the pioneering drop catching service will chase for you. It's not mentioned on the site yet, but they will also go after .de (the German country code that ranks second only to .com in the number of domains registered). SnapNames is one of the few services that still chase domains for a flat fee ($69) rather than requiring you to bid against others in an auction. You just have to make sure you take the Snap position before someone else.. the The .US extension got a nice boost during the final episode of Friends that ran Thursday night May 6. A massive audience tuned in to watch one of the most popular shows in American TV history end a 10-year run. During one of the commercial breaks, new extension domain investors got a special treat when a Volvo ad popped up featuring a website at VolvoCars.us. That is just the kind of exposure a new TLD needs to sink into public consciousness, but it doesn't come cheap. 30-second spots on the program reportedly cost about $2 million each!... Meanwhile U.S. Congressmen want something done to jump start Kids.us. The highly touted kid-safe area of the internet has had a miserably slow rollout and currently has only 13 live sites. A new article at PCWorld magazine has details from a May 6 meeting of the Congressional subcommittee that is overseeing the project (thanks to DomainState.co for bringing out attention to the story... Afternic.com has made a bold move aimed at claiming a bigger share of the market for Pay Per Click (PPC) domain parking pages. Company President Roger Collins announced on May 5 that anyone who parks their domains with Afternic between now and June 15 will get 100% of the PPC revenue for the rest of this year! Collins said said other recent changes had already doubled the payout for his company's partners. Collins said the primary reason he is "giving away the farm"  is to make more domain sales (the company's main line of work). He said their statistics show Afternic is five times more likely to sell a domain parked there than somewhere else. So what Afternic loses by giving up their share of PPC money could be recouped many times over through increased domain sales...You'll never guess what major extension has the highest growth rate over the past 16 months. In a post at DNForum.com, Dan McCullough, who has written a couple of previous columns for Domain Name Journal had some interesting data on growth rates for six major TLD's: oldtimers .com, .net and .org and newcomers .biz, .info and .us. From Jan.1, 2003 to April 25, 2004, the highest growth rate in pure percentage terms was enjoyed by .US, up a whopping 78% after moving from 444,000 registrations to 792,000 (numbers rounded to the nearest thousand). .Com was second, growing 33% after regs jumped from 21.8 million to 28 million (by far the highest of all extensions). That's really quite remarkable considering the gigantic base .com had to start with. Next in order were .net (28%), .biz (22%), .org (21%) and then .info (16%). Surprising that .info would have the lowest percentage growth in registrations since it currently enjoys the highest resale value among the new TLD's. Not surprising is that all major extensions are enjoying double digit growth as more people pour online worldwide...Where is the rest of The Lowdown?! At the request of readers we have begun archiving Lowdown items once a month (they had not been saved in the past). At the beginning of each new month, this page gets a fresh start while the material you have already seen is saved for posterity. If you missed what's been happening in recent months, the links you need are below.