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Borders sells IPv4 addresses for $12 each

Kevin Murphy, December 5, 2011, Domain Sales

The bankrupt book shop chain Borders intends to sell its IPv4 addresses for $12 each, raising over $786,000, according to a bankruptcy court filing.
The deal, which is subject to approval by ARIN, follows Nortel’s fire sale of its address block to Microsoft for $11.25 per address earlier this year.
The buyer is Cerner, a healthcare software consulting company.
I’ve reported the story for The Register, here.
You can download a PDF of the relevant court document here.

ICM sells $700,000 of .xxx domains to Clips4Sale

Kevin Murphy, December 1, 2011, Domain Sales

ICM Registry has just announced the sale of $700,000 worth of .xxx domain names to Clips4Sale, which operates a network of clip-oriented porn sites.
The cash deal comprises 30 domains including one $300,000 name and two others at over $80,000 each, according to the company.
The domains themselves have not been disclosed.
The $300,000 sale would be the 16th most-expensive domain of the year, according to DNJournal’s chart. Gay.xxx sold last month for $500,000.
ICM is taking .xxx into general availability next Tuesday.

Paul Raymond rebrands under .xxx

Kevin Murphy, December 1, 2011, Domain Sales

Paul Raymond, a well-known porn publisher in the UK, plans to rebrand its portfolio around the .xxx top-level domain, according to ICM Registry.
It’s the “largest single migration of an adult brand to the .xxx top-level domain to date”, ICM said.
Raymond could be described as an old-school pornographer, with a history stretching back to the 1960s, better known for its clubs and top-shelf titles than its online presence.
The deal includes the domains paulraymond.xxx, prpvod.xxx, razzledating.xxx, mensworlddating.xxx, menonlydating.xxx, escortdating.xxx, adultsportdating.xxx, clubdating.xxx, fantasydating.xxx, mayfairdating.xxx, and paulraymonddating.xxx, ICM said.
Domains such as mayfair.xxx and razzle.xxx, Raymond’s best-known titles, may also be included, but they’re not mentioned in ICM’s press release. The domain escort.xxx is owned by somebody else.
The migration is expected to be complete by February next year.
The two companies have a relationship going back at least several months, with ICM regularly sponsoring events at Raymond-owned clubs.

Third-level casino.uk.com sells for $4,000

Kevin Murphy, November 14, 2011, Domain Sales

The third-level domain name casino.uk.com has been sold via Sedo for $4,000.
The uk.com namespace is not an official public domain extension – uk.com is one of several regular .com domains managed as alternative TLDs by CentralNic.
While .uk.com domains do occasionally pop up in search engine results, and are even used by brands such as Avon, it’s unusual to see one sell on the aftermarket.
The only other notable sale in the DI database of over 60,000 publicly reported transactions is restaurants.uk.com, which was bought for $1,650 last year.
Casino.com was one of the most expensive domains of all time, fetching $5.5 million in 2003.

Open .co landrush re-auctions — the full list

Kevin Murphy, October 4, 2011, Domain Sales

.CO Internet is putting 100 .co domain names that failed to auction during its landrush last year up for “re-auction”, and it looks like there are a few possible gems on the list.
The company said last week that the 100 names are the last of the domains that went to auction but failed to change hands due to a lack of bidders or non-payment by the winner.
While the first auctions were restricted to only those who had paid the landrush fee, this time around anybody can participate. Pool.com will again handle the auction.
There are some potentially nice names, such as accidentlawyers.co, injurylawyers.co, seoul.co, comicbooks.co and businessintelligence.co.
Click here for the full list of names.

Telepathy sells Republic.com for $200,000

Kevin Murphy, September 23, 2011, Domain Sales

Sedo has brokered the sale of the domain name republic.com for $200,000.
It appears to be an end-user sale – Whois reveals the buyer is the UK clothing retailer Republic, which already owns republic.co.uk.
Republic.com already redirects surfers to the .co.uk site.
The seller appears to be Telepathy Inc, the company owned by well-known domainer Nat Cohen.
It’s the third six-figure deal Sedo has announced this week, following the $100,000 sales of silvercoins.com and siteweb.com.

Space.travel – the awesomest .travel domain – sells

Kevin Murphy, September 2, 2011, Domain Sales

It’s fairly rare for a .travel domain name to change hands on the aftermarket – on my database of 60,000 sales I have only two.
Today I can add space.travel, easily the best .travel name I’ve ever come across, to that list. It seems to have been sold via Sedo for $1,600 in late August.
The newly listed registrant is Planet Space Inc, which appears to have previously been involved in a social network for space enthusiasts at planetspace.com.
That fact, coupled with the fact that the .travel gTLD is restricted to travel-related companies, makes me extremely curious how the domain will be developed.
Space tourism is an emergent growth market, so it’s not too crazy to imagine the domain being used as a travel agency for suborbital flights before too many years.

Google acquires StreetView.com

Kevin Murphy, August 12, 2011, Domain Sales

Google has got its hands on the domain name StreetView.com, four years after first launching its occasionally controversial street-level maps service.
The domain switched to Google’s contact information and name servers this week, according to Whois records.
It was first acquired quite recently from its original owner, who registered it in 2001, by an outfit called Brand Certified Inc, ostensibly based at a strip mall in Nevada.
A bit of digging shows that Brand Certified appears to be a front, a shell company operated by MarkMonitor for the purpose of quietly obtaining domain names for its clients.
There’s no UDRP record for the name – it would have been a far from straightforward case – so I guess it was acquired either by being purchased or through some other means.
The domain does not currently resolve from where I’m sitting.

Sedo launches domain pricing index

Kevin Murphy, July 13, 2011, Domain Sales

Sedo has launched Internet Domain Name Index, a research project that shows long-term domain pricing trends and compares the data to larger economic trends.
Using January 2006 prices as a baseline, the IDNX index will be updated monthly showing how much, relatively, domains are selling for on the secondary market.
Currently, domains are valued at 183% of January 2006 prices, for example.
The index uses something called a “hedonic repeat sales methodology” to come up with its numbers. No, I don’t know what that means either.
However the numbers are arrived at, the conclusions are quite interesting, showing that domain prices rise and fall in lockstep with the financial markets.
In this graph, the green line is the IDNX number and the blue one represents the value of the Nasdaq 100.
Sedo Domain Index
“The strong correlation shows that domain name buyers and sellers make economically motivated price decisions,” researcher Thies Lindenthal concludes. “Domain markets are not a cloud-cuckoo-land where dreamers trade esoteric goods at imaginary prices.”
Sedo expects domainers to use the index to adjust their portfolios’ changing values over time.

Salesforce.com pays over $1.5m for data.com

Kevin Murphy, June 7, 2011, Domain Sales

Salesforce.com has bought the domain name data.com for “an amount that significantly exceeds the $1.5 million reserve”, according to Oversee.net.
The domain had been due to be auctioned during the company’s DOMAINFest in Barcelona tomorrow, but was taken out of contention early with the private sale.
While Oversee did not disclose the buyer or final sales price, the Whois record already shows Salesforce.com as the new owner. It was previously owned by United Business Media.
Oversee said the deal brings its year-to-date sales to $11 million.