London Domain Summit starts tomorrow

The second London Domain Summit is to kick off tomorrow, August 22, with a two-day agenda blending domain investor and local domain policy themes.

The conference, at the Hilton London Metropole, is being organized by founder Helmuts Meskonis, who also owns two popular domainer forums: DNForum and AcornDomains.

Registration is available on the door and currently costs £50 for the two days.

It’s a single-track agenda, so nobody’s going to have to choose between sessions they find interesting.

I will be attending.

On the policy side of things, the highlights are a Q&A with Nominet director Kieren McCarthy, who was elected by members last year following hustings at the inaugural Summit, and a separate session with the UK government’s representative to ICANN, Nigel Hickson.

Two of this year’s three Nominet director candidates — Steven Wright and Thomas Rickert — will debate during the final session of the conference on Wednesday. The third, rejected candidate, Jim Davies, may well be in the audience. Andrew Bennett of Netistrar moderates.

There’s also going to be a panel on “Web3” domains — presumably meaning blockchain-based alt-roots — hosted by sponsor Freename.io.

A few sessions are set to focus on opportunities in other regions — namely the Middle East, Africa and China.

The domainer-oriented sessions cover the usual topics of monetization and premium sales with speakers from the likes of Sedo, CentralNic, BrandForce and IT.com. Not exactly my wheelhouse, but there’s nothing on the agenda that looks uninteresting and I anticipate checking out most sessions.

That said, if any fellow attendees fancy a hallway chat or a coffee or want to smash my face in or whatever, feel free to collar a fatter, grayer, shagged-out version of whatever photos you’ve previously seen of me, or slide into my DMs.

UPDATE — this post was updated August 24 to correct the number of candidates in this year’s Nominet election. Apologies to David Thornton, the candidate I neglected to mention, who did not participate.

woke.com among domains in NamesCon auction

Right Of The Dot has published the list of domains it hopes to help auction off during the forthcoming NamesCon 2023 conference in Texas, and my highlight has to be woke.com.

ROTD said in a press release that the headline lots of the auction, which seems to have 451 listed domains, are:

qd.com, oi.com, gorilla.com, holiday.com, programming.com, successful.com, estates.com, woke.com, fighting.com, dancing.com, cryptopunks.com, gpt.info, whois.io, software.ai, robots.ai, god.eth, nftx.com, shiba.com, we.co.uk, hi.co.uk, house.net, rap.hipHop, electricmotorcycles.com, and blackberries.com.

While woke.com is certainly not the domain with the best monetization/development potential, it catches the eye due to the fantastically divisive nature of the word itself, which is coming to dominate culture-wars political bullshit in the English-speaking world.

While “woke” ideology is arguably simply a modern restatement of the Golden Rule, it can mean very different things to different people — at one extreme it means welcoming the reintroduction of racial segregation and getting people fired for wearing a hat, and at the other it means buying a closet full of AR-15s because drag queens are coming to cut off your son’s penis.

The algorithm at the parking page it currently points to thinks it relates to beds.

It’s going to be fascinating to see who, if anyone, buys it, and what they do with it. It’s listed with a starting bid north of $250,000.

qd.com and estates.com both have starting bids above $1.5 million, while oi.com starts at over $1 million.

The auction runs online at rotd.com and live at NamesCon for the next three weeks.

Typo .com on sale for $94 million

Somebody has listed what they call the “Saudi National Domain” for sale for a laughable $94 million, despite it apparently being a typo.

The domain name in question is saudiarabiya.com, according to a press release that crossed the wires this week.

You’ll notice the addition of a Y to the traditional English spelling/transliteration of Arabia, which is something the release doesn’t shy away from acknowledging.

The would-be seller says it’s “the correct Arabic spelling of ‘Arabia,’ using the letter ‘y.'”, pointing to Arabic TV news channel Al-Arabiya as an example of this spelling.

The problem is, “Saudi Arabiya” doesn’t seem to be an official transliteration of the country’s name, and you’d be hard pressed to find examples of anyone referring to it in that way.

Some European languages do spell the “Arabia” component of the name with a Y, but none appear to call it “Saudi Arabiya”.

The registrant wants to sell the name via Escrow.com, and is offering buyers the chance to lease the name for a year for $4 million before handing over the full asking price.

“Everyone thinks you’re a spammer” if you buy keyword domains, says Googler

A veteran Google “Search Advocate” has said he’s “not a fan” of keyword-rich domain names, partly because they’ll make people think you’re a spammer.

John Mueller responded to a Reddit thread from a user wondering whether it’s worth splashing out $2,000 on a two-keyword .com domain for his new business.

Mueller responded, according to Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Journal:

I’m not a fan of keyword-keyword domains, but YMMV [your mileage may vary]. Random thoughts:

everyone thinks you’re a spammer

changing business focus, or even expanding, is harder

you have no brand name, there’s nothing that people can search for which “obviously” should show your site. You’re always competing, you’re not building value with long-term users.

sex.com for sale, but it’s not a domain deal

The owners of sex.com, which for many years was the highest-price domain sale ever recorded, have put the site on sale.

The unidentified sellers say they will accept minimum bids of $20 million, with at least $10 million up front, in an auction that began yesterday and will run until January 31.

The domain alone sold for $13 million in 2013, but this offer is for the full site, so don’t expect it to make it to any domain sales league tables.

The sellers say the site is an “innovative blend of popular social platforms”. That appears to mean it’s a blend of features borrowed from TikTok and OnlyFans.

In the name of journalistic integrity I checked it out.

The main page is basically a feed of short teaser videos of porn models posing or performing sex acts, accompanied by invitations to subscribe to their feeds for modest monthly subscription fees.

The site’s sellers say they receive 20% of the subscription fees, with the models taking the rest.

They say they get over a million daily unique visitors. Most appear to be to the legacy “pin” business, which allows users to create collections of porn content, the site’s primary business prior to July 2021.

Interested bidders can sign up at sex.com/auction.

Update: when tweeting a link to this post, I discovered Twitter won’t allow links to sex.com (which Twitter had auto-linked from the headline) because it thinks the site is “potentially harmful”.

sex.xyz sells at $11,000 loss as premium renewal kicks in

The domain sex.com was for many years the most-expensive ever sold, but the outlook might not be so bright for sex.xyz, which may be a bit of a poisoned chalice.

sex.xyz sold at Sedo for $2,150, according to a record that popped up in my feed today. Namebio lists the same price, with a sale date of December 15.

The domain appears to have been sold just one week before it came up for renewal, which would have cost the original registrant an eye-watering $13,000.

According to XYZ, the registry, it had sold in December 2021 for $13,000, and is one of the names listed as having an annual premium renewal the same as the original sale price.

sex.com sold for $13 million in 2006 and held the record for the highest publicized domain sale every, until the crypto guys started throwing their money around a few years back.

The current record is $30 million for voice.com, sold in 2019. The name nfts.com sold for $15 million last year.

Update: this post was updated to correct that it was sex.com that sold for $13 million, not xyz.com.

Right-wing YouTube bought rumble.com from founder for $477,077

Right-wing video-sharing platform Rumble paid its founder the equivalent of $477,077 for the domain name rumble.com last year, it has emerged.

The company went public on Nasdaq last month, reversing into a shell company, and in an SEC filing last week disclosed the deal:

On May 11, 2021, Rumble purchased from Jokaroo Entertainment Inc. (“Jokaroo”) the domain license for the name “rumble.com” for a purchase price of CAD$603,895 (approximately $477,077), as permitted by the terms of, and in accordance with, the License Agreement dated October 1, 2013 between Rumble and Jokaroo. Mr. Pavlovski is the controlling owner of Jokaroo. In connection with the purchase, the license for the domain name under the License Agreement automatically terminated in accordance with its terms.

It’s not your standard sort of domain sale, but it appears to be an all-cash, domain-only deal. Pavlovski is Chris Pavlovski, the company’s founder and CEO.

The filing makes reference to other six-figure domains purchased from related parties, without specifying the domains.

Rumble is a YouTube clone founded to provide a platform for voices that have either been censored, or fear being censored, by “Big Tech”, due to their views. It’s largely frequented by right-wing Americans.

The company also owns Locals.com, a crowd-funding service mimicking Patreon and set up for largely the same political reasons and audience. It also provides hosting services to Donald Trump’s Truth Social.

Namebio shows that rumble.com previously sold for $31,283 on SnapNames in 2007.

Drug dealer sells blunt.com for $165,000

The domain name blunt.com sold last month for $165,000, it has emerged.

Legal cannabis distributor Farmhouse Inc, which runs a social network called WeedClub and the @420 Twitter account, announced the sale in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing yesterday. The company said:

In June 2022, the Company received an unsolicited offer for its domain name “blunt.com” from an unaffiliated party. The Board considered this offer to be a fair arms-length price for a premium domain name and on July 20, 2022, the Company sold domain name “blunt.com” for $165,000, net of commission

Elliot Silver reported the name was bought by Farmhouse for $125,000 in May 2020 at the same time as it bought weed.club for $30,000.

The name was never developed and the undisclosed new owner currently has it parked.

A blunt is a hollowed out cigar filled with cannabis that people light and smoke the marijuana like a cigarette.

nickel.com sells for a hell of a lot more than a nickel

The domain name nickel.com has sold to a mining company for roughly $250,000.

Flying Nickel Mining, listed on the Toronto stock exchange, purchased the name at some point in the first half of the year for CAD 313,977, according to a regulatory filing from its parent, Silver Elephant Mining.

“During the six months ended June 30, 2022 Flying Nickel purchased a domain name nickel.com at $313,977,” the filing reads.

That works out to about $243,000 at today’s exchange rate, but one assumes it was probably priced at $250,000 at the time of the sale.

Flying Nickel mines nickel. Silver Elephant mines silver. The former was spun out of the latter earlier this year and has its own stock market listing.

Another Silver Elephant spin-out, Nevada Vanadium, bought vanadium.com for CAD 23,461 during the same period. Vanadium is another type of metal, albeit one with substantially less name recognition than nickel.

Flying Nickel is still using flynickel.com as its primary domain, but nickel.com already mirrors the original site.

Before the sale, the domain was parked at GoDaddy, archive.org shows.

Buyer “phasing out” domain “bought for $2.2 million”

The domain name coupons.com, which was acquired for a reported $2.2 million over two decades ago, is being phased out by its purchaser.

The dot-com-boom-era company, which changed its named from Coupons.com to Quotient Technology in 2015, has said in recent earnings calls and regulatory filings that it plans to deemphasize its old brand in favor of newer ones.

The company started out as a print-at-home discount coupons player, but in recent years has moved into digital as paper coupons fell out of fashion in favor of cash-back promotions and mobile apps.

Even in light of the current global inflation crisis, which one would expect would fuel demand for cheaper food and products, the company is struggling as retailers are also feeling the pinch.

In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing this week, Quotient said: “We are phasing out our use of the coupons.com domain, which we will replace with our Shopmium cash-back mobile app.”

The company acquired the domain in 2000.

Namebio reports the price as $2.2 million, which would have made it the third most-expensive domain ever at the time, though this was later disputed by CEO Steven Boal in a 2011 interview with podcaster Michael Cyger. Boal appeared to confirm it was a seven-figure deal, however.

Quotient’s SEC filings have for some years listed a $0.4 million domain on its balance sheet, but it’s not clear whether this is coupons.com or something else.