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Instagram paid Chinese cyberquatter $100,000 for instagram.com, Facebook lawsuit reveals

Kevin Murphy, January 20, 2016, Domain Sales

Facebook has sued a Chinese cybersquatter for trying to renege on a five-year-old deal that saw it buy the domain instagram.com for $100,000.
The lawsuit, filed in California last week, claims that a family of known cybersquatters, based in Guangdong, is trying to have the purchase invalidated by a Chinese court.
The company, which acquired Instagram for $1 billion in 2012, wants the court to rule that the domain deal was legal, preventing the cybersquatters retaking control of the domain.
Photo-sharing app Instagram launched in October 2010 using the domain instagr.am.
At that time, instagram.com was owned by a US-based domain investor, but it was bought by Zhou Weiming about a month later.
Zhou, Facebook says, was the now-dead father of three of the people it is suing, and the husband of the fourth.
When Zhou purchased the domain, Instagram had become wildly popular, well on the way to hitting the million-user mark in December 2010.
Instagram had applied for the US trademark on its name in September 2010, less than a month before its launch.
The company made the decision to pay $100,000 for the domain in January 2011.
The Whois information for instagram.com changed from Zhou Weiming to Zhou Murong, apparently his daughter, around about the same time, though the registrant email address did not change.
The purchase was processed by Sedo, according to a copy of the deal filed as evidence (pdf).
Now, Murong’s mother and sisters are suing her and Instagram in China, claiming she did not have the authority to sell the domain, according to Facebook’s complaint.
Facebook claims the Chinese suit is a “sham” and that the whole Zhou family is acting in concert.
The company wants the California court to declare that the sale was valid, and that registrar MarkMonitor should not be forced to transfer the domain back to the Zhous.
Facebook in 2014 won a 22-domain UDRP case against Murong Zhou, related to typos of its Instagram trademark.
Read the full California complaint as a PDF here.

Top 2015 new gTLD sale looks like cybersquatting

Kevin Murphy, January 8, 2016, Domain Sales

One of the top secondary market domain sales of 2015, as reported by Sedo, appears to be a case of somebody selling a domain matching a trademark to the trademark’s owner.
According to a press release yesterday, the domain basic-fit.fitness was the third-priciest reportable new gTLD domain sale handled by Sedo last year.
It went for €7,949 ($8,634).
Given that it’s not intrinsically an attractive-looking domain, I tried to figure out why it sold.
Judging by Whois records, the buyer is the corporate owner of Basic-Fit, a chain of over 300 gyms in four European countries.
It has at least one trademark on “Basic-Fit”.
The original registrant, according to records cached by DomainTools, was a Belgian web designer.
The domain seems to have changed hands around May last year. In April, it spent a couple of weeks under Whois privacy.
The domain was registered August 27, 2014, the day .fitness exited its Early Access Period and domains were available at regular prices.
It seems the same Belgian web designer owns several more new gTLD domain names matching brands that are parked with Sedo and available to buy instantly.
Many are .immo (“.realestate”) domains matching the brands of Belgian real estate firms. There are also a few .beer domains under his name matching the brands of breweries and beers in the UK, US and Czech Republic.
It’s not unheard of for web developers to register domains on behalf of clients. It’s rather less common for them to then list them for sale, with buy-now prices, on domain marketplaces.
Looks dodgy to me.

Rightside to auction “xyz” domains at NamesCon

Kevin Murphy, January 5, 2016, Domain Sales

.xyz made a bit of a splash with domain investors in 2015, but is the meaningless string “xyz” inherently attractive? Even at the second level?
Rightside seems to think so.
The registry, which does not operate .xyz, is planning to auction at least four “xyz” domains during next Monday’s live auction at the NamesCon conference in Las Vegas.
Rightside today disclosed that xyz.sale, xyz.market, xyz.news and xyz.live will be among about a dozen registry-reserved short domain names– such as q.sale and z.pub — it will attempt to sell.
The only meaningful domain on its list is the absolutely fantastic, category-killing viral.video.
It’s difficult to see the “xyz” names as anything other than attempt to cash in on the popularity of .xyz domains among the investors, many of them Chinese, currently pumping money into the domain market.
XYZ.com’s .xyz gTLD has over 1.7 million domains in its zone file today, making it the largest-volume new gTLD by a considerable margin.
I’m not sure there’s any causal connection here, but it should probably be noted that Daniel Negari and Michael Ambrose, XYZ.com’s CEO and COO respectively, recently acquired a substantial chunk of Rightside.
The two men disclosed November 30 that they had paid over $8.5 million to buy almost 10 million shares — or roughly 5.2% of the company — on the open market.
The NamesCon auction kicks off at 1400 Pacific (2200 UTC) on Monday at the Tropicana in Vegas. It’s being managed by RightOfTheDot and Namejet.

Berkens flogs the lot to Go Daddy

Kevin Murphy, December 7, 2015, Domain Sales

Domain investor Mike Berkens has sold almost his entire portfolio of domain names to Go Daddy, both parties said today.
Berkens’ company, WorldWide Media sold about 70,000 names to the company, which plans to list most of them on its Afternic Fast Transfer Network.
That’s the service that tries to streamline the purchasing of premium-priced domains as much as possible by making them available intermingled with unregistered names on registrars’ storefronts.
Berkens said on his blog, The Domains, that the decision to sell off most of his portfolio came about largely due to his personal circumstances.
“Simply put, life is short and this it was the perfect time for myself and my family to make a move that doesn’t require working 7 days a week, 365 days a year on the computer,” he wrote.
He intends to continue his work with RightOfTheDot, the auction and premium sales company he founded with Monte Cahn, which is running a big auction at the NamesCon conference next month.
He has also retained a portfolio of adult-themed domains, which he plans to sell via a web site at adult.domains.
A small portfolio of mostly new gTLD domains will be sold via the.domains.
Financial details of the Go Daddy deal were not disclosed, but Berkens said he could have made more money selling the names individually. He expects Go Daddy will find the domains profitable too, he said.

Is gold.co.uk the most expensive .uk name sale yet?

Kevin Murphy, September 18, 2015, Domain Sales

The domain name gold.co.uk has reportedly changed hands for £600,000 ($940,000), potentially making it the biggest .uk domain sale ever.
The new owner of the domain is Jewellery Quarter Bullion, a Birmingham, UK-based online gold seller.
The deal was announced by press release yesterday.
Whois records archived by DomainTools show that the company has actually owned the domain since at least November last year, and the oldest available record shows that .uk registry Nominet verified the buyer’s identity in December 2012.
So it’s not a recent sale. The press release seems to have come out to plug the new web site at gold.co.uk, which only went live in the last couple of months.
It’s also debatable whether it’s the biggest sale, depending on the currency you use.
Six hundred grand in GBP would be £40,000 more than was paid for cruise.co.uk, the current DN Journal .uk record holder.
But DNJ, the industry touchstone for secondary market sales leagues, compiles its rankings based on the USD value at the time of the sale. At the time cruise.co.uk sold in 2008, it was worth $1,099,798.

M+M gets $3.5m from two gTLD auctions

Kevin Murphy, August 27, 2015, Domain Sales

Minds + Machines secured loser fees totaling $3.5 million from its participation in .art and .data new gTLD auctions, the company disclosed today.
It seems .data was auctioned recently. It was a three-applicant string and none of the applicants have yet withdrawn their applications.
It seems either Donuts or brand applicant Dish DBS won the string.
The .art auction happened well over a month ago, with the final losing applicant withdrawing on July 23.
UK Creative Ideas won .art. Whatever it paid for the string would have been shared between nine competing applicants.
M+M also said that “strong interest” (presumably no sales yet) has been expressed in its $15,000+ “super premium” registry-reserved names, and that it has sold 20 premium names in its .london auction last month.

Dot London auctioning 50 registry-owned premium names

Kevin Murphy, July 13, 2015, Domain Sales

Dot London is to auction off 50 premium .london domains over the next two weeks.
The names are all currently registry-owned, and include the likes of dentist.london, flats.london and coffee.london. The full list can be viewed here.
The auctions are scheduled to end on July 30 and all have £100 ($155) starting bids.
According to the registry, it has sold over 3,000 names from its premium list since its launch last year. Some live examples include golf.london and catering.london.
The .london gTLD has a tad over 63,000 names in its zone file today.

New musical named after (and uses) new gTLD domain

Kevin Murphy, July 3, 2015, Domain Sales

How’s this for a high-profile registrant?
A new stage musical, co-written by Blur front-man Damon Albarn, has opened in the UK this week, and it’s named after a new gTLD domain name.
wonder.land is a take on Alice in Wonderland that reportedly “tells the story of a 21st Century teen who immerses herself in a psychedelic online game.”
The production, which is running previews in Manchester until July 12 before transferring to the National Theatre in London this November, is using the domain wonder.land.
Reviews have been mixed.
.land is a Donuts gTLD with about 13,000 domains in its zone.
Chrome users who search for wonder.land in their browser address bar will be taken to the domain rather than a search results page.

DomainFest to hold one-day event this June

Kevin Murphy, April 30, 2015, Domain Sales

DomainFest is heading to Bulgaria for a special one-day conference a little over a month from now.
NamesCon, which now owns the DomainFest brand, plans to hold the event June 3 at the Kempinski Hotel Marinela in Sofia.
It will be sandwiched between the fifth annual DomainForum — June 1-2 in Varna and Ruse — and EuroDIG — and internet governance conference June 4-5 also at the Kempinski.
The focus of the event appears to be very much on the domain investment side of the industry.
Tickets for DomainFest will be €125 ($140) on the door, but can be acquired for the early-bird price of €49 until the end of April (that is, today). Dinner costs another €40.
DomainForum, as ever, will be free to attend.
The schedule, which has not yet been finalized, can be found here. Tickets for DomainFest and DomainForum can be obtained here.
DI may attend.

Go Daddy splashes out $28m on Marchex domain portfolio

Kevin Murphy, April 22, 2015, Domain Sales

Go Daddy has acquired about 200,000 domain names from Marchex for $28.1 million.
The sale comes as Marchex seeks to extricate itself from the domain name business in order to focus on mobile advertising analytics.
It works out at about $140 per domain.
Go Daddy said that it will make the domains available via its multi-registrar Afternic platform, which should massively increase their visibility among potential buyers.
The deal was a “unique opportunity” that doesn’t represent a change in direction for the registrar.
Domain Name Wire has an interview with company senior VP Mark McLaughlin over here which explains Go Daddy’s plans in a bit more detail.
Marchex said that it has also sold $6.7 million worth of domains from the portfolio separately since January.