Demand Media to invest up to $75m in content

Demand Media plans to invest between $50 million and $75 million in content in 2011, according to the company’s latest IPO filing.
The company, which owns number two registrar eNom, has also disclosed that it plans to list itself on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol DMD.
Under “Use of Proceeds” in its latest amended S-1 registration form (huge HTML file), filed today with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Demand says:

We currently anticipate that our aggregate investments in content during the year ending December 31, 2011 will range from $50 million to $75 million.

Demand Media’s main business is the advertising it sells against the thousands of freelance articles it publishes every day. It had about $102 million in current assets on its balance sheet on June 30 this year.
Previous text talking about about using the proceeds of the IPO to “acquire or invest in complementary technologies, solutions or businesses” has been dropped.
The amended S-1 spends quite a lot of time talking about a reverse stock split that it is carrying out prior to its public offering.

1 Comment Tagged: demand media, enom, ipo

4Domains customers transferred to Internet.bs

Customers from the insolvent registrar 4Domains have had their domains transferred to Bahamas-based Internet.bs, only a few days after ICANN told 4Domains it was shutting them down.
In a notice posted last night, ICANN said that 4Domains had nominated Internet.bs as its registrar of choice for refugee customers, which likely speeded up the transaction.
ICANN’s letter telling 4Domains it was losing its accreditation, alleging multiple breaches of its contract, was sent September 30, last Thursday.
A 4Domains customer contacted me earlier this week to say she had received a renewal notice from Internet.bs (which she had never heard of) as early as Sunday, October 3.
That’s possibly the fastest turnaround between a registrar losing its accreditation and the new registrar taking over to date.
ICANN tells former 4Domains customers worried about fraud that any emails they receive from Internet.bs should link only to internet.bs or internetbs.net.
Customers should probably also be aware that their domains are now handled by a registrar subject to Bahamas law. 4Domains was US-based.

7 Comments Tagged: internet.bs

1,500 premium domains available at reg fee

Earlier today I blogged about how dotMobi had published a list of over 5,000 “premium” domain names that are still registry-reserved.
I thought it might be interesting to see how many of these strings were still available in other top-level domains. If they’re “premium” you’d expect them to have been snapped up long ago in TLDs such as .com and .net.
But that doesn’t appear to be the case.
I ran all 5,108 strings on the dotMobi list through Go Daddy’s bulk registration tool, to see how many were still available in other TLDs, and the results were a little surprising.
More than 80 are still available in .com, although none appear to be English. I suspect some may even be typos of non-English words (pornigrifia.com, for example).
About 375 of .mobi’s premiums are currently unregistered in .org and/or .net. Most are non-English, but there are a handful of exceptions, such as wildparties.org, tooshort.org, and gas-propane.org.
(I’ve no idea why these are considered “premium” domains under .mobi or any other TLD)
Perhaps most usefully, there are well over 800 strings on the .mobi list that have yet to be registered in the new .co namespace, hundreds of which are in English and (I think) Spanish.
The English domains include two-word combos such as banquetrooms.co, bostonterriers.co, carpeltunnel.co, scarletfever.co and raplyrics.co, as well as the odd dictionary word, such as rejected.co and monologues.co.
A great many of these available .co names are adult-oriented, such as adultpics.co, celebritynudes.co, footworship.co and gayhunks.co.
As far as I can tell, Go Daddy’s tool only spits back domains that are available at the standard registration fee. I registered half a dozen .co names this afternoon at reg fee using this method.
The list’s too big to post here, but if anybody’s interested in my spreadsheet, I’d be happy to share. Drop me a line: kevin at domainincite.com

Comment Tagged: .co, .mobi, available domains

dotMobi to sell 5,000 premium .mobi domains

Afilias-owned dotMobi is taking another crack at selling off over 5,000 “premium” .mobi domain names that it has had reserved since its launch in 2006.
The reserved list, which includes domains such as television.mobi, recipes.mobi and shopping.mobi, has been published, and the domains have been turned on.
They all (or most) now resolve to dotMobi web pages where interested parties can file an expression of interest in the domain, in order to be alerted when they become available.
The actual process by which the domains will be allocated has yet to be announced.
The biggest premium .mobi sale I’m aware of to date was flowers.mobi, which Rick Schwartz picked up for $200,000 in 2006. He plans to sell the domain, probably at a loss, later this month.
The list makes fascinating reading. To my untrained eye, many of the domains appear to be utterly bizarre inclusions.
Businesswoman? Out-of-town meeting? Need to quickly self-administer a Pap smear? Why not visit speculum.mobi for a list of nearby gynecological equipment suppliers?
The full list can be downloaded from here. The official dotMobi announcement is here.

8 Comments Tagged: .mobi, afilias, dotmobi, premium

“Beware of Hookers”, ICANN attendees told

ICANN has published a security guide for delegates planning to attend its meeting in Cartagena, Colombia, this December, which makes quite entertaining reading.
A highlight of the report (pdf), prepared by outside consultants Control Risks, warns attendees to steer clear of bar prostitutes who plan to take advantage of them.

All travelers should avoid bars which have public touts (or “spruikers”) standing outside encouraging them to enter. Many of these bars attract high levels of local prostitutes, some who intend to rob tourists by drugging them in the bar or in their hotel rooms.

Sage advice.
The report also recommends staying off the streets after 11pm, using official taxis, keeping your wallets clean of identifying information, and not resisting muggers/abductors.

Fight for your life, but not your possessions.

I’m cherry-picking the scary stuff here, obviously. In general, the report says Cartagena is fairly safe. Last year, there were only two kidnappings in the city.

Cartagena enjoys a mostly deserved reputation as one of the safe destinations for foreign travelers in Colombia. Certainly, violent crime rarely affects foreign visitors to the city.

ICANN has said that it will commission such reports when there is a concern that security at its chosen meeting locations may not be up to scratch.
I believe the new meetings security plan was introduced in response to the vague terrorism threats that clouded the Nairobi meeting earlier this year, keeping many flighty Americans at home.

1 Comment Tagged: cartagena, colombia, ICANN, nairobi, security

NeuStar wins UrbanBrain .brand contract

NeuStar has become the preferred provider of registry services to UrbanBrain, a consultancy that hopes to launch “.brand” top-level domains with major Japanese companies.
The companies said in a press release:

Under the alliance, Neustar and UrbanBrain will provide brand owners with the expertise and support required to prepare and submit their applications to ICANN, and will provide all of the registry services necessary for brands to launch and operate their own Internet extensions.

NeuStar already operates the .biz and .us registries under contract with ICANN and the US government respectively, as well as providing back-end services for a number of other TLDs.
UrbanBrain is currently associated with a proposed bid for .site.
The only formally announced commercial .brand to date is .canon. Canon is working with GMO Registry, another Japanese firm.

2 Comments Tagged: .brand, canon, gmo registry, ICANN, neustar, new TLDs, urbanbrain

Trademark holders think new TLD policies inadequate

Less than one in ten trademark holders believes ICANN’s policies go far enough to protect their rights under new top-level domains, according to a recent survey.
World Trademark Review is reporting that 71.6% of its survey respondents believe that the current Draft Applicant Guidebook goes not far enough to “prevent trademark infringement”.
Only 9.5% said they believe the DAG does contain adequate provisions.
The full survey will be published later this month, but today a few more results can be found over at the WTR blog.
The survey was conducted prior to ICANN’s recent Trondheim resolutions, which contained a few amendments to strengthen policies such as Uniform Rapid Suspension.

2 Comments Tagged: cybersquatting, draft applicant guidebook, ICANN, new TLDs, trademarks, uniform rapid suspension

US and Russia face off over ICANN veto power

The ruling body of the International Telecommunications Union this week kicked off a major policy-making meeting in Guadalajara, Mexico, and has already seen the US and Russia taking opposing stances over the future control of ICANN.
A group of former Soviet nations, chaired by the Russian Federation’s Minister of Communications, seems to have proposed that the ITU should give itself veto power over ICANN decisions.
A proposal filed by the Regional Commonwealth in the field of Communications (RCC) calls for the ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee to be scrapped and replaced by an ITU group.

Consideration should be given to the expediency of having the functions of GAC carried out by a specially-constituted group within ITU with the authority to veto decisions adopted by the ICANN Board of Directors. If it is so decided, the ITU Secretary-General should be instructed to consult ICANN on the matter.

The proposal was first noted by Gregory Francis at CircleID.
It says that the GAC is currently the only avenue open to governments to “defend their interests” but that it has “no decision-making authority and can do no more than express its wishes”.
It also notes that fewer than 50% of nations are members of the GAC, and that only 20% or fewer actually participate in GAC meetings.
The proposal was apparently submitted to the ongoing ITU Plenipotentiary Conference but, in contrast to ICANN’s policy of transparency, many ITU documents are only accessible to its members.
A reader was kind enough to send me text extracted from the document. I’ve been unable to verify its authenticity, but I’ve no particular reason to believe it’s bogus.
The RCC was set up in 1991 to increase cooperation between telecommunications and postal operators in the post-Soviet era. Its board is comprised of communications ministers from a dozen nations.
Its position on ICANN appears to be also held by the Russian government. Igor Shchegolev, its communications minister, is chair of the RCC board.
At the Plenipotentiary on Tuesday, Shechegolev said (via Google Translate):

We believe that the ITU is capable of such tasks to international public policy, Internet governance, its development and finally, protection of interests of countries in ICANN.

the ITU should be a place where the development of the Internet is fostered. The Internet has progressed and evolved in a remarkably successful way under the existing multi-stakeholder arrangements. Changes, especially changes involving inter-governmental controls, are likely to impair the dynamism of the Internet—something we all have an interest in avoiding.

ICANN itself has no formal presence at the Plenipotentiary, after ITU secretary-general Hamadoun Toure turned down a request by ICANN president Rod Beckstrom for observer status.
The conference carries on until October 22. It’s likely that we haven’t heard the last of the anti-ICANN rhetoric.

5 Comments Tagged: gac, governmental advisory committee, ICANN, international telecommunications union, itu, plenipotentiary, rcc, russia

Telnic wants to sell numeric domain names

Telnic, the .tel registry, wants ICANN to allow it to start taking registrations of purely numeric domain names.
While the company has not submitted a formal request, Telnic CEO Khashayar Mahdavi has asked for numbers-only domains in a separate public comment period.
VeriSign has asked ICANN for the ability to start accepting hyphens and numbers in domain names in the .name TLD, including purely numeric strings such as phone numbers.
Mahdavi, who apparently views .name as a key competitor, wrote in a comment submitted on the VeriSign request:

If ICANN decides to remove this restriction from .name then this change in policy should apply to .tel as well. Approving the release of this restriction on one TLD and leaving it in place for another provides the first with a substantial commercial advantage.
In order to avoid such an unjust result, we respectfully request that, if ICANN decides to approve VeriSign’s request to allow all-numeric strings (and strings with combinations of numbers and hyphens) to be registered as domain names in .name, it simultaneously allow Telnic to do the same in .tel.

Telnic’s charter, part of its ICANN registry contract, currently states “The .tel registry will not allow numeric-only domains to be registered at the registry level.”
I believe the restriction was conceived in order to avoid clashes with the international telephone numbering authorities and the ENUM protocol. Mahdavi wrote:

Telnic believes it is important to avoid conflict with ENUM , so it will continue to forbid the registration of single digit domain names in .tel. Such domain names would be necessary for creating an ENUM tree under .tel, so forbidding them makes a .tel-based ENUM system impossible.

When Telnic originally applied for .tel in 2000, one of the reasons it was rejected was the fact that the International Telecommunications Union wasn’t happy with the idea of phone numbers in domain names.

3 Comments Tagged: .name, .tel, ICANN, itu, telnic, verisign

Government ‘cybersquatting’ case rattles India

Cybersquatting mischief is making headlines in India today, after the nation’s main opposition party accused the government of directing a confusingly similar domain name to its own site.
According to various reports, the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party served a “legal notice” on the ruling Indian National Congress party over the domain name bjp.com.
The BJP hosts its primary site at bjp.org. According to the party, the .com domain has been redirecting users to the Congress’ own site. Today, it resolves to a page parked at Sedo.
The contested domain is currently registered behind eNom’s privacy protection service. It appears to have changed hands several times over the years, most recently to an Indian.
Unless the BJP has some other evidence connecting its rival to the domain, it looks like this may be a case of cheap political point-scoring.

3 Comments Tagged: bharatiya janata party, cybersquatting, enom, indian national congress