Readings for March 26th, 2008


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DNN: U.S. Domain Name Registrar Conduct A Ticking Time Bomb

Attorney John Berryhill addresses an important issue that seems to be ignored by some U.S. based registrars: Doing business with Specially Designated Nationals (SDNs) and countries under US sanctions is against the law.

Berryhill's article points to several obvious violations of the law by registrars including Network Solutions, Godaddy and Enom who all appear to be conducting business with Sudanese businesses. The Sudanese businesses all have registered domain names through these U.S. based registrars and more specifically the companies Berryhill references are listed as SDNs.

Source: Domain Name News

TechCrunch: Communicate Acquires Y Combinator Startup Auctomatic, Unveils New Business Strategy

Communicate.com, a public company in Vancouver, Canada, is announcing the acquisition of Y Combinator startup Auctomatic this morning for $5 million in cash and stock. The company is also changing its name to Live Current Media, Inc.

Communicate/Live Current is in the domain name business - their primary assets are 800 high value domains (perfume.com, cricket.com, etc.) that generate a variety of advertising and affiliate fee revenues. The company's market cap is just shy of $60 million. That stock price has increased by around 250% in the last year.

Some of those domain names are quite valuable. The company declined to sell cricket.com for $6 million earlier this year, for example. About 40 of the company's 800 domain names are "very high quality"? CEO Geoffrey Hampson told me in an interview last week.

The company is going to focus on building out branded properties around those domain names, Hampson said, starting with Perfume.com. The Auctomatic shopping engine technology will be a big part of the push, and the company will also add social features over time.


Source: TechCrunch

Advertising Lab: Hacked Digital Billboards



Someone known as Skullphone has hacked into a few ClearChannel billboards in California to insert the trademark image.


Source: Advertising Lab

The World: Japan: URL's Are Totally Out

"Within minutes of riding on the first trains in Japan, I notice a significant change in advertising, from train to television. The trend? No more printed URL's. The replacement?

Search boxes! With recommended search terms!

It makes sense, right? All the good domain names are gone. Getting people to a specific page in a big site is difficult (who's going to write down anything after the first slash?). And, most tellingly, I see increasingly more users already inadvertently put complete domain names like "gmail" and "netflix" into the Search box of their browsers out of habit - and it doesn't even register that Google pops up and they have to click to get to their destination.

But, I ask you: could this be done in the USA? Wouldn't search spammers and/or "optimizers" ruin this within seconds? I did a few tests with major name brands and they're almost always the top hit on Google (surprisingly, even Panic). But if Nabisco ran a nationwide ad campaign for a hot new product and told users to Google for "Burlap Thins" to learn more, wouldn't someone sneaky get there before they do?" (cabel.name)

Source: The World

This is pretty old issue, does not mean URL's are passe as links within search engines still point to URL's. In addition, it isn't very smart as what many of these companies fail to understand is their lack of control of search results in search engines. It's nice as long as you are at the top, howerver, did we all forget Google's Florida update already?