Acro.net – Technology Rants & Raves by Acroplex®

Over at DomainNameWire, Andrew is optimistic about the state of domain economics. While I agree overall, I think that a fuller picture is needed in order to accurately define the state of the domain economy. As I mentioned, commenting at his post:

For those of us that are now in the business for several years, the industry is buzzing along nicely. For the newcomers, the expectations are higher. Five years ago, there was one domain conference every year, now there are almost a dozen. The overall economy is erratic and does not provide with the necessary excitement that sustained us during the up-and-coming years of domaining. There are opportunities, for sure, there is inherent risk as a side-dish. I don’t view sales figures as a pure indicator of the industry’s health, I consider the overall volume and the monthly trends to be a more accurate gauge of the state of the economy.

There are several additional factors that would determine the direction of the domain economics: end-user sales, volume of online advertising and outwards growth in the industry.

Nowadays, it’s not sufficient to quote sales that completed at various domain conferences and venues; it’s important to scrutinize the end-user sales as they define the health indicators of the economy. Purchases and acquisitions of intellectual property, including that of domains, show that corporations value the important role of domain names and invest in them for a variety of strategic purposes.

Online advertising is another indicator of how well the economy is doing; the usual suspects – Google, Yahoo & MSN – are determined to survive the drop in online spending, from the consumer standpoint and that of the advertising agencies. In the first months since the change of guard at the White House, the financial scandals and the corporate greed that defined the previous years are getting under the microscope. So companies end up spending less for online advertising because their budgets are tighter until a raise in productivity is justified by increased consumer spending.

The domain industry itself has lost its momentum and we are witnessing job losses and cuts in spending across the board; perhaps in the coming months acquisitions of some companies might lead to odd strategic mergers that we didn’t think of as possible. The flow of money right now is within the corporate core; the need for an outwards growth and investment is needed, in order to sustain the goals set forth in the previous years, when the economy appeared to be healthier overall.

And that’s the challenge of the coming months: to keep a cool head and plan for a prosperous and rewarding domain year.

DNGator.com is a domain news aggregator that brings in one place, for your convenience, a number of informative blogs related to the domain industry.

There are no accounts to create, no logins, no recording of personal information. Just by visiting DNGator.com you are able to view the most up to date posts from domain related blogs.

Public beta was launched today.

I recall that dark day in late 2003, when mp3.com was bought by c|net and all the music and artist data went into the digital oblivion, all of 1.7 million songs from 250,000 artists. That day, c|net refused an offer from the Archive.org operators to provide them with free archiving space.

Archive.org operates in a manner similar to that of an ant: it crawls through each digital hole and every web gap of the Internet, takes snapshots of its contents and stores the data in a series of archiving web servers. The downside is slow retrieval speed; the upside, you can take a glimpse at how a particular web site looked in the past. Archive.org seems to be the authority of the matter, having stored millions of pages with its omnivorous crawlers that do seem, however,  to observe the robots.txt declarations.

There have been several cases where Archive.org was used as a tool for litigation purposes, utilizing the web site’s authority and sheer amount of stored pages. Quoting from Wikipedia:

In 2003, Healthcare Advocates, Inc. were defendants in a trademark violation lawsuit wherein the prosecution attempted to use archived web material accessed via the Internet Archive. When they lost that suit, the company turned around and attempted to sue the Internet Archive for violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. They claimed that since they had installed a robots.txt file on their website, it should have been avoided by the Internet Archive’s web crawlers but was not. The initial lawsuit was filed on June 26, 2003, and they added the robots.txt file on July 8, 2003, so pages should have been removed retroactively. The lawsuit with Healthcare Advocates was settled out of court.

I read in the news today that Citigroup – holding company of Citibank – is suing a New York pawn shop, All Citi Pawn for infringing on the “Citi” mark and logo. The story from CNN mentions that:

In the suit filed last week in Brooklyn federal court, Citigroup alleges that in using the same Citi abbreviation and red arc as its banking subsidiary, Citibank, All Citi Pawn has infringed on their trademark. Citigroup is seeking all of the business’ profits since it adopted the All Citi name.

In the lawsuit, Citigroup is after damages equal to the revenue generated by the pawnshop during its entire use of the logo. The WHOIS information shows that AllCitiPawn.com was registered in 2005; unfortunately for the Citigroup vultures there is no such old entry in Archive.org. However, the stored pages from January 2007 tell a different story.

After taking the logo down, the store manager, Bob Kay, denies any such infringement and states:

“What can I tell you? Its crazy. They’re going wild for a little art that I put up. Theirs is a moon shape, mine is a V-shape, but I’ve already taken it down,” pawn shop manager Bob Kay told CNN.

It’s crystal clear that compared to the Citigroup logo the similarities are not coincidental: the typeface used appears to be intentionally similar, with the pair of dotless “i” letters forming an enclosure finished by the red cover on top: an arrow for All City Pawn or an arch for Citigroup, it’s all irrelevant; what matters is the overall impact of the logo and the potential for confusion that it delivers. As unfortunate as it is for the pawn shop owner, Citigroup appears to have a case with their monetary demands for damages.

So there you have it, Archive.org can be your friend in discovering useful parts of the past – or your enemy, forever storing parts of the past you’d rather hide. And that’s the culture of the Internet era that we live in.

The entrepreneurial spirit of Nick Spanos, a respectable Real Estate broker from Manhattan, NY and owner of bApple.com, led him to new ventures in the 1990′s. His vacation rental business was thriving and so was his portfolio of domain names. Nick’s business expanded on the Web to promote these vacation rental properties, through the simple philosophy outlined below:

In the past, the popularity of hotels was primarily due to the accessibility. You knew that if you went to the center of NY City there would be a hotel that might be able to accommodate you. Now, through the NoMoreHotels.com network, thousands of available rooms, villas, condos, estates, beachfront rentals, and apartments are for rent by owners and are accessible at the click of a mouse.

Nick’s an ever-busy mind, he programs his own applications, structures his own databases and runs his own hosting servers. This multiplicity of skills has allowed him to overcome tough times in life.

When the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center took America’s society by surprise, Nick went to ground zero to help with the rescue efforts as a volunteer. At that time, all travel stopped, tourism dropped to zero and his vacation rental business tanked, with the Bank taking 100% of the bookings. In his own words, Nick lost his shirt in the aftermath of 9-11.

As a domainer, Nick Spanos is fond of  establishing domain verticals for his business and at the peak of his NoMoreHotels venture he also registered NoHotel.com and NoHotels.com, figuring that it’d be easier for non-Americans to remember. This foresight proved extremely worthy 10 years later.

Right after Christmas of 2008, Nick received a $1,000 offer via Sedo, for the domain NoHotels.com to which he countered with a whopping $100,000 ticket. During the course of the following weeks, Nick negotiated aggressively with what appeared to be an increasingly impatient buyer, who jumped from his original offer to $8,000 – then $15,000 and $16,000 – before showing his true financial colors by raising the offer to $55,000.

At that point, Nick’s asking price was $70,000 and he was soon contacted by a Sedo broker on behalf of the buyer. The deal was closed at $60,000 for both NoHotel.com and NoHotels.com – a move showing that the Norwegian buyer fully intends to capitalize on the brand: “No” is the ISO country code for Norway.

Nick Spanos could not be happier; a great domain sale that successfully closed the link to the past business and emphasizes the importance of negotiation: go with your gut feeling – if you don’t ask, you don’t get.