Matt Schlicht, one of the clever Web pranksters at minds1anda.com, has punked us. He registered valleywag.org, and turned it into a mashup of our site and MySpace, with "Here Comes Another Bubble" by the Richter Scales playing incessantly in the background. (Why didn't we register the domain first? Fair question. I don't know.) [Valleywag.org]
David Hirsch, one of Google's earliest salespeople, is leaving the company after eight years to advise startups, Silicon Alley Insider reports. His track record is mixed: He helped launch Google's attempts to broker print ads, an effort which has met with little success. But having joined the company early enough that he was mostly vested at the time of its IPO, he's surely got a big enough bankroll to get startup founders interested. Our favorite tidbit? Hirsch previously worked at Snowball.com. Snowball, now part of News Corp., bought that domain name from a gay porn site.
Moniker, a domain-name auction house, is selling bisexual.com and a long list of other thoroughly NSFW domain names in an auction January 13-15. The domain-name business is "extremely dirty," Michael Arrington has said — and he should know, since he spent a fair amount of time in it before launching TechCrunch. I'm not sure if this is quite what he meant, but it's clear that a fair amount of the money in the domain-name business goes for porn websites. SheMale.com was recently sold for $525,000. And Moniker itself was recently purchased by a competitor, Oversee, for an undisclosed sum.
Notorious nerdbody Julia Allison, the Star editor-at-large best known for her geek conquests, has this to share with Valleywag: Digg cofounder Kevin Rose has asked her out on a date. Really, could she have come with a more thoughtful present for a gossip blogger? How sweet. Let me go out on a limb here with my prediction: This is going to end badly. Incredibly, someone has already registered kevinandjulia.com.
The Freakonomics blog and search-data company Hitwise found that there are quite a few Gmail users who accidentally end up at GM.com when they mean to go to Gmail.com. In fact, 0.94 percent of GM.com visitors go to Gmail.com on their next page load versus 0.14 percent for Toyota.com to Gmail. No word from GM, but it's doubtful that any of these accidental visits turned into purchases. (Photo by AP/Paul Sancya)
Freakonomics coauthor Steven Levitt posits that the no matter who first claims a domain name, the Web address will ultimately end up in the hands of the party most of us would expect. This is because the brand you know likely values domain names associated with its brand the most. Apple, for example, made sure to acquire iPhone.com, even though it cost more than $1 million. The Coase Theorem, as it's called, works in that case, but Levitt asked readers to come up with exceptions. Which were the most notable?
When you fat-finger a website address, so-called "typosquatters" are set to profit. They register domains like iohone.com that are just one mistyped letter away from the real one, and make money from ads served on those pages. What's worse, Google is helping them. Nearly one in five typo domains use Google's AdSense to monetize the traffic. Yahoo comes in at a distant second, underwriting 4.4 percent of all suspected typosquatter sites. The numbers come from a McAfee report, which also details who all this spammy advertising actually hurts.
The domain name recycle.co.uk was sold at auction for £150,000 (roughly $317,000) by British startup incubator ASAP Ventures. This is the highest price ever paid for a .co.uk domain name, the British equivalent of .com. ASAP will use the name for a new company that will provide consumers with information on recycling. $300,000 might seem like a lot for the U.K., but that's small potatoes for the U.S. of A. In the last two years we've had two big-money .com purchases — sex.com for $12 million and porn.com for $9 million. What does it all mean? Recycle your porn. (Photo by Peter Kaminski)
Google has purchased the shortest possible domain name to make it easier for Chinese users to find Google: g.cn. Interestingly, "g.com," along with most other single-letter and single-digit domain names are reserved by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. The IANA is the master arbiter of domain names and addresses on the Internet. There are a few one-letter domain names out there, though: Z.com is owned by Nissan, Q.com by Qwest, and X.com is owned by PayPal. There was a proposal floated a few years ago to auction off the one-letter domain names, but nothing has come of it.
Facebook has registered Facebook.cn. Already, 100,000 Facebook members belong to its China regional network and alumni groups for Peking Univeristy and Fudan University. The company hasn't yet announced expansion plans and the move might be more of an effort to protect its trademark in China, where a local already owns facebook.com.cn. [Reuters]
The Whois domain-name directory may be dismantled because of a deadlock in negotiations regarding privacy concerns. "What removing the [directory] will do is force all of the actors to come together without the benefit of a status quo to fall back on and say, 'We are now all screwed. What will we do?' It will lead to better good-faith negotiations," said one registrar. [AP]
Aussie rockers AC/DC have finally won access to the domain name acdc.com from a porn company that was redirecting traffic to sexually explicit sites. Now, kids searching for the band that keeps rocking after more than 30 years won't be exposed to dirty deeds. One wonders if hearing the song is any substitute. [The Register]
Typosquatter John Zuccarini has agreed to give up $164,000 in revenue from ads served to misspelled domains. Zuccarini had previously served two years in Federal prison for serving porn ads to misspelled children's domains including teltubbies.com and bobthebiulder.com. (Remember John Ashcroft? Zuccarini always will.) This time around the ads weren't pornographic. But they violated the terms of a court order that barred Zuccarini from registering typo domains. In the old days, his porn ads allegedly made up to a million dollars a year. [InfoWorld]
In a move that nearly makes up for ".biz," ICANN officially phased out the .yu domain of the now-dead nation of Yugoslavia, replacing it with .rs for Serbia and .me for Montenegro (which should go on sale early next year). Maybe .me can do for Montenegro what .tv did for the island nation of Tuvalu; for those who couldn't nab an eponymous .com, this definitely sounds classier than .name. And it's got a ready-made advertising slogan: "It's not .yu, it's .me."
Is any blogger still satisfied with merely blogging? The quirky alternative website Boing Boing, which claims 7.5 million monthly viewers, will debut a daily online video show Wednesday. After closet negotiations with national networks, the Boing Boingers decided to go it alone and own the show themselves. But this is no basement operation. BBtv's Hollywood agent is George Ruiz at clout-wielding ICM, who also handles Christopher Walken, Jennifer Connelly and Richard Dreyfus. Robolicious blogger Xeni Jardin (left), whose TV credits include appearances on Dennis Miller and most of the big nightly newsies, will host. She'll coanchor with fellow BB editor Mark Frauenfelder, best known for his TV appearance in an Apple ad.
AOL wants a tasty chunk of the 9 million people addicted to the massively multiplayer game World of Warcraft. Its rumored plan is to lure WOW players into AOL's clutches with a dedicated social network at its wow.com domain, dormant for years. Just one problem: Is it setting itself up for a cybersquatting lawsuit? [TechCrunch]
In 2005 Facebook bought the Facebook.com domain name for $200,000. Now, Facebook has gotten ahold of Face-book.com via a ruling from the World Intellectual Property Organization. So, how much did it cost them this time? Aside from its own lawyers fees, just $1,500 to the WIPO dispute resolution service. [The Register]
News Corp., under CEO Rupert Murdoch, already has developed a reputation for stealing websites, when a Fox television show or advertiser covets a desirable URL on the MySpace social network. But Murdoch's website-snatching ways extend further than that. On Wednesday, News Corp. and NBC Universal announced that their online-video joint venture finally had a name, "Hulu". But before Hulu.com fell into Murdoch's hands, the website featured no videos at all — just innocent pictures of a couple's 7-year-old daughter.
No wonder TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, formerly CEO at domain-name trader Pool.com, was so eager to get out of what he's called the "extremely dirty domain name business": Moniker.com is now putting 257 ultrafilthy domains up for sale at a live auction to be held August 4 in Hollywood, Fla. The list includes domains like Jiggly.com, Poledancing.com, and Lactationnation.com — and those are some of the more pleasant ones. We're curious how Floridarentalproperty.com made it onto such a raunchy roster. Is there something we should know about what people are doing with all those condos on the market?
