Couple that with the new crop of domaining observers and journos (whilst struggling to keep up with all the excitement) labelling every event or piece of news with headlines such as “You will remember this day”, “Its a landmark day in the life of domaining”, “Never has there been bigger news than this”, “Stand up and take notice of this news, you will thank me in 5 years, just like I said 5 years ago” yadda yadda – when all they have to say is simply a repeat of last weeks news at best and when they only have something akin to the boy who cried wolf. The only difference being that, nowadays in domaining, the wolf never actually shows up.

I think David Carter’s piece (Ooer Missus) about lease/lease purchasing of a particular domain name is well written and is something Ive also been thinking about myself for some time. Our company was recently offered a really nice prime generic .com name by another large UK Media company and they wanted to lease this particular name to us for ~£20k/mnth (numbers slightly changed to protect the guilty). Although irrelevant in some respects, they know that we know that they only paid £20k for the name in the 1st place. And yet here they were wanting £20k per month to simply lease the name from them. And whilst the merits of which are probably a separate discussion in themselves, it does make you wonder where these valuations are coming from and why people think that something they bought 2 years ago has subsequent made an appreciative value that hasnt been seen since Frank Logan bought up a small plot at Dukes Creek simply because he liked the waterfall. Perhaps domaining too once had this charm. I know myself that many a nice exotic holiday has been paid for by something that originally cost me just six bucks – but like anything, over the past at least 2 years or so, I appreciate now that this is no more.

The traffic on the domain we were offered was negligible and so what begged the question to me was, why? As in, why is owning a super generic single word dot com of any use to anyone anymore at those prices – unless there is tangible type-in traffic that can be quantified against the revenue or traffic it generates? The problem is is that domain names no longer have the mystique that they once generated to those not in the know. As such, I think the fabulous prices domains once commanded are now a thing of the past. Simply because, where specifically does the value lie? Less people type in a domain name directly into an address bar, PPC rates for those that do are terrible at best (unless its a nice typosquat, ehem) and yet, in the domain channel, the value of generic domain names attempts to remain unsustainably high. I think that in a few years time, those guys who have been basing their retirement on the fact that they own a handful of domains that they value at in excess of millions of dollars each will begin to wonder when that magical offer is going to come in.

There is a slight silver lining to all my gloom (as many a shrewd domain investor knows), the only saving grace for domain names seems to be in the way Google hold websites with domains that are an exact match of a search term in such high regard. Provided of course there is an actual website behind it – “dag nammit” says ye common or garden domainer.

David talks about golfclubs.com and how this name is available at $35k a month, lease or lease purchase (I wasnt so sure which).  Despite all the tabloid style journalism that seems to surround domaining, I dont think anyone will be leasing this name anyday soon and certainly not for this sort of money. In fact, how many raw domains are there actually out there that would command such a fee? I personally dont think there are that many. Perhaps whats more relevant, is that £20k/mnth is probably the wages of 4 or 5 members of staff.

The knock on effect is also yet to be felt. As in, if the best of the best are losing value, what happens to the millions of names out there, the plurals when the name should be singular, the hyphens, the exotic extensions and the names that make no sense whatsoever. Is it really worth investing in domain names at all anymore?

I’ve been tracking this for the past few weeks, a little cynical that what I was hearing was in fact true.

Anyhow, word on the street is that Yahoo are not renewing the direct deals with partners where their overall traffic quality score is less than 7 out of 10. Regardless of income generated. Seemingly this get tough approach has been trialed in the Australian market and is now being rolled out across the rest of the network.

What does this tell us? Well, seemingly that whilst the MS/Y! steam roller continues unabated, come launch day, the traffic on the network they want to be clean. As shocking as this might sound on face value, word is that this does not affect those partners with syndication rights – a la the parking companies and the ad networks. Who does it affect then? Again, Im not stating my life on the news at this stage but accordingly, partners without syndication deals, large domainer networks and arbitrage clients are the ones apparently feeling the heat. TQ less than 7/10 and no renewal.

Where do these people then go? Well, either out of the network completely or over to a syndication partner where Y! knows there is no term contract and feeds can be pulled with just a few keystrokes in an email.

Sounds great for the networks and the parking companies fed by Yahoo but, as ever, Im remaining cynical about this as well. Im willing to bet a few schekles that all of the partner network will have be cleaned in some way come the time it all goes Bing… or might that be Bang?

Anyone familiar the US.com and UK.com domain names will know that the owners, UK based Centralnic, sell sub domains of these TLD’s as domains in their own right. Earlier today however (and up to and including the time Im writing this), anyone attempting to visit ANY of the 2.5m sub domains indexed using the Internet Explorer browser will have been presented with the following warning message-

This is a reported phishing website

Internet Explorer has determined that this is a reported phishing website. Phishing websites impersonate other sites and attempt to trick you into revealing personal or financial information.
We recommend that you close this webpage and do not continue to this website.

Remember this is for every single UK.com and US.com domain – including some of the large institutions who use these sub domains as their main web presence.

Centralnic have this to say about the issue on their website:

We have been made aware that the Microsoft SmartScreen® filter included with Internet Explorer 8 is erroneously marking some domain names as being unsafe. The most likely explanation is that a genuinely unsafe website under one of our suffixes was reported to Microsoft, but they incorrectly added all the domains under that suffix to their list of unsafe websites.

If you are a domain registrant whose website is affected, you can click on the “More information” link, then the “Report that this site does not contain threats” link, and report that your website is safe to Microsoft.

We are currently working with Microsoft to resolve this issue as quickly as we can. CentralNic will continue to do everything we can to protect our customer’s interests, and we apologise for any inconvenience or distress this issue may cause.

If you have any questions about this matter, please feel free to get in touch.

As ridiculous as it might be for MS to mark each and every sub domain as a bad apple when probably what happened is only one or even just a small handful were reported to Microsoft as being dodgy websites, what it does highlight however is how fragile the sub domain market is and can be. Those familiar with sub domains will remember the web.com story where the sub domain owners got told that the ability to use a web.com sub domain as their website was to end – “though thanks for all the backlinks and traffic you created”. Wave one of the sub domain bad PR wagon.

Im not sure how this latest scenario will play out and even whether Microsoft will reinstate or lift the warning. In any respect the future of the Centralnic sub domains has taken a huge reputation smack across the legs and it will be interesting to see if or how soon confidence returns.

Popcorn at the ready..

In one of the most remarkable domain disputes ever seen (certainly for the UK name space), the domain name oasis.co.uk has this week been overturned on appeal by the panel of nominet appointed DRS experts and returned to the ownership and control of the registrant.

The parties in this case are UK high street clothing chain Oasis Stores Ltd (complainant) and James Dale (respondent).

In what no doubt will become a landmark case for a number of reasons, Oasis.co.uk will remain with owner James Dale;  despite he not submitting a defence to the original complaint, failing to keep accurate whois records and being allowed to submit fresh evidence at the appeal hearing. All of which are against the rules as set out by Nominet.

Speaking today, Mr Dale said “For owners of UK generic domain names, this could be considered a landmark outcome. The DRS has at times been viewed as the poorer, less effective cousin of the UDRP process. That the complaint against oasis.co.uk was successfully overturned here should help to restore the damaged reputation of the DRS in the eyes of the UK domain community, whilst giving owners of other generic domains some additional peace of mind. I hope to see this case referred to in future in support of other unfair claims which will undoubtedly arise – although perhaps now with a less opportunistic slant.”

The first Mr Dale knew of the original complaint and subsequent loss of his domain name was when a friend commiserated with him about his loss. Mr Dale stated that he had not received communications about the original complaint (and hence never filed a defence) because both his physical address and email contact address had changed since acquiring the domain in 2006 – yet he asked that, in the interests of justice, because Nominet knew his new address from other correspondence, they overlook this violation. The appeal found that in the interests of justice, Mr Dale having to pay the appeal hearing fee was, in itself, punishment enough for not keeping up-to-date and accurate whois and contact details. The precedent saving caveat however was also added by the appeal panel “That should not be taken to mean that any Respondent who ignores a Complaint (whether intentionally or inadvertently) has a right to submit new evidence on Appeal upon paying the fee.”

The main cornerstones of the case however surround the claim that oasis.co.uk was an abusive registration because the site was displaying ads of the complainants mark/brand on a parking page and, because this was an appeal hearing, that the respondent be not allowed to submit fresh evidence.  The respondent claimed (in the subsequently accepted fresh evidence) that the reason the parking page displayed ads of the complainant was because it had deliberately bid on exact domain names owned by the respondent  (the respondent also owns oasis.com and oasis.de) at their upstream PPC provider. In this case Yahoo.

As if the decision based on the material facts alone weren’t remarkable enough, the appeal committee took the unprecedented step of visiting the complainants website themselves and found meta information embedded in the source code of the site which showed the terms “oasis.co.uk” and “oasis.com” – names the complainant did not own.

The appeal panel concluded :  “The Panel considers this information [submitted by parking company iMODO.com] tends to confirm the thrust of the allegations made by the Respondent – namely that the Complainant is itself seeking to use the domain names oasis.co.uk and oasis.com to attract traffic to its own site. It may well be that this metatag use will also have some influence on the search results that Yahoo (and other search engines) return when these domain names are used as search terms.

In short the Panel concludes that the Complainant, by choosing to use as keywords with Yahoo (and possibly also as metatags on its own web site – www.oasis-stores.com) text which corresponds to domain names which it does not own, including the Domain Name, has to some degree caused the parking page to which those domain names are linked to behave in the manner which the Complainant now says is Abusive. The Panel believes it is clear that this cannot be Abusive Behaviour by the Respondent. He has said he did nothing to alter the behaviour of the site and if a significant cause is the actions of the Complainant it cannot rely on those as evidence of Abusive Behaviour by the Respondent. Accordingly the Panel considers, if all the evidence before it is admitted, that the registration is not an Abusive Registration, and it should not be transferred to the Complainant.”

What’s amusing in this case for me is not the way the respondent managed to shoehorn in additional evidence through the back door but more about how the big nasty company clearly made bids on the domain name as a keyword in their PPC campaign with the view of using it as the evidence in their reverse hijacking claim – I guess you could align it as being a modern day “plant”. In this case, I applaud the appeal panel for gathering additional evidence and making the “smoking gun” discovery that domain names not owned by the complainant were sat there in the source code of the complainants site..

To bring you up to speed, allow me to give you a 5 second capsule review. In May last year, Hewlett Packard bought Electronic Data Systems (EDS) for $13.9Bn.  EDS provides, in their words,  a broad portfolio of business and technology solutions, from e-commerce platforms to integrated out-sourcing contracts and business transformation.

What transpired as soon as HP took over was an immediate 20,000 headcount cull of EDS’s 120,000 global employees. Ok, recession, depression, all seems reasonable thus far, cut the wheat from the chaff, yadda yadda.

Anyhow, last month, Mr Hurd announced that all HP employees (including those remaining at profitable entity EDS) would be required (“asked” in the case of non-US employees) to take between a 5% and 20% pay cut depending on their level of seniority. To emphasise his commitment to the cause he announced that he too would be taking a 20% cut from his $1,450,000 salary – amounting to a reduction of some $290,000.

On the face value of it, regardless that he was still pulling in over $1m per annum in annual salary, so be it. I have the firm belief that if such things are necessary, and regardless that his income is immeasurable against the common or garden worker drone, you have to lead from the front when times get tough. Unpalatable decisions need to be backed and supported by all and none more so than from the guys at the top.

“The point is…?” -  Goes the communal reply.

Ok, here’s the thing. Mark Hurd is reducing his basic salary by 20% in line with all the other HP employees. In the US these employees have no choice. It’s a mandatory reduction of between 5% and 20%.

The Company line,  read PR, read smoke and mirrors show falls flat however when you look at the sums a little closer. And do please have your sick bags at the ready.

In 2008, Mr Hurd also received :

$5.3m in Bonus
$12.9m in Stock
$3.4m in Option Awards
$18.5m in Incentives
$738k in Other Compensation.

Source

Together with his HP financed home security ($256k), HP financed personal use of the company jet ($135k) and his mortgage subsidy ($71k) his total compensation for 2008 amounts to an extremely modest $42,514,524. How will he manage to put food on his family’s table..?

Basically, he earned (and its worth repeating) about an office junior’s salary above 42.5 million dollars…

So, lets back up to his “oh so generous offer” to reduce his salary by 20%. In real terms, this $290,000 he will be losing amounts to just over 0.5% of his total pay. Perhaps even more vulgar, he starts with over $42 million and ends up with, you guessed it, just over $42 million

In 2008, four other senior executives at HP, who are also required to reduce their basic pay by this 20%, each earned more than $20m a piece. Of course, the highest any of them is losing amounts to just $160k.

Most of us work. Most of us work hard. Most of us earn enough to get by. And most of us would wince at the idea of permanently losing (for thats what HP staff are being asked to do) between 5% and 20% of our salary. Especially when the fat cat at the top is treating you like a moron.

The spin Mr Hurd and his cohorts place on this action include the velvet glove approach of intimating that it’s better to lose a slice of salary than any more staff. Pfft. Trouble with this line is that people have long memories and, of course, the internet.

Since Mr Hurd’s tenure at HP, they have already shed over 40,000 staff. When the salary slicing exercise is done and dusted and the recession bites that bit harder – despite HP continuing to turn a profit ($1.9Bn in the past 12 weeks) – based on previous behaviour, you can bet your bottom dollar that more head cuts will be on the way.

Most of Mr Hurd’s current actions have been seen before. In fact, his previous CEO role was at NCR Corp. The modus operandi here was, of course, to do exactly what hes now doing at HP. Way before the current HP smoke and mirrors show, Mr Hurd left a company where it was said  “morale under him plummeted after management slashed jobs, demoted personnel and cut benefits.”

John Pardon, an NCR alumnus said of the company during Mr Hurd’s tenure that “the feeling is one of utter insensitivity and [as an employee] complete lack of respect or regard for them. Among my peers within the company, there’s a great deal of skepticism and suspicion about anything the company had to say”.

From a May 2008 issue of Business Week magazine ” Hurd’s strategy severely damaged the core of the corporation — the employee base. Here’s what Hewlett-Packard Co. employees can look forward to under Hurd: loss of pension benefits, less attractive and more expensive health care benefits, loss of educational benefits, massive layoffs, jobs lost to outsourcing, and demotions coupled with loss of pay”

When Hurd took over at HP, analysts advised that he should :

• Make cuts at HP that are financially sound without ripping the heart out of what’s left in that company. I just worry that he may choose or be cajoled into choosing to cut too deeply
• Given that Hurd is new to HP, he should make his plans as clear as possible to employees
• Before Mark Hurd got there, the place still has managed to attract and retain people who are not only talented and hard-working, but also loyal to their perception of the HP Way. If Hurd makes these cuts in too Draconian or insensitive a way, he risks snuffing out the last vestiges of the HP Way

I guess he wasn’t listening.

Fight Back Against Cybersquatters

The article kicks off with this:

“The story you are about to read is true. The names have been changed to protect the #$&%$ pond scum who hijacked the name of a not-for-profit animal rescue group. Not that they deserve protection.”

First up, Im surprised to see such a learned writer not quite understanding the term “hijacking”; being that he goes on to suggest later in the article that the hypothetical group mentioned never actually owned the hypothetical name for which the nasty “cybersquatters” had “hijacked”.

Of course, no domainer I know would ever have over-to-dinner anyone who passes off or squats or preys on those out to do good and especially so for those who squat on a charity or on those who build something not-for-profit. But come on, some of the terminology he uses comes across as being both holier-than-thou when it comes to domain parking and also a little too close to the old “all domainers are bad” attitude we’re all so commonly used to.

With reference to domain parking, seemingly Mr Coursey distances himself from having too much awareness on the subject:

“Up popped one of those “This domain for sale” pages that also included a bunch of paid links to various pet-released services. It looks as though these are Google AdSense placements, though I could be wrong. The page doesn’t even have a listing for our actual site, a small courtesy that is too much to expect from cybersquatters.”

Ok, before I address this part, let me take a shot at the site hosting this article.

One of the largest computer retail outlets in the UK (in fact probably the largest) is also called, you guessed it, PCWorld. They operate online under the domain pcworld.co.uk.

Hmm, now call me Miss Picky (careful on the pronunciation) but, seeing as though pcworld.co.uk was first registered in 1996 and PCWorld.com never came into existence until 1998, Im not seeing any “small courtesy listing” anywhere on the PCWorld.com site informing visitors where the other “pcworld” resides – I’ve done a search – and I’ve also made this typo error myself when looking for the UK site. Im guessing many others (domaintools confirms this) have done likewise.

So, is this yet another example of a nasty cybersquatter benefitting from anothers mark, perhaps?

Let’s now disect some of Mr Coursey’s other comments:

“Meanwhile, what can be done about cybersquatters?
We could significantly reduce squatter activity if the paid search companies would simply refuse to provide ads to sites unless they could verify the site was actually legit”

He goes on to use (when referring to cybersquatters) other terms that feel a little too scattergun to be solely directed towards just squatters:

“these people have no shame and will do anything for a buck”

“Google and other paid search providers could take the wind right out of these so-and-so’s sails.“

“God has a special plan (and place) for these people.”

Like i say, on the face of it, it all looks like a bonafide pop at genuine cybersquatters but is it just me who is reading between the lines on this? Bearing in mind also that the author’s example of one his “couple of hundred” domains americanwarning.com conveniently points to a 1&1 holding page. Bless him.

Perhaps if Mr Coursey didn’t want to raise my suspicions as to his true intent with his article he should have instead used his SMBideas.com domain as his example – incidentally a domain parked at Sedo and showing adult links.

Hey-ho

Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic
(absorbs heat)?

One students answer:

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving.

As for how many souls are entering Hell, let’s look at the different religions that exist in the world today. Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell.

With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle’s Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.

This gives two possibilities:

1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.

2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So which is it?

If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshman year that, “It will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you,” and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number two must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over.

The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore, extinct……leaving only Heaven, thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why, last night, Teresa kept shouting “Oh my God.”

This student received the only “A”.

UK Price comparison site comparethemarket.com has been running adverts on television about a spoof site

Compare The Meerkat dot com

Quite amusing, but with a serious point no doubt. In the very least it shows that main stream media now recognises the value of the typo domain.

I do like the way they have actually built out the meerkat site so that visitors can compare them. Very good

http://www.comparethemeerkat.com/compare.html

Here’s their TV ads

http://www.comparethemeerkat.com/tv-ad.html

The reach of domainers, domaining, direct navigation and the industry-at-large now seems to have reached a new level in the UK; for apparently, included at this get-together was  an IP lawyer from Microsoft and an American journalist from CBS news. Not a great deal of relevance in that last sentence however, in the discussions that followed, the whole concept of domaining and the “value” (or lack of) it brings to the internet ecosystem as a whole were debated at length.

I was interested in this last point.

in the UK,  DRS cases against parked domains will be upheld if the contextual pay-per-click ads displayed on a site breach anothers trademark. Domains will be transferred to the complainant if any 3rd party ads (generally outside the control of any domainer) are displayed. The message therefore seems to be that, as domainers, complete vigilance over your parked domains (including the generics) must be observed at all times. On occassions, reverse hijackers have actually bidded on a domain name in it’s “exact” sense – that being claimants have bidded on domain names themselves as part of  a PPC campaign – in order to bring an action against a domain owner. Crazy enough so far? Read on..

As a result of such “passing off”, a domain name can be transferred to any complainant who also reserves the right to bring forward further action under the 1998 cybersquatting act.

The facts seem to be that in order to qualify as a “cybersquatter” you need only pass yourself off as someone who owns a trademark of an advertisement served on your site by a third party. This includes any ads served after a visitor initiates a further search.

Now, I’m no lawyer or even someone that professes to be learned in the subject and I don’t even know the situation stateside, but does this just seem crazy to everyone else or just me?

Ok, lets go full circle and back to Microsoft. Taking into account that domain names resolving from IP addressses (for that’s all they are) are simply vessels for getting interested parties, lets call them consumers, digital information they need – which includes (in the commercial sector) products and services from companies who have a brand which they rightly wish to protect, what’s the difference between serving contextual advertisements on a website and Microsoft resolving error traffic from non-resolving domains to a page of sponsored links with their Internet Explorer 7 product?

Type www.mortgage.co.uk or mortgage.co.uk into your IE address bar and you’ll see what I mean. And I don’t mean the fact that such a valuable domain doesn’t resolve

The difference is actually quite substantial. Generally speaking, domain owners do not go out to deliberately pass themselves off as TM owners and the serving of contextual ads is not something for which they any control. Microsoft, on the other hand, deliberately resolve error traffic typed into an address bar to a page of sponsored links. The small-fry domain owners who earn a few bucks per month from their questionable traffic are pursued vigourously and Microsoft, who are doing this “passing off” millions of times per day, get away with it scot free.

Where’s the justice in that?

I’ll kick it off with a few of my favorites: Please feel free to suggest some more..

Pro.com
Click.com
And, I can’t fail to include Dan Bornstein’s fabulous Milk.com

Any others?? (dont include parked domains, these dont count..)