Namemon - Domain Market Monitoring Blog
Thursday, 31 March 2011 04:57
Mister Wong, a popular bookmarking engine, sent out an email to users this morning notifying them of its intention to convert to a pay model for commercial bookmarks. 
With a Pagerank of 8, Mister-wong asserts that it has been under heavy fire from bots and spammers and cannot continue cleanup efforts without some form of compensation. To effect this change, users who are non-commercial can apply to have their account reviewed and approved as a free account, but with new non-commercial terms. All others need to upgrade to commercial packages which start at $2 per month for 10 saved bookmarks. At the top end, commercial accounts can save 10,000 bookmarks for $72, or nearly $ 0.01 per bookmark.
The notice to users, listed at http://www.mister-wong.com/payments/notice/ and clearifying for commercial users at http://www.mister-wong.com/payments/upgrade/ is the first publicly posted commercial upgrade service for a bookmarking engine. With its page authority intact, mister-wong looks to come out ahead as exploiting holes in getting link juice is becoming a full-time, and well-paying job for many black hat search engine masters.
Is this the way of the future on the internet - will all things SEO in fact become paid subscriptions for commercial accounts? Frankly such a change is long overdue. So what if with two you no longer get a free eggroll. Abusive webmasters have been gaming the system too long to be useful.
Saturday, 22 January 2011 08:55
Although the news isn't official, it appears that iWhois, a highly favored whois query service for domainers, has changed ownership.
Andrew Moulden, the prior owner has stated that the new site administrator will continue to develop new features into the product, while maintaining a strict "no frontrunning" policy, safeguarding queries.
So if you experience any outages or errors using the service, keep in mind it is likely to be improving over the new few weeks as changes are made to its fundamental behavior.
Some of the features we were able to take advantage of right away include a toolbar with all the typical domainer needs related to a whois query - such as Alexa rank, links, Google site query, pagerank and Estibot.
Even the secure,encrypted SSL search is working again, providing a unique cloaking experience even when browsing via someone else's unsecured wireless network.
We look forward to the new features and hope to be using them all very soon! We've also recently learned that none other than Richard Lau, formerly of MyDomains and nameDirect has taken over this tiny but unforgettable domainer resource.
Tuesday, 11 January 2011 12:52
Facebook revealed on November 15th 2010 that it had acquired Fb.com. the acquisition was between the company and the American Farm Bureau Federation. The goal was to use as the domain for internal email in the corporate offices for exchanging with cleints.
Today comes news that the acquisition cost for FB.com was a whooping 8.5 million US dollars, landing the sale on the top of this year's charts. The sale relocated the 6 Million member Farm Bureau over to Fb.org permanently.
“At their annual meeting in Atlanta, Farm Bureau officials on Tuesday said the organization earned $8.5 million by selling a couple of domain names but is barred from identifying the buyer.”
Monday, 13 December 2010 18:50
Recently, Google has reported making changes to its algorithm for search to include "penalties for bad reviews" and "reduced EMD (Exact Match Domains) rank value. However, some oddities have appeared as a result.
A great example is a recent search for Divorce. The top result has been for about a year Wikipedia's page on Divorce, which has thousands of back-links and boasts traffic of 3k visitors daily. Starting Dec 5th, this top search result was replaced by a page much less referenced, D.I.V.O.R.C.E. the song. And not the beautiful one by Dolly Parton or the original by Tammy Wynette, but a farce by Billy Connoly. Total inbound links? I have more toes.
Well maybe it's a dang fluke. After all, these algo-thingies are rough stuff. Okay, so how does the chart below representing the volume between Hair searches make you feel?
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| Stats courtesy of grokse |
Notice how on December 6th, 2010, the article for Hair, the biomaterial with thousands of backlinks, dropped from 3k hits to 1k hits, and taking its place was Hair the Musical, with only 100 backlinks.
These are only the anomalies which I have encountered in search. I am sure there must be many more. When will we hear from the big SEO companies about this?
While you may find this information inconclusive its timing seems spot on. Something in the algorithm has changed the nature of basic search to a large detriment.
Wednesday, 20 October 2010 12:55
In a filing in California court, domain auction mediator Sedo has filed for the completion of the sale of Sex.com to a third party. Sedo had been hired in June after Mike Mann successfully sued and blocked a previous auction scheduled for March of 2010.
The buyer is named as Clover Holdings LLC of Saint Vincent islands in the Caribbean. Estimated sale price is $13 million not including Sedo's fee for the private auction. Several bidders apparently made offers until this final one was accepted and filed on the 18th of October. Original cost to acquire the domain in 2006 is reported as $14 million. It is not known if this number is accurate in terms of cash cost in the original deal.
Not much is known of the buying company and web searches return few results. The signer on the sale documentation going to bankruptcy court is an unknown "E. M. French , Director". You can see the full PDF filing here.
Despite the private sale, court approval is still required due to the bankruptcy action which caused the initial auction in March 2010 to be cancelled. A hearing has been set for Oct. 27 at U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Woodland Hills, California to determine if all debtors approve the sale.
Monday, 11 October 2010 19:50
At Namejet today, a new domain has broken one of the best pre-release record barriers. PcGame.com, a common two-word domain, nearly hit the $25k mark. Clocking in at $24,704 after two and a half hours of bidding, user PLZ captured the title to ownership after battling with a mix of manual and proxy bids vs newyorker.
Certainly this is one of the most premier gaming domains, excluding one-word prizes in the industry. We're certain a buyer will be found quickly if one wasn't lined up already, at a fairly sizable markup no doubt.
Congratulations to the winner as well as the bidders who participated in the excitement.
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