I was away during the week and did not spend much time on my laptop. Because of this I was unable to get any blog posts done or a video recorded. So instead, I’ll give everyone a quick recap of this week’s top stories.

Sex.com Auction Cancelled – Creditors of Escom, LLC filed an involuntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition the day before Sex.com was set to be auctioned off.

.TV Premium Pricing Lowered – VeriSign has lowered the pricing on tens of thousands of premium .tv domain names. In addition, all .tv domain names registered after March 19th will not have a premium renewal fee. At this point all domain names registered before March 19th will continue to carry the existing high renewal rates.

Mocus.com Renamed To Catchy.com – Francois Carrillo, owner of Domaining.com and brandable domain name marketplace Mocus, has acquired Catchy.com for an undisclosed amount and rebranded to the new name. I love the new brand name!

Victor Pitts New VP At DomainIt.com – Victor Pitts whom recently left Moniker has now announced his new position as Vice President of DomainIt.com. Victor will be responsible for growing market share and profits for DomainIt’s core domain registration business, as well as evaluating and overseeing new business ventures for the company.

ScreenSavers.com Sells For $335,000 – SnapNames sells ScreenSavers.com for $335,000 during their recent themed auction.

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Wow, I can’t believe it’s been almost two months since my last weekly news video. I’ve been traveling a lot with the shows, meetings and just overall busy with projects. I hope to get back into doing the weekly videos starting today.

Links:

$750 In Prizes Just To Register Domain Names At Name.com – ChefPatrick.com
Sign Up For a Chance To Win One Of Three Apple iPads – ChefPatrick.com
Sex.com Sale To Be A No Reserve Auction – ElliotsBlog.com
Want To Learn More About ccTLDs? – ChefPatrick.com
ICANN Pushes .xxx Vote Off Until Brussell Meeting – TheDomains.com
Get A Premium .CO Before Launch – ChefPatrick.com
Industry’s First Domain Conference On A Boat – DNCruise.com

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As reported earlier on several domaining blogs, Sex.com is heading to foreclosure auction on March 18th. One quick note, in order to bid you must be prepared to put down a $1 million deposit. For more details visit the auctioneers auction page.

So the question is…

How much do you think the domain name Sex.com will sell for? My opinion, $8 million. Visit DomainShane.com to cast your vote, he already setup a poll.

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Is Modern Domainer Magazine closing shop? I just sent an email to the company to find out. What I can tell you is that ModernDomainer.com, the magazine’s domain name expired on February 4th.

Domainers…I wouldn’t waste your time placing a back order on this domain name. I am 100% sure they will renew. Whether or not they will use it is what we we’ll find out.

I hope this is not the end of Modern Domainer, I truly enjoy the magazine.

When a domain name expires the registrar, in this case DirectNIC, removes the website and parks it.

Thank you to my Twitter friend John @BuySellDomains for pointing out the expired domain name.

UPDATE – Domain has been renewed and the website is back up again.

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To start off the day Domaining.com had at least five new blog feeds that I could see, Mashable, TechCrunch, Engadget, BusinessInsider and ReadWriteWeb. These five websites took over 95% of the showing feeds. They have professional writers that write several times per day. Out of 20 feeds on the first page of Domaining.com, I’d say 16 of them were non-domain related feeds.

Myself, along with several industry members sent an email to the owner, Francois, urging him to take down these feeds. His initial response, in a nutshell, was that he is doing this because after 2+ years he still has not covered his monthly expenses with advertisers or sponsored headlines. His goal was to reach out to webmasters of the world and pull them into the domain sphere. This is just a summary because I do not believe in sharing private emails. I think it is great that he wants to increase domain awareness, but this was not the route to go.

It seems that after enough complaints those feeds have been removed. Smart move!

Now…I have never, not one single time posted anything negative about Domaining.com, until today. I feel a line has been crossed with this new donation button. As you can see below, the donation button says that our industry leaders have no money and to donate money in order to help maintain his website. This from the man that values Domaining.com at $3,000,000, he shouldn’t need the money. If Domaining.com is a business that is not producing revenue, I hate to say this, but either take it down, create a new business model or seek consultation.

I have to say this is the worst message to send to the domain community and potential advertisers. Who the heck would advertise after seeing a message like this? I personally emailed Francois last year offering my assistance to sell advertising, something I have a knack for. Not once was he receptive to the idea. Instead, what he does is sends a message to potential advertisers that they must advertise with Domaining.com to support the domain community. I’m sorry to say this but Domaining.com is not the community, the people that make up our industry are.

This is not a personal attack towards Francois. Not only have I had some very nice email conversations with him, but I do believe most of his efforts benefit our industry. Unfortunately, this is an action that does not.

UPDATE – Since this post Francois has removed both the donate banner and non-domain related news feeds from Domaining.com. Good job Francois!

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