Over the weekend Elliot Silver of ElliotsBlog.com did an excellent article comparing the amount of domain names that resolve to each parking company. The article was based off of DNS information provided by DailyChanges.com. Unfortunately, as Elliot pointed out, the data may not be completely accurate because some customers use their own DNS controls.

Personally thinking that the numbers were low – for example, Parked.com showing 415,000 domain names – I did a little research. When I say a little, I really mean a little, lol.

I sent Donny Simonton of Parked.com a simple text asking how many domain names are with Parked.com and his response was “In the past 6 months we have had traffic from more than 6 million domains.”

I also talked with Frank Schilling of InternetTraffic.com last week to let him know all the guests of DNCruise are very excited to spend the day with him when we stop in Grand Cayman. In that conversation we briefly discussed his new parking venture in Internet Traffic. What he said blew me away. Frank said that they have already reached over 1 million domains with the service and that there was a pending order for another 250,000+. That is over 1.25 million domain names using Frank’s parking service.

This is truly amazing. Internet Traffic has been around for less than 60 days, spent ZERO marketing dollars and already has 1.25 million plus domains using their service. The only “marketing” I have seen is through the blogs and word of mouth. Then again, it doesn’t hurt that the company is owned by one of, if not the most, successful domainers on the planet.

For years I have promoted only two parking companies, Parked.com and WhyPark.com plus Above.com for parking management. With what I’ve heard from InternetTraffic.com clients and talking to Frank, I would strongly suggest giving his service a try. In fact one thing that I have learned from parking companies in the past is that not all will perform the same, testing is key.

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Disney purchased ClubPenguin.com in August of 2007 for $700 million, $350 million cash and potentially another $350 million based on performance goals. At the time of purchase ClubPenguin.com had more than 12 million members with roughly 700,000 of them paying $57.95 per year. Do the math, that is over $40 million per year in revenue.

You would think with this kind of revenue Disney would have renewed their domain name for ten plus years and or set it up on auto renewal. Instead, on June 13th the domain name expired and today the website went down. The website has been down for over 8 hours!

By tomorrow Disney will have the domain name renewed and millions of children will be playing their favorite game again, but I am sure some Disney executive is getting ripped a new one for this muck up!

Lesson of the day for all of us, renew your domain names on time, in advance or setup auto renewal.

Below is a screen capture of the expired page, going to Network Solutions.

For more information on this story visit CBSnews.com.

*Update* It appears the domain name has now been renewed until 2020. The website, at least for me, is still down.

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The big news in the domaining community today is that .CO has sold it’s 1,000,000th web address.

Here is the statement released by .CO this morning.

“.CO Internet S.A.S., the official registry operator for the .CO domain, announced today that it has reached the landmark one millionth .CO domain name registration. Less than one year from the global launch of .CO in July of 2010, individuals, organizations and businesses in more than 200 countries have registered .CO web addresses.”

At an estimated $26.99 per registration, .CO reaches just shy of $27 million. Add the single character sales and premium .CO owned sales, then we are easily in over $30 million.

What ingredients have taken them where they are today:

• $5,000,000 initial investment
• CEO – Juan Calle (it starts at the top, read all about Juan on dnjournal.com)
• Director of Marketing – Lori Anne Wardi (one the hardest working individuals in our industry)
• Entire .CO team
• Neustar.biz – the backend system and support
• Strategic partnership with the world’s largest registrar, GoDaddy.com
• Superbowl Ad in conjunction with GoDaddy.com
• gTLD classification which allows .CO to rank well in search engines
• Euntrepenuers, startups and established businesses that have adopted .CO (Twitter, Overstock, Amazon)
• Marketing, Marketing and more Marketing!

Am I missing anything?

In other .CO news it is rumored that Overstock will completely rebrand their company to O.CO. Stay tuned for more on this June 6th. Also GoDaddy is offering .CO domain names for $11.99 today.

The last big question on the mind of many…
.CO is coming near it’s one year birthday, how many .CO domain names will drop?

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I haven’t seen any news about this so figured I would bring some attention to it.

On October 5th 2010 Michael Berkens of TheDomains.com published information about an upcoming Moniker auction which Restaurants.com was part of. Berkens posted this in relation to the domain name, “Reserve price I’m told is north of $6 Million making this seem like a no-brainier great deal if you have the cash.”

On May 4th 2011 Andrew Allemann of DomainNameWire.com published information that Monte Cahn was suing Oversee.net for over $13,000,000. In that article it states Cahn was not paid commission for the sale of Restaurants.com.

1 + 1 = Restaurants.com sold for at least $6,000,000.

Unfortunately when the sales information for Restaurants.com does come out, we won’t see it on DNJournal.com’s top sales list. This sale was a domain name and website. As Berkens pointed out the website generates $80,000 – $90,000 revenue per month, receives roughly 250,000 visitors each month and is ranked #1 in Yahoo and Bing and #2 in Google for the keyword ”restaurants”.

Regardless of the final price this is a beautiful sale for both buyer and seller.

Speak Your Mind (12)

So what’s the big secret, we all already know that John Ferber is a millionaire from creating and then selling his Advertising.com business to Time Warner in 2004 for just shy of $500 million. You can read more about that story on ElliotsBlog.com. The secret here, or at least until Secret Millionaire airs tomorrow night, is that John is one of the nicest, down to earth, generous guys I know. You know what, I’m going to add brave to that list. His show was filmed in Los Angeles, California, an area called Skid Row. From what I’ve seen and read Skid Row is in a very run-down part of downtown Los Angeles with a large impoverished population and a high crime rate. In fact, Skid Row has one of the largest populations of homeless people in the United States.

Guessing based on previous Secret Millionaire shows John will be giving at least $100,000 of his own money to a few lucky charities or individuals.

John not only leaves the show with a big heart, but street cred!

John is having a special viewing party tomorrow night in South Florida. My wife and I both will be in attendance to support fellow domainer and friend John and his charity. If you can make it come, and even if you can’t, donate! John is only asking that attendees pledge $20 on MicroGiving.com, another site John founded and another way for him to give back. I know this will be very inspiring for many of us see and can’t wait to watch the show tomorrow. Awesome job John!!

Pictured above is John Ferber and girlfriend Jenna Wehner aboard last year’s DNCruise.

I almost forgot, John has been generous enough to lend out his South Florida mansion for next week’s Domainer Meetup. Visit SFDomainers.com for more information.

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