A few people have raised a concern that the sale looks suspicous, as the domain has not changed ownership according to the whois records.  DNN spoke to PriveCo President Tom Nardone on the phone and he gave us the exact details of the transaction. Priveco has closed on the deal to buy the domain outright, but whois ownership has not changed because the current owner is financing the deal. Priveco made a six-figure down-payment on the domain name and will be paying the rest off over the next few years with an 8% interest rate.

UPDATE : Nardone gave me the original numbers but I kept them out of the story as a courtesy to keep some of the specifics on the deal private.  Since TechCrunch just released added those, we’ll put them up too.  PriveCo paid $200,000 down and will pay $800,000 off over 5 years at 8% interest.

Since PriveCo has run Vibrators.com since 2002, essentially leasing the domain, the company is in the best position to end up buying the domain. Nardone explained “It’s not like it was easy to buy. . . .but we know the business. This keeps orders coming in to our warehouse.”   The company is in the best position to know the true value that the domain name can bring in to their organization and spreading out the acquisition costs over time allows them to spread that risk as well.

Press release follows after the jump.

Why Did They Buy A Domain Name For A Million Dollars?
This week, PriveCo Inc. purchased a domain name for $1 Million. PriveCo is a small company in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan and a million dollars is a lot of money to them, especially in these tough economic times. There is something special in the combination of PriveCo’s business strength and this name, though, and that combination might be enough to make the deal work.

PriveCo was founded in 1998 on the principle that some items are best bought in complete privacy.Back then, the Internet was new and shopping online was a novelty.PriveCo began selling embarrassing products online at a site called ShopInPrivate.com.Customers responded positively to a brand that promised personal items and complete privacy.

In the early days, PriveCo, whose name is a contraction of the words private and company, was a one-person operation They began by operating out of a spare bedroom.Now, ten years later, PriveCo is a thriving operation whose warehouse ships 1500+ packages per week.Still, they are privately owned, and not wealthy.

So what possessed them to spend $1,000,000.00 on a domain name?

• It is an instantly recognizable name,
• Tied to products that people want to buy in complete privacy
• Customers will value PriveCo’s policies and services
• Competitor websites lack professionalism and tact
• PriveCo has strong experience in this field

Will that be enough to make their business decision work? Well, that is a risk they’ve decided to take. Of all the companies in the world, though, PriveCo is probably the best choice to run Vibrators.com.

Source: http://www.domainnamenews.com/

On 28 October 2008, ICANN sent a notice of termination to EstDomains, Inc. (EstDomains) based on an Estonian Court record reflecting the conviction of EstDomains’ then president, Vladimir Tsastsin, of credit card fraud, money laundering and document forgery.

Pursuant to Section 5.3 of the Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA), ICANN may terminate the RAA before its expiration when, “Any officer or director of [a] Registrar is convicted of a felony or of a misdemeanor related to financial activities, or is adjudged by a court to have committed fraud or breach of fiduciary duty, or is the subject of judicial determination that ICANN deems as the substantive equivalent of any of these; provided such officer or director is not removed in such circumstances.”

ICANN received a response from EstDomains on 29 October in which it indicated that the Estonian Court record on which ICANN relied was not final and had been appealed. ICANN pended the termination of EstDomains’ RAA to analyze the claims made by EstDomains and to obtain independent information regarding the status of the alleged appeal.

On 7 November 2008, EstDomains was informed that, based on ICANN’s findings, ICANN was proceeding with the termination of EstDomains’ RAA, effective 24 November 2008.

ICANN’s records indicate that EstDomains manages approximately 281,000 domain names. To protect the interests of registrants, on 28 October 2008, ICANN published a Request for Informations seeking expressions of interest from registrars to receive a bulk transfer of the domain names managed by de-accredited registrar EstDomains.

ICANN is analyzing the responses to that request and will take measures to effectuate a smooth transition of the domain names managed by EstDomains to a qualified ICANN- accredited registrar.

Source: http://www.icann.org/

The problem arises because Google and other search engines view the two versions as two distinct sites, even if they have the exact same content (technically, in fact, the “www” denotes a subdomain that could point to different content).

Search engine ranking is based, among other things, on the number of incoming links to your site. If you keep the two versions available some people will link to “http://www.domain.com” while other people will link to the “http://domain.com”, basically splitting your backlink count.

Having two different versions might damage you in popular lists and social bookmarking sites as well. The picture on the right was extracted from Populicious, a site that lists the most popular sites on Delicious. If you take a look you will notice that Digg is listed both at the 7th and 10th position. This happens because the list treats “http://www.digg.com” and “http://digg.com” as two different sites. Shoud only one version be available the combined number would place Digg on the first position of the list.

How do you solve the problem for your blog? The easiest way is to set up a “301 Permanent Redirect” from the “no-www” version to the one with “www”, or vice-versa. Once the redirect is in place every time a visitor types http://domain.com he will automatically be redirected to the “www” version.

By the way, if you are wondering whether you should go with or without “www”, it does not matter. The important thing is that you pick one and stick with it.

Source: http://www.dailyblogtips.com/

a) “The domain is not a big deal” school: those people argue that while a good domain can help on the success of a website, it is not an important factor, because people are increasingly using browser bookmarks and subscription tools like RSS feeds, removing the need for them to remember the name of the website that they want to visit.

b) “The domain is vital” school: those people argue that despite bookmarks and RSS feeds, domains still play a very important role on the success of the websites built upon them. A good domain, therefore, can be the difference between a successful site and a flop.

Before proceeding with my analysis, however, I think it is important to define what a “good domain name” is. Summing it up, a good domain:

1. is short
2. is easy to remember
3. is easy to spell
4. is descriptive or brandable
5. does not contain hyphens and numbers
6. has a .com extension

You can read more about that on the article The 7 Characteristics of Good Domain Names.

I belong to the “domains are vital” school of thought, and I will tell you why, both with words and with numbers that I gathered on a small research.

Bear in mind that whenever I mention “domain name” throughout this article, I am also referring to the name of the website itself. In the majority of the cases those are the same after all, and for marketing purposes they should always be.

Everything Starts with the Domain

The biggest flaw on the argument of people that don’t think that domains play an important role on the success of websites lies on the assumption that web surfers will bookmark or subscribe to a given website right after visiting it.

That is not the case. Most people need to come across a website several times before making the decision to bookmark it or to subscribe to its service.

On the first visit they will come to that site via a link on another website or on a search engine. The domain name, however, will play an important role on the subsequent visits. If it is short, easy to remember and easy to spell, a visitor will not have a problem going back to that site in the future. If the domain is very long, hard to remember and hard to spell, however, there are great chances that the visitor will end up somewhere else, and will probably never return.

Now I am not talking exclusively about users that will remember your domain and type it directly in their browser URL bar after a couple of days. If your domain is long, difficult to spell or contains dashers and numbers, there is a possibility that the user will completely forget about it. After two or three days he won’t even remember that your site exists. A short and catchy domain, on the other hand, will stick on the mind of the visitor. Even if he will not be able to type that, Google is there to help him find your website again.

Another point to take into consideration is that connection between the domain name and the brand of a website. When you have dozens, if not hundreds of websites competing for the same niche, the brand factor will be determinant. If you then realize that the brand of any website is heavily anchored to its domain name, you can see how important domains become.

The Domains of the Top 250 Websites in the World

I know that numbers and facts speak louder than words, so instead of extending my prose I will back up my claims with a small research that I did. Basically I gathered the top 250 most popular websites in the world (according to Alexa) and counted how many characters and words their domains had. I also checked if they had a .com or another extension (e.g., .net, .org, .info and so on). Notice that sites with a foreign extension were excluded from the list for the sake of simplicity.

The results were pretty interesting. First of all, the average number of characters on the domain names was 7,15. The graph below presents the number of characters on the y-axis, and all the 250 domains on the x-axis. The red line is the average (the statistical mean).

Other interesting findings include:

• Over 177 out of 250 domains had 8 characters or fewer. That is more than 70% of them
• The average number of words was 1,58
• The most common domain name (statistical mode) had 7 characters and 2 words
• 86,2% of the domains had a .com extension
• only 11 out of the 250 domains (4,4%) contained a number
• only 3 out of the 250 domains (1,2%) contained a dash

The Domains of the Last 250 Front Page Stories on Digg

One could say that the list with the 250 most popular sites in the world could be biased due to the presence service portals like search engines, email services, social networks and upload sites. I don’t think that the bias would be significant, but in order to remove the doubts I also profiled the domains of the last 250 websites that reached the front page of Digg. Those are mostly content websites, so they should complement the initial findings.

The numbers here point into the same direction. The average number of characters on those domain names was 8,47. Slightly higher than on the previous case, but still a small number. The graph below illustrates that.

The average number of words on the domains is 1,67, which is very similar to the number found on the previous case. Other interesting findings include:

• 89,6% of the domain names had a .com extension
• 146 out of the 250 domains (58,4%) had 8 or fewer characters
• only 4 out of the 250 domains (1,6%) contained a dash
• the most common domain (statistical mode) had again 7 characters and 2 words (e.g. youtube.com)

Oh But I know A Website That Is Popular And…

At this point I am pretty sure that some of you are thinking “Oh but I know a website that pretty popular and has a really long and confusing domain name.”

Well, you just found an exception to the rule.

It is like when you discuss smoking and health problems. Even if the statistics say that smoking will reduce your life expectancy by 20 years, there is always someone that has an uncle or a grand father that smoked his whole life and yet lived to the age of 100 years.

Your uncle or grand father represents the exception, and in no way it diminishes the validity of the statistical findings. The same applies to the statistics we showed above, even if you know a popular website with a really long and weird domain.

Conclusion: The Law of Domain Names

Based on that evidence, here is the conclusion (or the law of domain names):

All other things being equal (e.g., marketing budget, content quality, design, affiliation with larger websites and so on), a website with a good domain name will always outperform a competitor with a bad or average domain name.

Which one should you pick, however, if you want to maximize the number of people that will trust your website? According to our poll, a .org is slightly more trusted than a .net extension. The result was 55% against 45%.

The total number of voters was 217, where119 voted for the .org extension and 98 for the .net.

The final result was more balanced than what I would have expected initially. At some point during the poll the .org extension had almost 70% of the voting preferences in fact, but .net made a come back on the last couple of days.

Some readers commented that each extension serves for a different purpose, and that people should respect that. When the web was conceived, it is true, people wanted .com domains to be used by commercial websites, .net by networks, .org by organizations and so on.

The problem is that over the time they stopped monitoring and restricting who were able to purchase the domains with those extensions, so even a 15-year-old boy in Sri Lanka could pretend to be an organization and buy a .org domain….

In my opinion, the practice of using a specific domain extension depending on your whether you a commercial entity or a network or an organization has been completely eroded, and does not make much sense anymore.

To complicate things even more, ICANN recently also approved the creation or any type of extension whatsoever, like .sex, .microsoft or .shit.

So my rule of thumb remains: always go with a .com!

If you really can’t find a free .com that you like, go with a .org, as our readers suggested.

Source: http://www.dailyblogtips.com/

For 99% of the projects we take on, a domain is already part of the equation. However, in some circumstances, we’ve been called on to provice advice for naming a domain, either for a new blog, a company launch or even just a friend’s website. Below, I’ve listed 12 tips I find indispensable when helping people select a great domain name.

1. Brainstorm 5 Top Keywords
When you first begin your domain name search, it helps to have 5 terms or phrases in mind that best describe the domain you’re seeking. Once you have this list, you can start to pair them or add prefixes & suffixes to create good domain ideas. For example, if you’re launching a mortgage related domain, you might start with words like “mortage, finance, home equity, interest rate, house payment” then play around until you can find a good match.

2. Make the Domain Unique
Having your website confused with a popular site already owned by someone else is a recipe for disaster. Thus, I never choose domains that are simply the plural, hyphenated or misspelled version of an already established domain. I still believe that Flickr desperately needs to buy Flicker.com – I hear kids in their 20’s tell parents in their 40’s and 50’s to see photos on Flickr and always envision that traffic going straight to the wrong domain.

3. Only Choose Dot-Com Available Domains
If you’re not concerned with type-in traffic, branding or name recognition, you don’t need to worry about this one. However, if you’re at all serious about building a successful website over the long-term, you should be worried about all of these elements, and while directing traffic to a .net or .org (as SEOmoz does) is fine, owning and 301′ing the .com is critical. With the exception of the very tech-savvy, most people who use the web still make the automatic assumption that .com is all that’s out there – don’t make the mistake of locking out or losing traffic to these folks.

4. Make it Easy to Type
If a domain name requires considerable attention to type correctly, due to spelling, length or the use of un-memorable words or sounds, you’ve lost a good portion of your branding and marketing value. I’ve even heard usability folks toute the value of having the letters include easy-to-type letters (which I interpret as avoiding “q,” “z,” “x,” “c,” and “p”).

5. Make it Easy to Remember
Remember that word-of-mouth and SERPs dominance marketing (where your domain consistently comes up for industry-related searches) both rely on the ease with which the domain can be called to mind. You don’t want to be the company with the terrific website that no one can ever remember to tell their friends about because they can’t remember the domain name.

6. Keep the Name as Short as Possible
Short names are easy to type and easy to remember (the previous two rules). They also allow for more characters in the URL in the SERPs and a better fit on business cards and other offline media.

7. Create and Fulfill Expectations
When someone hears about your domain name for the first time, they should be able to instantly and accurately guess at the type of content that might be found there. That’s why I love domain names like Hotmail.com, CareerBuilder.com, AutoTrader.com and WebMD.com. Domains like Monster.com, Amazon.com and Zillow.com (whom I usually praise) required far more branding because of their un-intuitive names.

8. Avoid Copyright Infringement
This is a mistake that isn’t made too often, but can kill a great domain and a great company when it does. To be sure you’re not infringing on anyone’s copyright with your site’s name, visit copyright.gov and search before you buy.

9. Set Yourself Apart with a Brand
Using a unique moniker is a great way to build additional value with your domain name. A “brand” is more than just a combination of words, which is why names like mortgageforyourhome.com or shoesandboots.com aren’t as compelling as branded names like bankrate.com or lendingtree.com. SEOmoz itself is a good example – “SEO” does a good job of explaining the industry we’re in and creating expectations, while “moz” gives a web association, and an association with being free, open, and community-driven.

10. Reject Hyphens and Numbers
Both hyphens and numbers make it hard to give your domain name verbally and falls down on being easy to remember or type. I’d suggest not using spelled-out or roman numerals in domains, as both can be confusing and mistaken for the other.

11. Don’t Follow the Latest Trends
Website names that rely on odd mis-spellings (like many Web 2.0 style sites), multiple hyphens (like the SEO-optimized domains of the early 2000’s), or uninspiring short adjectives (like “top…x,” “best…x,” “hot…x”) aren’t always the best choice. This isn’t a hard and fast rule, but in the world of naming conventions in general, if everyone else is doing it, that doesn’t mean it’s a surefire strategy. Just look at all the people who named their businesses “AAA… x” over the last 50 years to be first in the phone book; how many Fortune 2000’s are named “AAA company?”

12. Use an Ajax Domain Selection Tool
Websites like AJAXWhois and Domjax make it exceptionally easy to determine availability of a domain name – just remember that you don’t have to buy through these services. You can find a name you like that’s available, then go to your registrar of choice.

Source: http://www.seomoz.org/

Keywords are Nice, But they Don’t Matter Much
Don’t choose a domain name based on keywords in the URL. If you can’t get the short, sweet version, go for something cool and original, and if you can fit in one or more terms, you’re golden.

Type-Ins are Important
Don’t have a domain name that’s hard to type or hard to give out in person. People who’ve met you are much more likely to go home and check out your URL if you’ve got a catchy name that can be typed in easily. Between 5 and 15 characters is still short enough to where it can be remembered, and if you combine two simple words (that don’t run together with strange vowels), you can achieve a very usable name.

Build a Brand
Don’t choose something generic – make a brand for yourself. Unless your name brand is glasses.com or sportscars.com, its far better to be branded and individual if you’re shooting for long term recognition.

What about Anchor Text
If you need your domain name to be your anchor text in order to build your site, I’d recommend starting in a new sector. It’s terrific if you can get it, but relying on the anchor text of your URL is not a long term solution – our research is showing that anchor text is less important today than it was a year or two ago, and that trend will continue.

What to Choose
For example, if I wanted to target the home refinancing industry, most of the great names are taken, but I’d much rather have:

• svmortgages.com
• geomortgage.com
• refinancewest.com
• irefinance.com

Than cheesy, lengthy domain names that include the keyword like:

• refinance-your-home.com
• refinance-mortgages.com
• home-refinancing.com

Note how the top names are “brandable”, “typeable” and still contain the term. That’s the ticket.

Source: http://www.seomoz.org/

Anyway, after researching a bit I managed to find two interesting tools for that purpose. The first one is dyyo.com, a search engine that will help you find 4 letter domain names.

Some time ago I even started looking for 2 and 3 letter domain names, only to discover that they were all gone… so 4 letter is as short as you can go.

According to the tool there are approximately 28,000 4 letter domain names still available. Most of them are unpronounceable words like bqhj.com or pqhn.com, and that is where the tool comes handy. You can specify letters for each position, so just stick some vowels in there, hoping to come up with something useful.

The second tool is 5letter.com, and as you probably guessed it can be used to find 5 letter domain names. Here you create a fragment and specify if the domain name should begin with that frament, end with it, or merely contain it.

For example, if I specify domains to begin with the fragment “po” I get the following names:

• pozzr.com
• pobie.com
• pokoz.com
• podrr.com

Source: http://www.dailyblogtips.com/

The Daily Domainer blog has an interesting article titled “Expired – But Not Gone” describing the process in detail. Basically once a domain expires it enters into the “Auto Renew Grace Period”. This period usually lasts 30 days and the owner of the domain is able to renew anytime during that time frame. Should the owner fail to renew the domain it will enter into the Redemption period.

The registrar becomes the owner of the domain on this period, and it will try to sell the domain through auctions or retain it in the case it generates PPC revenues. Finally if the domain is not sold through an auction and if it is also not generating revenues the registrar will release it.

Source: http://www.dailyblogtips.com/

Once you decide to buy a domain you will need to search for domains that are not registered yet, but where exactly should you go? Below I will list 3 useful services for someone looking for domain names.

Who.is: you type the domain name and the server will check the availability with most of the extensions (.com, .net, .org, .biz, .us, .tv and so on). The advantage of this service is that, if the domain is already registered, it will also display the details of the registration (date, registrant, company, etc.).

Instant Domain Search: this site checks the availability of .com, .net and .org domains only. The advantage is that it reports the results in real time. As you type the domain you will see whether it is free or not, letter by letter.

Domains Bot: if you are having trouble finding a suitable domain this service will certainly help you. All you need to do is type one or more keywords and it will generate hundreds of suggestions.

Source: http://www.dailyblogtips.com/