Saturday Tidbits

Another Saturday here already! For all of you celebrating Halloween Monday with your families or this weekend at parties with your friends have fun and be careful!

• The .ME Premium auction is underway and got off to a pretty quick start. There are still many great .ME names without any opening bids including Tourism.me, Services.me, Wealth.me, Culture.me, Tablet.me, Realty.me and many more. The highest bid right now is shared by top.me and RealEstate.me which are both currently at $1,550. This auction is ending Thursday, Nov. 3rd.

• Web.com finalized the acquisition of NetworkSolutions.com this week. They now own NetSol as well as Register.com, the combination of those two registrars gives Web.com control over an additional 8.4 million domain names (according to webhosting.info). Web.com has recently been mass advertising their cheap web design and hosting options for businesses via TV commercials. According to a press release, Web.com paid NetSol Holdings LLC (NetworkSolutions.com parent company) $405 million in cash and 18 million shares of Web.com common stock. It will be very interesting to see what happens to the Network Solutions and Register.com brands, obviously Web.com is the shorter and more memorable name for new/non domainer customers. Even with more than 8.4 million domains housed with Web.com, this is still only a fraction GoDaddy.com’s nearly 40 million registered domains.

• My first article of a four part series on acquiring domain names was published this week at iGoldRush.com.  This first article focuses on strategy for hand registering domain names.  The series I am writing is geared more towards new domain investors, which works out great for iGoldRush as it really is a go to site for those learning the ropes in the domaining world.  iGoldRush.com is the most comprehensive domain name guide and news resource on the Internet.

• DomainShane.com reported this week that the domain name 55.com was sold earlier this year for $2.3 million dollars via the 4.cn domain marketplace.  Shane has been talking about the Chinese domain market for over a year now and has really sparked interest by many sellers in the 4.cn forum.  Numeric domain names are very popular amongst the Chinese and it seems many of the highest numeric domain sales are coming from China.  The Chinese domain market is only getting stronger and is worth paying attention to if you are a serious domain seller.  According to DNJournal.com 11.com just sold for $525k through the MediaOptions.com newsletter, the buyer a Chinese company.

• At the request of many domain registrars, ICM Registry has extended the Sunrise Period for .XXX domain names.  At the end of the week ICM estimated they received nearly 72,000 applications with many more coming in and yet to be processed.  Elliot Silver predicts that by Monday there will be over 100,000 applications.

• The complete list of results of the 2011 TRAFFIC Auction were posted yesterday at RicksBlog.com.  Rick also just announced this morning that they will be adding an award for domain “broker of the year” to the TRAFFIC 2012 awards.