Saturday Tidbits

A new gTLD conference was announced this week. The Digital Marketing & gTLD Strategy Congress will take place March 12-13th in New York city.  The founding sponsor is Afilias and it looks like it will be a very informative conference which will see several workshops, roundtable discussions and speakers including Donuts Inc CEO Richard Tindal, Neustar’s Senior Business Executive Ken Hansen, CEO of PIR (.org) Nancy Gofus and Director of Global Communications at Deliotte Bill Barret among many other highly qualified speakers.  Early signup is $995, you can get more info and register here.

A few .COM sales to speak of were announced or revealed this week.  Sedo brokered the sale of Paste.com for $100,000.  The buyer, Paste Magazine currently has their new .com acquisition forwarding to PasteMagazine.com.  It was revealed that FreeWebsite.com sold for $500,000 earlier this year.  FreeWebsite.com recently launched with a similar feel to the Web.com business model offering free websites for business owners.  Sedo also recently brokered the sale of Jane.com for $60,000.  While we’re on the topic of domain sales, Marchex released a list of it’s top 500 end user domain sales over the last few years.  Andrew at DNW did a great job of analyzing some of these sales in a part one and two of his Marchex end user sales posts.

End user sales are the goal of Domain Holdings Group this month as it’s reported they are attending the largest energy and construction conference in the Middle East, ADIPEC.  The show kicks off tomorrow and Domain Holdings will be there looking to make connections and taking premier .COM domains to the table for their clients.  Gas.com, Oil.com, Energy.com, AbuDhabi.com and Dubai.com are being brokered by DHG and they are really going the extra mile(s) to spike interest in these top .com domains.  Way to go Domain Holdings! This is a great way to get exposure for your clients domains.

Two UDRP decisions and a RDNH decision were in the headlines this week.  A UDRP on Buff.com was rejected by the respective UDRP panel and CrowdSourcing.com was also spared in a decision that was put forth without the owner even responding to the UDRP.  Tarheel Take-Out, LLC of Chapel Hill, North Carolina is the newest addition to the reverse domain name hijacking hall of shame.  They brought a case against owners of Takeout.com, Versimedia and their attempts to take the name backfired. Read more about this case on TheDomains here.

Adam Dicker launched a new video blog in the last couple of weeks that is piled with invaluable information for domainers looking to improve, monetize and successfully sell their portfolios.  I haven’t gotten a chance to watch every video yet but I’m really looking forward to spending a lot more time at TheArtOfTheName.com.  Thanks to Adam for launching such a valuable resource for domainers!