Last year at this time, I blogged about the Hollywood Florida T.R.A.F.F.I.C East and how impressed I was the sales totalled $4.9 M with the top price going to Cameras.com at 1.5 M. Well for those that thought that was the day domains peaked you were wrong.

Yesterday, the same expo a year later in Miami Florida, netted $7.8 M shattering all records for a domain name auction. I wathced some of the live video cast via Moniker.com. Coming in at #1 this year was Computers.com for a $2.2 M price tag.

Rounding out the top 10 was as follows:

1. computer.com $2,200,000
2. investment.com $900,000
3. sportinggoods.com $450,000
4. cowboys.com $275,000
5. table.com $260,000
6. crosswordpuzzles.com $210,000
7. criminallawyers.com $195,000
8. promotion.com $170,000
9. poker.mobi $150,000
10.ringtones.mobi $145,000

Read the rest of the auction results here.

I like seeing .mobi’s doing well as when they were first announced I invested in them. I have sold off some and am already seeing solid returns. With ringtones.mobi going for 145k, I think I’ll put up polyringtones.mobi and some other similar names for sale as well.

Congratulations to both the buyers and sellers of the domains, and of course hats off to Moniker and Monte Cahn for throwing this annual event that continues to out-perform itself.

It has been a solid week for domainers in the world of internet marketing. I’m a true lover of domain names, and I have been coined an addict by my colleagues - an accusation I have trouble defending since I have some utterly useless domains in my portfolio. We’ll save those gems for another post.

Being an avid buyer and seller of domains, one of the sites on my must read list is the weekly Dnjournal sales report. This week, all top 20 domain name sales went for 5 figures each. Coming in at #1 this week is Atomico.com selling for $80,000 at AfternicDLS. You may be thinking; “Isn’t Atomico something Godzilla fought?”. The answer is yes - but it’s also the name of a high end investment firm called Atomico Investing. The domain now redirects to their investment site.

Coming in at #2 was Subscription.com at $74,000 (GreatDomains/Sedo) . Also from Sedo, HOO.com goes for $47,000. Read the rest of the top 20 here.

Possibly the most interesting development noted was that Weiber.de went for €25,000 or roughly $35,000 US. Weiber is German for “skirts”. Certain country code domains are starting to gain momentum in this industry. Many domainers are buying keyword.tld’s for different countries that have not been popularized yet as well, just in case they become solid investments in the near future.

Lately I have been getting heavily into snatching expired domains on the aftermarket. I feel this is beneficial for two very profitable reasons. The first is the quick flip. You can always find an end-user buyer with solid expired domain sniffing techniques.

The second way I use this for profit is by finding sites that have lots of backlinks on a topic I feel like monetizing and then start a blog or content site on it. Although most of the time a domain will lose it’s PR when it expires, if the links remain the PR will eventually come back.

Finding a large list of expiring or expired domains is not very hard, but finding detailed stats on each domain is very time consuming and tedious. Cue AboutDomains.net.

There are several things I have found using this tool that lacked on other sites. It’s also 100% free.
- Lists pagerank of expiring domains and can list by pagerank

- Determines if pagerank is valid

- Lists Alexa ranking

- Lists Yahoo! link popularity

With all this data streamed and organized as beautifully as it is on AboutDomains.net, you are sure to start finding some success in the domain aftermarket as I have. Some of the domains you’ll find are so good you will surely need to backorder them. Subscribe to my RSS feed for an upcoming article on back-ordering expired domains.

Godaddy has decided to go with Amanda Beard as their new GoDaddy girl.

Amanda Beard is right on track with the GoDaddy girl stereotype. She is edgy like the company brands itself, and she is an accomplished business women. Oh, and she won a gold medal in the olympics.

At the end of the day, GoDaddy girls are all about marketing and branding. Amanda Beard will replace Danica Patrick race car driver as the current Godaddy Girl.

Well if you ever wondered who major registrars bow down to at the end of the day, think the highly popular Vbulletin Forums. Even more specific, the 3rd party fraud control they employ in Croatia. Yes, a simple e-mail complaining of an expired VB license, and echoes of “how high?” ring throughout Godaddy. The following story happened to a friend of mine, with his site being pulled down late last week (and for the record, the license was valid bought on the owned $160 option)

I recently noticed a post by a friend of mine who owns a site called Highstakesreport.com. He was furious, because Godaddy had pulled his site down due to a copyright infringement complaint, issued by Vbulletin. Apparently there was a missing plural on the VB licensed URL so whatever automated process that they run picked it up as
invalid.

For the record, I happen to know it was a valid license as this site was my creation once upon a time before selling it to the MacPokerOnline Network. This is not the issue, however, that should be concerning. What bothered
me the most was how Godaddy would just shut down the site on a whim without so much as contacting the owner of the site in question.

Now, I am a fan of Godaddy and have been for a long time, but I only use them for a registrar these days. They do have hosting solutions that are right for some people as well, but I wouldn’t recommend hosting your site at the same place the domain is registered at. With that being said, I am disapointed with Godaddy’s actions here.
Godaddy’s rash decision negatively affected HSR in 3 ways.

1. The owner of HighStakesReport lost traffic, qualified and targeted, and possibly money making life-time clients.

2. The site may now be adversley affected in the search engines. Any SEO knows how long it takes to gain quality organic search positions and it is hard work, let alone how much harder it is in the highly competitive Poker SEO industry. In my experience f a site is down when search engine spiders try to connect to it, there are negative reprecussions in the SERPS, aka losing rankings. This is because the search engines are in the business of pleasing users, and a user is not
pleased when they hit a blank error page.

3. The site’s branding took a hit, with their loyal readers wondering why they can’t afford to keep up their site which is a common assumption with an error page.

My friend tried multiple times and multiple angles for them to put the site back up, and after exhausting all his options made the post on the forums. The main point is that Godaddy pulled the site without a warning, which gave the site unneccassary downtime.

Why does VB have such clout at Godaddy for? Why wasn’t the owner of HSR notified of the infraction, and given a time period to respond or defend himself? What happened to innocent until proven guilty? These are questions we have to ask ourselves, as webmasters, as business people. If Godaddy is a partner to us, then
they should act like one, and not like big brother plucking sites off the net for no good reason.

If you would like to read the entire first post by the owner of HighStakesReport and continued discussion, visit it here at PAW.

I was waiting for the Mercedes-Benz.tv website to launch today, and it did not disappoint. The website will feature a weekly 20 minute show as well as running content 24 hours a day on 5 different channels, content fit for a Mercedes Benz lifestyle.

This is one of the most amazing websites I have ever seen media wise and it makes me wonder what the future holds for the .tv extension. This is definitely a step in the right direction and a promising glimpse of the internet and TV merger that is quickly approaching us.

(archived)

It must not have been more than a month ago when somebody at Name Pros forums posted a very long list of still available LLL.mobi domain names. I thought I’d register a few just in case and so I did. If I had only known! If I had only known that a month later, the LLL.mobi’s would not only be gone, but selling for 6 or 7 times more than they were bought for.

Obviously I had a hunch. Why else would I register 4 of them? If I had truly known for sure, though, I would have bought them all. Every single one of them. I am holding on to all of mine for now, I think they will reach the value of xxxx and if they don’t then I didn’t lose much. If I had bought the whole lot I’d sell lots of them now … I’m kicking myself for this because I could have flipped 100k easily in a month.

All in all I’d suggest you to hold on to your LLL.mobi’s. I had an offer of $1000 for all 4 of mine and I paid $120 for them a month ago. The value of them is rising quickly, and for those of you who “knew” and bought up hundreds of them, my hat is off to you.

(archived)

The Traffic EAST tradeshow yesterday saw over 4.9 million dollars worth of domain names sold in a live auction. Bids were from live bidders and left bids. Topping the list was Cameras.com which sold for $1.5 million dollars. VB.com went for $130,000 and mortage.net went for $149,000. After each large sale, their was a loud applause and cheering heard. The auction was played live on Webmaster Radio.

What’s most interesting from the domain auction is how hot .mobi domains are. Flowers.mobi went for an incredible $200,000. Fun.mobi went for $100,000 and hot.mobi went for $40,000. If you do not have any .mobi real estate I suggest you invest in some, as these sales numbers for a new domain extension are very promising for the .mobi industry.

For a full list of the $4.9 Million Domain Sales, Check Traffic EAST results