Question answered by Matt Cutts – the head of Google’s Webspam team. This is a new video from March 7, 2011.
Archive for Domaining
Short .DE Domains Released: HR.de, E.de, G.de and more
On 12 January 2011, 10:00 CET, the central German registry DENIC released nine short .de domains for registration which were previously blocked due to temporary injunctions: dw.de, e.de, f.de, g.de, hr.de, sr.de, x.de, y.de and z.de. Domains are now assigned to new owners.
Registration was based on “first come, first served” basis but while usually such domain landrushes are organized through EPP protocol, this time it was based on old school fax technology..
I can’t see any dropcatchers on the list except one: Michau Enterprises Limited (they snapped x.de) – European registrar and dropcatcher for .pl, .eu, .de and .sk domains. I am looking forward to see x.de being auctioned at Aftermarket.pl website.
List of all nine short .de domains and owners:
dw.de | Martin Steinkamp |
e.de | Felix Köhler |
f.de | Patrick Federhen |
g.de | Hans Lackner |
hr.de | HR STAFFING CORP |
sr.de | Martin Steinkamp |
x.de | Michau Enterprises Limited |
y.de | Edit Stein |
z.de | Martin Steinkamp |
Some of the names listed above are worth well over 50-100k EUR. It will be interesting to see who will acquire g.de or e.de. It is also good to see that HR STAFFING CORP from the US managed to register hr.de. The more end users use short .de domains, the better.
Source: DENIC
Bido.com For Sale! Make Your Offer
So here it is: the TOP story of the day – “Bido is ceasing operation as of May 5, 2010. All transactions and accounts will be gracefully finalized and closed.” End of quote from Bido website.
I will not deliberate on why Bido failed and if I liked it or not – you can read other domainers opinions on other websites like DomainNameWire or you can just think for a moment on your own attitude to Bido auction platform. The only thing I really see popping out everywhere in comments to this news is that Bido was to complex. I have similar feeling about it.
But let’s get back to my post title.. I found an interesting comment on DNW.com made by Jarred Cohen, COO of Bido.com:”[…] Since we made the announcement this morning, we had some significant offers come in. If anyone else reading would like to explore acquiring the Bido.com brand, list, and technology, get in touch with me soon. This is a time sensitive opportunity.[…]”.
So it looks like there’s one and only chance to acquire Bido.com and the price is probably not so high taking into account the fact that they just wanted to close it down and didn’t even think of selling Bido. I believe there are at least couple of companies that may be interested in acquiring Bido. Let’s see what future brings. If you would like to contact Jarred Cohen please email him: jarred@bido.com.
I wish all the best to Sahar and the Team, and I am sure they will surprise us with new interesting stuff in coming future!
.COM & .NET Prices To Increase July 1, 2010

Or maybe you are just fine with these fees increases and it doesn’t really influence your domain business at all?
Will You Renew Your .tel Domain Names? VOTE!
Most of .tel names are expiring this month. Will you renew your .tel domains?
I have only 10 .tel domains and I have just renewed all of them. There are some names for personal use and some for businesses. I am not a big fan of that extension but in some cases it can be useful. Renewal fee is about $10 / year.
Why is Domaining Still so US Focused?
It was always very interesting but also wired to me that domaining was so US oriented. When I was at my first T.R.A.F.F.I.C. show in Las Vegas in 2007 nobody, NOBODY was really interested in ccTLDs. COM was king and there was no doubt about it. This is still the case – COM is the most popular domain name in the world but this world is expanding very fast and COM share market is shrinking.
The truth is that in the European Union COM is usually the second or third domain name and ccTLDs are the kings of its markets. This is exactly the case in Poland, where I live and where are 1,7M .pl names registered. There are also 190,000 .eu names and only 170,000 .com domains. The same situation is in other markets such us .de (Germany), .co.uk (United Kingdom) etc. According to the lates VeriSign report there are 83M COM domains and 76M ccTLDs.
And don’t get me wrong – it is OK for me as I have less competition here in Europe and I can easily buy good ccTLDs cheap and develop ccTLD projects but it is always strange to see how ignorant some people are.
The same case is with IDNs. I mean IDN names not TLDs – just to give you an example: pożyczka.pl would be IDN for nonIDN version pozyczka.pl. The meaning for that domain is “loan”. And YES, people in Poland start using IDNs a lot and in 2-3 years they will get more popular than nonIDNs. How do I know that? I see my IDN names statistics. For some pair of parked names – IDNs are getting more UV and revenue than nonIDNs.
But I have good news for ccTLD investors – good times for us are coming :) DomainSponsor has recently announced opening its subsidiary in Europe, DomainFest is coming to Prague in October 6-7, 2010 and T.R.A.F.F.I.C. conference is coming back to Europe in 2010, this time to Milan (Italy) and Dublin (Ireland). In September 2009 we heard that Go Daddy expands further into Europe with new data center to ensure faster access for Go Daddy’s growing European customer base. More of such news will be announced this year – there is no doubt about it.
And world is bigger than only US and the EU. There are big markets in Asia, South America as well – great potential there for sure. According to Internet World Stats US has now ~ 220M Internet users, EU: 310M, Asia: 740M (China: 360M), Brazil: 70M. BBC prepared nice Internet map, where you can see Internet penetration and users in the years 1998-2008. There are 1,7 billion Internet users on our planet Earth.
BTW Check out Facing The Absurd blog written by one of the finest European domainers. You will find there things that you won’t read about anywhere else.
38,172 .eu IDNs during the first hour
Today at 11:00 CET EURid (.eu registry) released .eu IDNs. 38 172 domains were registered during the first hour.
Total number of .eu names has just passed 3,100,000 domains. In the first hour of IDN .eu landrush 10 domains were registered each second.
Most of the best names were snapped by Realtime.at – Austrian drop catcher specializing in .eu drop catching (they have around 50 .eu registrars). Snapped .eu domains will be auctioned on Sedo platform. Auctions start tomorrow and are available only for preregistered customers.
First 10 IDNs registered:
Which countries registered the most IDNs in the first hour?
1. Germany
2. Czech Republic
3. France
4. Luxemburg
5. Poland
6. Belgium
7. Great Britain
8. Greece
9. Sweden
Source: EURid