DomainTools Blog

AboutUs.org is a company with a mission, to write a detailed article about every domain in the world and spotlight great websites. On Feb 22nd, Register.com linked to it from their whois records, then on the 24th Network Solution linked in as well. Both registrars have incorporated a whois link pointing to the AboutUs page for the domain listed on the whois record. Two other registrars that incorporated earlier were eNom and BulkRegistrar, they have been live for about 4 months. Network Solutions and Register.com are the two oldest registrars in the world with some of the best names under management, this should add some new eyeballs and continue the rapid growth of the project. AboutUs allows the general public to document their favorite websites, people are hungry to edit and share their sites with others. With an easy way to edit, a friendly staff and group of dedicated volunteers, documenting a website throughly has never been easier.

The article on Google Maps and Microsoft are outstanding, you can’t find all the information these pages describe so easily on the official sites. This documentation is constructed mostly by users after they use a website, no PR stuff in there just honest documentation by users for users. Companies don’t document like outsiders do and especially when the entire web is able to help. AboutUs is also setting up communities around subject matter to tie similar sites together, this allows for easy browsing of similar websites. Wikipedia did AboutUs a huge favor by popularizing the Wiki concept that anyone should be allowed to edit. Whenever someone edits/adds a sentence or fixes a grammar error they are improving the quality of the discussion.

If you haven’t used AboutUs yet now is a great time to try it, hopefully more Registrars will embrace the project and it will make it easier for users to document all websites.

As we reported earlier, RegisterFly is in chaos right now. We are are hearing reports that private registration in the whois, which consumers thought protected them, may do the opposite. Private registrations shields the identity of who owns the domain, which means the only company that can help you if something goes wrong is your registrar. What happens if your registrar doesn’t answer emails and will not process your renewals? This is a very real situation for hundreds of thousands of people. Customers are frustrated because they can’t prove they own their domains, and they may loose them permanently.

If a customer has a public registration or normal record, they can fax their driver’s license to another registrar and prove ownership. Once the domain leaves the old registrar where information was guarded, it would be hard to prove to a third party what happened. With a historic record of who owns what domain and when, it is easy to fight domain theft.

Further news today from ICANN - they have found RegisterFly to be in breech of its accreditation. RegisterFly has 15 days to cure the breech or ICANN will pull the plug. The signs don’t look good for the company, but this may help the customers if it is done quickly. We reported earlier that some customers had expressed suicidal thoughts out of frustrations with the company.

A friend of mine told me about the Flying Karamazov Brothers performance at the Seattle Symphony Hall. I thought it sounded fun so I decided to book some tickets. The first thing I did was attempt to visit their domain and look for a preview of the upcoming performance I wanted to see. I start every search on DomainTools for R&D purposes and not Google, so I tend to find things most people don’t. The first thing I tried was Psychic Whois, it predicts what the remaining part of the domain is, so I thought, boy, how many “flying” domains can there be, this will be easy. Wrong. There are so over 7,000 Flying domains and hundreds of flying animals. 181 Flying Fish and 154 Flying Pig domains. So I tried our Domain Suggestion search engine, I entered “Flying Karamazov” and bam! I was surprised to see the FlyingKaramazov.com as available. I know our readership and at least one person out there will snipe the name so I registered it for them for safe keeping, (the Karamazov brothers will find this post later and they are free to have their domains at no cost. BTW, I enjoyed the show). I found it extremely interesting that I was going to a public performance and the domain name for the performers were not even registered. The Karamazov.com domain was registered however by someone trying to monetize it. The most disturbing thing was something that looked like Domains by Proxy but in fact was just the registrant pretending to be a proxy service. Clever, but highly questionable, there should be a rule against this.

Registrant [6999]:
    Whois Data Shield
    4300 South US Highwy 1
    Suite 203-168
    Jupiter
    FL
    33477
    US 

Administrative Contact [6999]:
    Domain Administration  
    Whois Data Shield
    4300 South US Highwy 1
    Suite 203-168
    Jupiter
    FL
    33477
    US
    Phone: +1.15614270129

Next step to finding the Flying Karamazov Brothers was going to Google. I entered their name into the search box and I found them, they own their acronym of fkb.com. I suggest companies register all variations on their name before they establish themselves under that name or a $10 mistake will cost thousands in legal fees later.

Reports are flying in about RegisterFly’s implosion. Registerfly’s web site went dark for most of the Monday after the CEO Kevin Medina changed the root password and locked everyone out. It started earlier in the month, on February 12th, vice president John Naruszewicz threw the first major punch by suing the CEO with a claim of misappropriation of corporate funds. The CEO and the Vice-President both own 50% of the company so they are in a dead-lock right now. It seems Mr. Naruszewicz has taken higher ground by sending Mr. Medina a letter of termination.

In the lawsuit, Mr. Naruszewicz claims Medina used company funds to buy a $6000 Chihuahua, $9,000 in escorts, $6,000 worth of liposuction, and $10,000-a-month Miami Beach penthouse. Meanwhile some customers are expressing suicidal thoughts. “I am about to lose 476 domains with registerfly,” he wrote. “In the batch of domains I am about to lose is my bread and butter domains that put food in my family’s mouthes and roofs over my employees heads… You know for a few minutes there I could relate with the people that take their own lives.” Another customer notes that even when he pays them his domains don’t renew, “.. so far 2 of my domains have been allowed to expire. They took my money for one of them, I believe that is called fraud and the other was funded in a quick checkout account, but was never processed after performing the renewal.”

Customers are livid and many have been criticizing ICANN. But Frank Fowlie ICANN ombudsman says ICANN has no power over registrars except to pull their accreditation completely. He notes that 70% of the complaints he received in the last 2 weeks were about RegisterFly. Naruszewicz flew out to meet with ICANN on Tuesday. Most likely in an attempt to save the company’s accreditation. If the accreditation is lost they will loose all their customers. ICANN is expected to make an announcement later this week.

Former Wall Street Journal reporter David Kesmodel has uncovered about 30 domains in the Internet REIT portfolio that are misspellings on Google and Google products. A majority of the domains are based on the Google Earth product. Internet REIT is venture backed by Maveron LLC, which was co-founded by Howard Schultz - the chairman of Starbucks. When asked for comment, iREIT’s CEO, Bob Martin, and COO, Craig Snyder, told Mr. Kesmodel in an interview, “the company has been taking steps to remove “legally sensitive” domains from its portfolio, having acquired many through acquisitions of smaller domain investors’ portfolios. The company is in the process of implementing a system to identify and remove such names from its portfolio of about 400,000 monikers.”

Internet REIT is generally considered to be one of the White Hats in the domain industry so this discovery is very out of character for them. Since being notified of the trademarks, IREIT has stopped monetizing the domains and the domains no longer resolve. Having these types of domains in a portfolio can be a scary legal situation for any big portfolio, the standard fine is $1000 per name under the Anti-Cybersquatting law. Any company can make easy money by owning famous typos but they face many large risks that generally out weight the gains. Considering that IREIT most likely will not renew these domains, it is safe to say that someone else will picking them up. Trademark domains have a bad cycle of abuse - if a camper gets wise they delete the domain and the cycle starts all over again. Small portfolio owners take more chances and generally don’t know the legal risks involved when camping on trademarks.

Mr. Kesmodel also uncovered may other famous trademark names in the iREIT portfolio in a later post that day.

First off, I am in favor of legal and ethical parking pages, but clearly cybersquatted pages are not only wrong, they are illegal. The domain industry needs to police itself or someone will police it for us from the outside - doing more damage than a self policed industry. I wanted to highlight a clear example of what I think is an illegal parking page. In the example below, I was trying to go to British Airways. I typed in BritishAir.com and arrived at a parking page. British Airways actually owns BA.com, a two letter domain name, and they redirect it their own longer domain name BritishAirways.com. One can see how BritishAir.com violates the law when it appears to actually be British Airways. On first impression one might think they actually arrived at the real website, especially since the words “British Airways” are the first words that are readable.

I recommend British Airways get a good domain attorney to help themselves out. British Airlines.com and several other misleading domains are taken by cybersquatters around their name.Now for a good example of a parking page. Name Administration owns PotSticker.com. A type of food is generic and no one can claim ownership over it - hence it is not a trademark name.

We need more potstickers in this world and less criminal pages. Most people I talk with don’t understand the difference between a legal parking pages and illegal parking pages, and call everything that parks cybersquatting. Every industry has white hats and black hats. White hats follow the rules and black hats try tricks - even if they violate some rules and/or laws. The black hats always make the industry look bad and get 90% of the press.

Often thought leaders define new words but forget to register the domain name. Seth Godin in his blog this week defined the word, SheepWalking. Seth should remember to register the .COM before he publicly posts about new words in his blog. Here is Seth’s interesting definition of SheepWalking:

I define “sheepwalking” as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a braindead job and enough fear to keep them in line. You’ve probably encountered someone who is sheepwalking. The TSA ’screener’ who forces a mom to drink from a bottle of breast milk because any other action is not in the manual. A ‘customer service’ rep who will happily reread a company policy six or seven times but never stop to actually consider what the policy means. A marketing executive who buys millions of dollars of TV time even though she knows it’s not working–she does it because her boss told her to.

Looks like a loyal reader named Russell Page registered the SheepWalking.com domain for Seth and ironically there is a post from Mr. Page on January 24th to Seth, titled, “Forgive me Seth”. But blog post was before the blog entry and the registration date so he was apologizing about something else.

Remember to register your words!

Mark Albers of Florida is the owner of WickedRadio.com. However a radio station out of Wisconsin called Wicked Radio has a problem with that. The radio station in Wisconsin registered WickedRadio.org on Nov 29th, 2004 but Mark registered WickedRadio.com on Nov 10th, 2005. Clearly Mr. Albers registered his domain after Wicked Radio registered their domain, so should he be forced to give them the domain?

The easy uneducated answer is, yes, without looking closer. But we used our wayback machine to see some history on the domain and it looks like the answer is actually no.

WickedRadio.org	WickedRadio.com

WickedRadio.com is just a parking page. Everybody hates a parking page but parking pages are legitimate businesses too. It appears someone else had registered Wicked Radio back in 2002. Our records are not clear who, but that person failed to pay the renewal fees in 2005 and the domain was caught by Pool.com. The radio station or a DJ named “MarchHare” posted a long rant on their website asking visitors to harass Mr. Albers.

It appears that the owner of www.wickedradio.com is not wanting to work with Wicked Radio in our trying to purchase that domain for a reasonable price. We are now appealing to all our listeners to help join the fight against domain squatting and outright being lame. This Mr Mark Albers is showing the world how bad he really is at doing business. This information will be forwarded to the Isthmus, and all of the Indymedia.org media outlets, and to fox news. Mark Albers is doing nothing more then being childish with something he has gained in what seems to be foul intentions. If Mr Albers was going to put up a real website he should have done that by now. And what kind of website would it be if it was going to be like he said “In addition, my plans to make a functional website at this domain that is unrelated in any way to the website run by you. If you choose to pursue legal action against me, I will of course defend my interests.” Well what does that say? What can he possible setup using wickedradio.com that has nothing to do with what goes on here? If it has to do with low power fm, Pirate radio, Podcasting, Shoutcast streaming, or any number of other things realting to radio on and off the internet then he would be scamming me out of visitors and we all know that is the case. I get numurous emails every week about people accidentally going to wickedradio.com instead of wickedradio.org. So Mr Albers if you read this in the media I hope you are satisfied with defeating a small non-profit donation based community sponsored radio outfit. And I can only pray that this information falls into the hands of any potential customer you may have. I have researched Mr Mark Albers work and what he does for a living and he is a sham. Please pass this along we need to do something as not just Americans but as a Planet to stop domain squatting and have some sort of international rule about what people can do with domain names. If you would like to contact Mr Mark Albers and let him know that what he is doing is wrong here is his information.

markalbers[at]adelphia.net, 12518 World Cup Lane, Wellington, FL, US, 33414 (561) 629 3275

There was someone else that owned the .COM version prior to the radio station purchasing the .ORG. The radio station didn’t just forget to register the .com - it was already taken when they looked at buying it. They should have placed a backorder on the service and they likely would have been the owner of the domain in less then a month. Instead they are bitter because they have branded themselves the .ORG and customers get confused.

The radio station, in our view, is picking on the legitimate owner of the .COM name. Reverse Hijacking is common but it is unusual that the hijacker resorts to going on the air and asking listeners to harass the current owner.

Whois records just got better at DomainTools today because we have integrated Compete.com data into our records.

The metrics industry in general got a lot more exciting when Compete.com showed up last fall. Competition is what keeps innovation happening, and it was good to see a fresh face on the scene because things were stale. We have seen very little happen in the free global metrics space for years - comScore was thought to be more accurate but was a closed paid system that not many companies choose to afford. SEO marketing companies tend to go for the free service and until Compete.com showed up there was nothing to challenge the lone free Internet metrics service, Alexa. We have had Alexa data inside our records for a over a year and we thought it would be fair to add the new kid to the metrics industry as well. Some people, like Google’s insider Matt Cutts, question Compete’s data and say it is inaccurate. I think the verdict is still out, but I know more data can’t be a bad thing.

Alexa and Compete have huge difference when you look at their graphs. Last year DomainTools was ranked 190th in the world by Alexa. We certainly don’t feel that big, we have a few million visitors a month but should we be in the top 200? My friend Alex Algard founded another Seattle startup called Whitepages.com and they serve between 8-10 million pages a day. While DomainTools serves about 5% of that amount, both his traffic and ours are growing.

Geoffrey Mack the Product Manager of Alexa noted in his blog:

…[A] colleague who had noticed that Alexa had shown a steady decline of his site’s reach over the course of the year, which stood in stark contrast to his own internal stats which showed a steady increase in users. The answer to the apparent discrepancy is that Alexa’s Reach number is not the same thing as visitors. The reach is counting the percent of Internet users worldwide who visit a site. In the case of my colleague’s site, his global reach was declining, not because he was losing visitors, but because the rest of the Web was growing so quickly. As people are coming online in China, Korea, Vietnam, Brazil and countless other countries, they are counted as users in Alexa’s panel, but they aren’t visiting his site. So, in essence, his percent of global traffic is declining, even as his traffic goes up.

We have seen Alexa stats get even more World focused over the last two months and suspect that this is affecting their US-focused website stats. Alexa currently ranks DomainTools as 228th in the world and Whitepages.com at 650th in the world. DomainTools averaged 35.19% of our visitors from inside the US last week, while I am sure Whitepages.com had a far more concentrated US base. Companies can’t rely on Alexa graphs unless they have a truly global website.

This lack of non-US based customers explain why Whitepages.com fell from 400th in the world last year to 650th in the world while at the same time increased in visitors. Alexa seems to be increasing their global client install base faster than traffic increases on most U.S. geared audience websites. I think Alexa’s statistics are awesome at representing the world’s traffic, but their was an adjustment or some event that happened to the entire Alexa system 2 months ago which shows everyone dipping down a little. Geoffrey hints on his blog, “… we have as many U.S. users as ever, on a strict percentage basis [but] they are declining as the Alexa Toolbar grows in popularity across the globe“. The most interesting thing he points out is that Alexa has only 18% of its users from North America but he estimates North America actually has 21.2% of the Internet users. Which means Alexa data should be taken with a huge grain of salt and only considered a world metrics system. Even as a global metrics system on their own accord they discount the North America by 17.7%! Look to the new companies to eat Alexa’s lunch because they continue to not want to normalize. If they isolated U.S. based traffic and just showed those statistics they would have entirely new graphs and I suspect look closer to comScore numbers. All of the things I have read lead me to believe the world is growing faster than US targeted websites - even if those U.S. based sites are having phenomenal growth.

Many start-ups use free metrics, but if they are showing these numbers to investors, they put an asterisk on them. VCs should also be aware Alexa graphs are only good for global reach numbers as well. Sites like Skype would be accurate but then again, they are more an application then a website.

Conclusion: Alexa discounts North America by 17.7%

The youngest metric company is the start-up called Quantcast - a horrible name, but very interesting data. First, let me rail on this name. Quant is short for Quantitative, Quant is a slang word for an expert in the use of mathematics and related subjects, particularly in investment management and stock trading. I suspect a mathematician co-founder invented this name, and I think they should hold a few focus groups on names for this company before they decide to stick with it. After all, they are in beta and could rebrand when they come out of beta. But enough about their bad name, as I said I was impressed with their data. They are still young company and don’t have an API yet but their data is very impressive and their chart of DomainTools shows traffic on the rise. It appears they have isolated US traffic and show just that chart. I wish Alexa would learn a lesson from this and show traffic based on different areas of the world rather then trying to show the entire world as the default view. Check out Quantcast’s service, it offers a fresh perspective to both Compete and Alexa. We look forward to adding their data in once an API is available.

Robots.txt footnote
Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast are all guilty of firewalling unknown friendly search engine agents at the front gate. These sites that monitor the Internet should be the most in the know that unfriendly agents cloak as humans and will come in no matter what. So the general rule of thumb is that robots.txt directives are only for the good agents anyway. Having just one rule that applies towards all agents is considered a best practice. New search engines like Powerset are left with a huge firewall and no information about certain websites because webmasters don’t understand the power of robots.txt. One of these three companies sort of got the right idea by blocking certain locations but if you are a CEO of one of these companies, send your webmasters back to boot camp. If there are sensitive areas of the site, most search engines can use complex pattern matching rules and agents can be instructed to stay out of those areas. I am not naming names but they are all guilty. Why does one company allow 4 agents, the other 6 agents, and last 7 agents? I got started on the Internet as an SEO expert so I have to rail on large companies that are unaware or clueless.

Alexa’s Robots.txt
Compete’s Robots.txt
Quantcast’s Robots.txt

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch recently spoke at a domain conference in LA. He was talking to a room full of Domainers about his adventures in Web 2.0 land. Mr. Arrington left the domain world a few years ago and started TechCrunch. However, back when he was co-founder and CEO of Pool.com, he firmly lived in the domain world. Mike and I first met at an ICANN meeting about 5 years ago. Little did I know that he would turn out to become a Web 2.0 superstar reporter.

Arrington gave the room a firm lecture about how Silicon Valley does not understand the domain industry. He explained that they view Domainers as evil hoarding monsters that just squat on perfectly good domain names. Arrington said the industry is ripe for change because it is so heavily Web 1.0 based and has numerous ways it could improve if it embraces 2.0 technologies. He remarked that he is a customer of GoDaddy and that when he uses their website he wants to throw his laptop out the window. He called for a Web 2.0 company to step up and handle domain registrations. Mr. Arrington also wondered why it is not possible to see all domains listed for sale in one place. I quickly pointed out DomainTools provides this service in the For Sale section. Yes, we must have a low profile if a former domainer like Arrington does not know about this service. DomainTools gathers domains from all corners of the world such as Afternic, Sedo, GoDaddy, BuyDomains, and Fabulous. Any organization that has over 2,000 names may include those names in the For Sale section on the DomainTools site.

I must admit, DomainTools does not have an RSS feed for these For-Sale domains. Arrington’s call for more APIs in general, was a good one. If a service has an API or RSS feed it can be used by a far bigger audience. People can then create mash-ups and extend the base service. If DomainTools controlled the end point of purchase, I can guarantee we would have released an API or RSS feed by now. Instead, I think we may release a Widget because we need users to come through us in order to generate any revenue on our free listing service.

It was a pleasure to hear Arrington speak and I recommend attending any event where he will be speaking. He mentioned he plans to hold a conference called “20″ later this year and I look forward to attending. BTW, Arrington mentioned that he bought 20.com for $70,000.00 and that this will be the conference’s domain name.