In preparing for the Rick Latona Auction of .CM domains, I found some very interesting things.
Some of the domains in the auction are resolving to the .com owner’s site.
Bodybuilding.cm goes to bodybuilding.com through an affiliate program.
Date.cm is going to Date.com through an affiliate program.
DrugStore.cm is redirected to DrugStore.com through an affiliate program.
Most of the other 43 domains in the auction go to either a Sedo.com or DomainSponsor.com parked page, giving both of those companies, pretty good insight to traffic levels on the domains in auction.
Some of the auction domains, like Gap.cm, Musica.cm, and Forex.cm, are going to a parking page run by searchignited.com, a domain just registered on May 26th, through the registrar known as resellersclub, and having privacy protection on its registration, using an address in Zuid-Holland Province, The Netherlands, but with a phone number using a Denmark country code.
Jobs.cm, and Fling.cm are going to an an affiliate program through a company called cpalaunch.com, which is a domain which was just created on less than a month ago, on June 15th, and goes to a privacy registration at Moniker.com
A couple of domains resolve to a “dead page” such as Playboy.cm.
The good news is if you have interest in bidding on any of these domains, those going to a Domain Sponsor lander or a Sedo lander, will have Alexa.org stats on them.
Those .cm’s going to searchignited.com, and CpaLaunch.com are combined with all other traffic, and therefore the Alexa ranking per domain is not available. Those .cm’s going to the .com’s through an affiliate program are likewise not going to give you Alexa stats.
All and all it’s very interesting.
You should note that outside this auction, few other .cm, are resolving.
However Google.cm is resolving to a page registered at Tucows under privacy, to a site called Officialiqquiz.com. It is unclear if its the owner of that site which is directing Google.cm to itself or if it’s an affiliate, but I didn’t see anywhere on the site to sign up as an affiliate. I did see on that sites TOS the following language: “All trademarks, service marks, trade names, domain names, slogans, logos, and other indicia of origin that appear on or in connection with the Service are the property of the Company and/or its affiliates, licensors and/or licensees. You may not copy, display or use any of these marks without prior written permission of the mark owner.”
So this site is aware of trademarks, at least its own.
Myspace.cm is likewise going to an affiliate type page for a service similar to the one Google.cm is going to.
Microsoft.cm is going to a DS parked page.
Verizon.cm is going to a Sedo lander but no results come up, so it looks like Sedo wisely blocked the results.
Still other .cm’s are going to their rightful owners:
Yahoo.cm is being redirected to Yahoo.com.
Baidu.cm is redirecting to Baidu.com (9th busiest site on the net).
Dell.cm is redirecting to Dell.com
The .cm registry had a trademark period where trademark owners had an opportunity to get their .cm name and Yahoo, Baidu & Dell appearently applied, begging the question of why Google did not. However this Sunrise period does not actually close until July 15th so some trademark holders still have a few days to get their .cm domain.
Unanswered questions abound.
Did Google.cm get allocated already, even though the land rush has not occurred yet? If so to whom and if not why is it resolving at all? Likewise, why is Myspace.cm resolving to an affiliate page?
If a domain has not been assigned during the sunrise period to the trademark holder, then why isn’t the domain available in the land rush?
Why are all the names in the Rick Latona auction resolving, when none of the domains on NameJet.com most popular backorders list, are?
Who is the beneficiary of the traffic going to the .CM auctions domains?
Who is tracking the traffic and in some cases the performance of the .cm auction domains?
Is it the Cameroon registry that is the beneficiary of the information and revenue, and if so, why won’t they share the info with potential bidders?
Why are some of these .CM auction domains, going to through affiliate programs to the .com sites while others are going to parked page?
Who is directing the traffic from these .cm domains accordingly, or in other words who is in charge? Is it the government of Cameroon or someone in the industry?
And finally who is behind the 2 newly created landing pages going by searchignited.com and cpalaunch.com and who is behind the page Google.cm is going to?
We can only make 2 conclusions from all this:
1. Whomever is getting the actual traffic count from .CM domains, and in the case of the domains going to the affiliate sites, the performance of these domains, are in a much better position of knowing what the domains are worth than any other potential bidder.
2. With certain parking companies handling the landing pages, they will be in a good position to determine the value of these and other .cm domains.
I told you it was interesting.
Someone from the .CM registry really needs to address these questions for the benefit of the industry and for the benefit of its own extension and the sooner the better.
Thanks to my fellow blogger and domainer, Alan Dunn, who turned me on to this story.
The domains in the RickL auction are all grandfathered .CM domains that were registered prior to the current registry. The rules & registry changed many times in the history of .CM. Match.cm which is not in this auction is another example of such a grandfathered domain.
What is clear is that the sellers know very well how these names monetize and one can only assume the reserves were set accordingly 🙂
D
“The domains in the RickL auction are all grandfathered .CM domains”
You may be right but transparency is something we all want in this industry and it seems very odd to me that many of these names are being forwarded to the 2 domains Mike mentioned above
searchignited.com (may 26 – 2009)
CpaLaunch.com (June 15 – 2009)
Even domains grandfathered in pose the question of who controls these now? Someone had to change the DNS / forwarding structure of these domains after the 2 respective dates above.
Is someone engaging in active use of these domains while everyone bidding is under the impression that these have never been available until now?
A lot of questions seem unanswered and those with the data have serious advantages over everybody else. Of course, I think we all would expect people who used these names before to have data but thats a small circle of people and now it seems like those who certainly probably never had access to this data before currently are testing and collecting data.
I appreciate Mike taking this serious and asking for answers from the community – its all about transparency.
Some tool stole my nickname 🙂 Anyway watch status bar at firefox it’s redirected through several domains via affiliate
D
Your missing the bigger picture.
Who decided what domains got grandfathered?
You mean to tell me Google applied for Google.cm during the sunrise period as a trademark holder and was turned down because the domain was “grandfathered” while Yahoo was able to get Yahoo.cm?
Doesn’t make sense.
“What is clear is that the sellers know very well how these names monetize and one can only assume the reserves were set accordingly”
Without any transparency how on earth can we assume that? If I owned one of these, and was not going to have any transparency, then I would ask a much higher reserve then it was worth just with the hope that someone would come along and say something like you did.
Mike,
have to agree with Troy on this point. We should not assume higher reserves on these .cm names mean high traffic.
Some will have traffic (and if the data is collected by sellers) certainly will have reserves which factor in traffic but many I will assume have no traffic and high reserves simply based only on the keywords of the name.
searchignited.com is one of the many domains used by Skenzo for their parking setup (just like their other domains regd through themselves aka Resellerclub/directi). Yes it is a newly regd domain, but they use it throughout their system and it is not specific to .cm parking.
regarding “grandfathered domains” well it seems that any domain registered prior to the Netcom .cm tld launch was grandfathered. This is a typical policy and there is no reason why the registry would cancel domains previously registered. My understanding is that these domains were registered long ago, prior to the Agoga deal.
Alan
Not sure I argued anywhere that the reserve price and traffic had any relation.
There are only 3 price reserve levels in this auction $20K, $5K and $1K, certainly within each subset you are going to find different traffic levels just based on alexa stats were available so I do agree with you guys on this point
Troy,
What I meant to say is exactly that, sorry for not being very clear in my wording. “one can only assume the reserves were set accordingly” I meant “accordingly” from the sellers perspective as they know all the stats and have no reason to offer great deals to the buyers. I doubt you can squeeze much profit buying any of these names even at the reserve prices.
D
OK if you are correct then Skenzo is another company that has access to stats on .cm’s
What I’m saying is if you read the previous comments on the post I wrote last week about this .cm auction, you will see readers trying to guess at how much traffic these domains are receiving.
http://www.thedomains.com/2009/07/07/cm-auction-starts-now/
Now we know at least three parking companies have this information and we don’t
Mike,
you never – sorry about the misunderstanding. troy cliped a quote from D’s post
““What is clear is that the sellers know very well how these names monetize and one can only assume the reserves were set accordingly”
just wanted to clarify how we can not assume traffic goes with higher reserves on these names. Troy also elaborated above.
You did not say that.
Re: grandfathered domains
So a pre-release auction is not just including domains unavailable before but also grandfathered domains.
Who is selling these then … the registry or the owners?
D – you said “This is a typical policy and there is no reason why the registry would cancel domains previously registered”
so why is Latona stating
“These names are not included in the regular landrush or open registration and are only available at this auction”
seems fishy to me this whole thing.
Alan,
Rick Latona is saying that simply because the names are already registered so there is no reason for them to be included in the landrush or open reg. There are other .cm domains (not in Ricks auction) that are registered already and are not going to be available either (match .cm for example)
fyi here are a few .cm domains reged previously:
abc.cm
abercrombie.cm
adidas.cm
adobe.cm
adultfriendfinder.cm
buy.cm
youtube.cm
tagged.cm
overture.cm
loan.cm
freecreditreport.cm
sony.cm
lots of good stuff 🙂
D,
gotcha but as Mike said in his article :
Bodybuilding.cm goes to bodybuilding.com through an affiliate program.
Date.cm is going to Date.com through an affiliate program.
DrugStore.cm is redirected to DrugStore.com through an affiliate program.
all names available at Latona’s auction ….
so these names are “private seller” names???
from what I remember all new extensions with premium domains offered for sale the first time around do not have active use attached to them.
These do.
I think the .cm registry and Latona should clarify this more. People will bid on .cm auctions assuming they have been available or first time registration.
Unlike other auctions we have landrush periods and other factors which generally make people believe ALL names are running first come – first serve.
Again, its all about transparency – sometimes we leave things out, this time it would be nice to hear a little more about what is really what.
I’m bidding on some names regardless but they are questions to be answered.
D,
These are mostly all trademark names. Not good stuff unless you own the trademark 🙂
UPDATE
I’ve been told my a confidential source that all the domains in the Rick Latona auction are owned by a company or individuals related to the .cm registry, NetCom, but are not reserved registry domains.
The whois for the registry does not show ownership of any of these domains:
http://register.cm/whois.php
Sunrise Application Information
Query: google.cm
Status: No Applications Pending
You get the same results on .cm domains which are active and already going to the trademark holder like Yahoo.cm which is resolving to Yahoo.com
Sunrise Application Information
Query: yahoo.cm
Status: No Applications Pending
Very strange
I’ve been following .cm for maybe 2 years now. Google.cm, and myspace.cm, and all the other ones have been going like this for years, pointing to the same affiliate sites, etc… that they do today. Not sure what this will tell you, but thought I’d throw that nugget of knowledge in. Yahoo.cm has always pointed to yahoo.com as well. Previously it was possible to register a .cm domain if you presented to cameroon proof of your trademark, and even then it was a complicated process involving getting power of attornies notarized and so on. I also know that Cameroon has been plauged with TM lawsuits regarding the wildcarding and that is why it was previously so difficult to register a .cm name without proof of your own trademark for the term. After knowing the difficulties that Cameroon has faced regarding TM lawsuits I would be very careful in registering any of these TM .cm domains. It seems to me that they are just passing the buck and going to make it somebody else’s problem.
JP
Thanks for the insight.
Personally I haven’t followed .CM domains at all and are looking at it very much as a newbie.
So these domains are obviously owned by someone already, still I have no idea of how Google can’t get google.cm through the .CM sunrise period.
Having said that, I still urge readers to stay clear of any trademarked terms such as playboy.cm and even generic domains who .com is clearly trademarked such as cars.cm.
I would also remind people that cctld’s are subject for better or worse to the laws of the sponsoring country which could vary greatly from US law.
Hello, we are trying to answer the questions from above.
Domains had been registerd in the .CM domain space long before Dr. Kevin Ham got the wildcard. Also Dr. Kevin Ham was not the first to wildcard the .CM space, domainers which have watched the space for years know this and the “parking companies” should also be aware of this fact.
Most of the domains in the current .CM zone have been registered before Netcom.cm existed. After the launch of .com.cm, .co.cm and .net.cm, Netcom.cm assisted companies in recovering their .CM domains. Yahoo.cm is one of the domains which is mentioned already above. We have worked with several big trademark registrars and recovered various domains for their clients.
Domains which have been registerd before the involvement of Netcom.cm, are of course excluded from sunrise, landrush and go live, as there are existing contracts with the current registrants in place.
Domains which are curently sold via Rick Latona Auction, are not held by the registry. They are owned by various companies/individuals. We helped to get the domains for the auction, as we saw this as a good way to market the .CM domains.
It is up to the owners to release stats on traffic or revenue, we as the registry do not know how the registrants make from an individual domain. We of course have an idea about the traffic, but this is information we, like many other registries, do not share at this moment in time. We have seen the approach from NASK, which are publishing DNS request per domain, and we will look into this for the future.
Whois information is currently not available but will be available by the time of go live.
We hope this answers the above questions.
Netcom.cm Sarl
Sarl/Netcom
Thanks for making a response.
Are few questions:
Is there is list of all the domains that are already registered and therefore unavailable for the land rush?
Your saying that if Google applied during the sunrise period for Google.cm they would not be awarded it since the domain was already registered?
What is the registry position on the new URS proposal?
Did Netcom.cm file any comments on the proposal with ICANN during the comment period?
Are you saying that while the domains were wild carded with Dr. Ham before this registry existed, and the registry has no stats for traffic or revenue made by the domains?
Do you know what the different reserve prices in the Rick Latona auction are based on. In other words what caused some domains to have a reserve of $20K and others at $1K? Are the reserve prices related to the traffic the domains received?
1. The list will be available for the registrars. We are currently in the last hours of the sunrise and the sunrise domains will be included in this list.
2. Yes, we cannot award a domain which is already registered, however we are working on the recovery of various domains, we cannot provide a detailed list due to data confidentiality.
3. We have not been involved with it yet, and in the near future we might not apply it to our registry. We do have a dispute policy, which can be found on our website.
4. No we did not. We had other issues to deal with, as the time from announcing sunrise to start of sunrise was very short and our number of staff is limited.
5. Cannot comment.
6. We assume the prices might be based on either revenue or on value of generic term, but as we do not own this domains, we can only guess. As far as we understand domain prices are not purely based on revenue.
Michael URS would not apply to CCtld Correct ? ICANN does not have the authority correct ?