We don’t cover the .Au (Australian) oftern but there are two different stories out today.
The domain name Deals.com.au sold for $100,000 according to the dailytelegraph.com.au to a Company Zoupon which is the “fifth or sixth largest” group buying website in Australia claiming around 400,000 members including our Facebook fans and Twitter followers.
“”By purchasing deals.com.au, the company hopes “to get the word out there,” he said, “about how great our offers are”. Mr Same said the group buying space was “a marketplace that’s come from nothing and is just growing and growing.”
“With us you can tell exactly how many customers are coming through the door. It’s a highly-measurable form of marketing.”
Poker.com.au sold last month for $100K as well.
In another unrelated story on .com.au domains today that appeared in smh.com.au, big business in Australia have been doing a lot of defensive registrations grabbing domain name which are typo’s of their brands.
BIG Australian companies are buying up ”misspelt” internet domain names to stop others making money from their brand.
“Corporations such as Qantas, Westpac and Woolworths have registered the incorrectly spelt internet names because many people are terrible typists or cannot spell.”
“Consumers can type in quantas.com.au and still get to the airline’s website. And if they leave the ”s” off the end of Woolworths, they are still diverted to the giant retailer’s website.”
“Australia Post has registered austaliapost.com.au and australipost.com.au to make sure clumsy typists can still get access.””Weather.com.au, has also registered whether.com.au and wether .com.au.”
“Internet regulator, the Australian Domain Name Administrator, has a list of more than 1900 domain names on its List of Prohibited Misspellings including bigpong.com.au, fightcentre. com.au, kommbank.com.au and wirlpoo.com.au”.”The regulator’s chief executive, Chris Disspain, said some organisations with savvy IT managers register the misspelling themselves and direct customers to their websites.”
”You would be amazed at the number of people who appear to have nothing else to do than sit around and try to come up with misspellings,” Mr Disspain said.
Bruce Tonkin, chief strategy officer at Melbourne IT, a leading official domain name registrar, said big companies secure domain names with similar spellings to stop ”traffic leakage”.
Any updates on the case with Groupon.com.au?
the .au after .com makes this buy “cheap” or “expensive”?
all double-TLD domains always seems me a stupid idea
why co.uk instead of .uk ? and why .com.au instead of .au ?
They should also buy dailytelegraph.com.ua – which is still for grabs.
@ [ TheDaily3D.com ] [ Sat3D.TV ] [ 3Dsat.TV ]…
The reason why .com.au is so valuable is because a very high proportion of Australians type that in by default for no other reason than our media is swamped by references to “domainname.com.au”…
The phrase “.com.au” rolls off the tongue because it is heard countless times each day by anybody who is listening to radio, TV or reading the paper.
I agree that it would be smarter to have a shorter TLD but the issue here isn’t about efficiency, rather it’s about mass media and repetitive advertising slogans.
I think it’s hilarious that you have a story about dot coms & misspelling that starts with a spelling error in the first line… lol!
“We don’t cover the .Au (Australian) oftern but there are two different stories out today”
Um, I think that should be OFTEN not OFTERN…
Funny that the heading of this article mentions typos, then you have a typo in the first line
Daniela said:
“I think it’s hilarious that you have a story about dot coms & misspelling that starts with a spelling error in the first line… lol!”
The title has 2 mis-spellings! “Typo’s” should read “typos” and “company’s” should be “companies”. At least it wasn’t DEAL’S.com.au
Ekaf – I also noticed that often is spelled “oftern” in the first line of the article. Funny!
@MHB – Congrats on your recent sale – VisitBerlin.com
Gnames
Thanks
I own the http://www.afteric.com site and it receives tens of hits every day because of the misspelling of http://www.afternic.com and I get traffic for free on the back of this spelling entry error by quick fingered surfers eager to log in into their afternic MyDomains accounts. I’ve tracked the keywords used and they were : Afteric.com,Afteric.
Should I wonder whether Afternic would want to buy it from me to get rid of the confusion.
Here is a link of an article published by Circleid.com in 2003 where the Reporter Mr Roger Collins quotes mydomain “Afteric.com” as having been sold in the September of 2000 for $48 million in cash and stock.
You can find the Reported interview in the shortened direct link here below. http://x.co/MWH7
Any one wants to share some light to this comment please feel free to add.
Thanks in advance to all Domainers for your feedbacks.
Cheers,Alex