About a month ago we told you that around 2,000 domain names owned by Joel Williams/Dream Sellers/In Stealth Mode had been frozen by a state court after certain parties claiming rights in and to those domain names filed for an injunction with a Tennessee Court.
At the time we noted that the parties filing the suit must have had an old list of domain since so many of the domains on the list were no longer owned by Williams including hundreds of domain were unregistered.
Other domains owned by Joel Williams which were not on the list provided by the Plaintiffs are are starting to hit NameJet.com auctions as pending delete domains.
The domain name registrar, Name.com was a huge player in the .TV extension.
Actually Name.com was catching expired .TV almost with such a high success rate, they were pretty much the only .TV backorder system.
However since Name.com was bought by Demand Media, Inc, (DMD) for $18 Million Dollars, all of the expired Name.com domains including the .TV domain names seem to be going to Namejet.com on an exclusive basis and they are hitting NameJet.com auctions.
There are a few prime .TV domain names now in auction at NameJet.com which were formerly owned by Williams or one of his companies including, Celeb.tv, Pussy.,tv, Comic.tv and Director.tv which all went into privacy in 2012 only to be dropped for non-renewal in 2013.
Some of these domains sold for a one time fee in the $x,xxx range once they were freed from the .Tv premium program where the annual renewal fees where in the $x,xxx range per year or higher.
Another sad tale in what appears to be a rags to riches to rags story.
“Another sad tale in what appears to be a rags to riches to rags story.”
Find (or be told) the next ground floor Internet domain extension
Max Credit Cards
Liquidate bank accounts
Liquidate Retirement
Take Second & Third mortgages on all property.
Go bankrupt.
Pass this information along to next sucker – and repeat
🙁
Hey Brian! Well said!
Joel just renewed most if not all.
Good for Joel although these domains were in pending delete and not sure how he was able to do it
Not 100% sure if i was correct about Joel renewing.
I thought with his nameservers still being there and sites resolving then he renewed but not certain.
Time will tell, auctions still running so who knows.
I was high bidder on one of the auctions yesterday, my credit card was charge yesterday for it
The name.com registrar said they were:
REGISTRAR STATUS: EXPIRED, PENDING DELETE / TRANSFER
however; they were really:
Domain Status: CLIENT-XFER-PROHIBITED
Any update on the name you were high bidder on or status as to when it will be transferred to your account? I’m kinda in a similar situation here and haven’t got a response from the folks at Name.com yet.
CashCow
i dont think these are pending delete, these are expired names.
my bet is joel lost them last year and name.com cherry picked them and help for a year.
so heres the question, is the registrar not also subject to the restraining order, or they see a path to sell the name prior to redemption, keep the dough and somehow sat that wasnt part of the restraining order.. ie even if they just waiting to not get paid the names should go thru registrar redempton and delete….
name – enom pretty slippery when it comes to their own interests… i guess like all of us.
These domains were not on the list submitted to the court therefore not part of the court’s order, again why I say the plaintiff;s had a old list they ran to the court with
Michael –
did you buy a .tv or a .com
Celeb.tv
Joel would wide to cut his losses and everyone else to. You are buying a sinking sland that has no legal precedent in the US. That’s why Hollywood has shunned it. That’s why original programming is coming to Yahoo, and to Hulu and the box once known as Tv is totally being redefined.
http://adage.com/article/special-report-tv-upfront/hulu-touts-shows-4-million-subscribers/241184/
http://adage.com/article/special-report-tv-upfront/yahoo-a-media-company/241183/
wise and sinking island me bad with typos
Owen
What do you mean cut his losses
He is getting zero out
He is saving the $50 renewal fee?
Hello Brian,
R. E. = ” “Another sad tale in what appears to be a rags to riches to rags story.”
Find (or be told) the next ground floor Internet domain extension
Max Credit Cards
Liquidate bank accounts
Liquidate Retirement
Take Second & Third mortgages on all property.
Go bankrupt.
Pass this information along to next sucker – and repea ”
Beautiful analogy ! Brian
Next suckers up to bat?
Gratefully, Jeff Schneider (Contact Group) (Metal Tiger)
Looks like the nameservers have changed to NAME.com – so it may have been an innocent glitch after all.
Hopefully, you can all enjoy your new names – especially that CELEB.tv one – awesome
Brian/Jeff – Great tale – this game is certainly not for the faint-hearted and everyone does need to keep there wits about them. When the CC is on max you do need to think twice about ‘why’ you are buying and what it can/will bring back.
Owen – Appreciate your views but are they backed up by the maths/facts or is it simply anecdotal evidence? Was at a Thinkbox.tv presentation last week in UK – and was gobsmacked to hear that normal TV advertising revenue, at least in the UK and much of Europe, has been constant/upwards for the past four years – because of the internet, not in spite of it. Twitter alone is now bringing more to TV to share the experience than could ever have been imagined ten years ago when numbers were in massive decline.
As for .tv – everyone is allowed their own views. Personally, I would ignore what domainers ‘suggest is correct’ and look at what real companies ‘know’ is correct for them. In Europe at least we are seeing a burgeoning amount of new .tv channels. And most, if they are smart are already attaching themselves to terrestrial, mobile and internet television. There is no favouritism for the delivery system these days – and that includes stand alone sites, hulu-type sites, youtube, FB, even twitter channels.
TV may be changing – but the name TV is staying the same.
I’ve been told I should expect the transfer from Name.com today on the domain we won at auction
ah ah gotcha didnt have the discipline to check, thanks
All I’m saying is that Joel has carried these names at premium costs for over a decade- it’s either shit or get off the pot.
TV is struggling to keep audiences. The headlines are reading: “Major Stars And Shows Head to AOL” That’s why rather than call them TV stars they are now called “Internet Sensations.” Open your ears and you’ll start to notice at least in the USA. This is the third announcement today. I haven’t seen one “Major Stars and Shows headed to dot TV” How many does Demand Media own, or Frank or kevin… isn’t that telling when the backers don’t even drink the kool-aid. I applaud Mike’s purchase and agree with owning some premiums if you can carry them, but too many dotcom fish to fry and like .me you better own the tv before the .com as well on any keyword you buy.
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So Owen –
“TV is struggling to keep audiences. ”
I disagree – .tv and every other non.com is struggling in the secondary market or domain investors – where capitalists – like me – roam 🙂
Non.com’s are all about registries selling domains to end users – and that is good stuff – but not my business model 🙂
what “audiences”?
The ones they never had..?
TV and ad platforms are headed to dotCOM (I’ve been professing the the Interenet is and would become a full broadcast medium and that a dotTV is not needed to do is, if anything it dates it). Any way if you think dotTV will finally take off you better tell Media Ocean. They got the ad bucks and have other plans. From Ad Age:
Like a lot of publishers, AOL is showing off a lineup of new programming in hopes of attracting viewers and exciting advertisers.
But AOL’s video chief Ran Harnevo is more excited about something happening behind the scenes. AOL will become the first digital publisher integrated into Mediaocean, the predominant software platform that agencies use to buy TV advertising.
AOL’s HuffPost Live Gets Shot on Cable With Mark Cuban’s AXS TV
Brings Six Hours of Live Daytime News Programming to Channel
It’s super-technical and back-office, but when media planners allocate money, they use software, and Mr. Harnevo believes the move will allow advertisers to TV dollars to video elsewhere seamlessly, if they choose to do so. More back-office: they are doing it through a video ad server called FreeWheel, which will soon assist other publishers to access Mediaocean software.
That, combined with Nielsen online campaign ratings, will mean TV can be compared to digital video on the apples-to-apples basis of reach and frequency, rather than web metrics like views or time spent.
More than $150 billion in ad spending is processed through Mediaocean, including plenty of TV budgets. “We feel this is the time to merge the industries if the content is good,” Mr. Harnevo said.
The truth is that while adland lines up for the so-called NewFronts, the dollar amounts actually spent on digital inventory ahead of time are very small, pulled mostly from existing digital budgets and not from TV. “There is little urgency to change this because the scale of web video remains small,” wrote Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research and former forecasting director at Magna Global. “Recent data from Nielsen indicates that desktop/laptop viewing of video indicates equaled 4.3% of TV viewing among the people watching any online video, and 2.5% of total TV viewing.”
That doesn’t include connected TV viewing, but you get the picture.
But that doesn’t also mean that friction isn’t also an issue. One of the reasons TV gets the dollars is because its easy to buy compared to video. If video can’t be compared on a like basis it has little chance of breaking into the truly big budgets, no matter how many viewers it starts to attract.
On the content front, AOL bought the rights to a film sure to attract nerds of a certain age: “Downloaded: The Story of Napster,” produced by Napster founder Sean Fanning and partner Sean Parker, which comes to theaters in June. AOL plans to cut it up into web-sized bites and like everything it does in video, distribute across the 5Min network it bought three years ago.
The company announced 15 different original series today with celebrities like Sarah Jessica Parker, who is executive producer of “City.Ballet,” Nicole Richie, whose Twitter feed takes center stage in #CandidlyNicole, and Gwyneth Paltrow, who will interview women overcoming hardship in “Second Chances.” Hank Azaria will document his own life as a first-time father in “Fatherhood.”
That and Monday AOL announced that its daily live online news network Huffpost Live will be carried on Mark Cuban’s AXS TV cable network. “AOL has never produced content at such scale,” Mr. Harnevo said.
For brands wishing to create and distribute their own content, AOL is launching Be On, a production studio and distribution network across the web, mobile and connected TVs.
Owen
I’m just saying the guy could have put them up on an auction platform and sold them, he didn’t to let them drop and get nothing out of it
Michael- Agree if he really owned the right to do that.