One of our most recent additions to our domain portfolio is the home to one of the regular golfing tournaments on the PGA Tour – The Zurich Classic.

The Zurich Classic of New Orleans has been played every year since being established in 1938 and has had an impressive list of winners over the years including Vijay Singh, David Toms, Davis Love III, Ben Crenshaw, Ian Woosnam, Tom Watson, Gary Player and possibly the best golfer of all time, Jack Nicklaus.

Find out more about the tournament on Wiki >

The domain is now available for purchase through our Sedo account. Interested? Make your bid now or view our full portfolio to see what other domains we have available.

A good example of just how quickly a domain auction can pick up momentum. Iraq.com recently went on sale through the Sedo Online Auction. With an initial bid of approx 2000 EUR, it only took 11 more bids to reach the current bid (of time of writing) of 600k EUR.

For those interested in Iraq related domains, try iraqcenter.com. We’re selling it through Sedo for a minimum bid price of £500 (GBP). It’s received over 1k views in the last 32 days and according to the Sedo powered stats currently has INcoming Google links (6), incoming Yahoo links (81), incoming MSN links (90) and incoming Alexa links (69).

Visit iraqcenter.com and clicks on the relevant for sale link to make your bid if you’re interested.

A good post here by Sahar on what else we might think of using domains for in the future: http://www.conceptualist.com/?p=488

Some interesting concepts – particularly the effective one-stop shop contact that a domain could be i.e. type it into TV and see a tv show, the same URL used on radio to play a radio station, typed into the phone to dial a number and so on.

Whilst most ads (whether on TV, radio or billboard) mention the companies domain, there is still a reliance put on the consumer having an internet device. This is changing as more and more people have internet ready mobile phones, but wouldn’t it be good just to type the URL on the keypad and go straight to the companies site or dial straight through.

Interesting.

The weekly domain sales report for period 10th September – 16th September has been released by DnJournal. This weeks biggest sale was a 6 figure sum, televisions.com for $215k through NameDrive.

With such an increase in domain sales volumes, the top 20 domain sales has now been changed to the top 30, and it includes domain sales such as hot.tv ($35k through DRT Auction), historian.com ($25k through Moniker), observe.com ($17k through GreatDomains / Sedo) and gems.org ($11k through Sedo). The list included 6 3-letter .coms (vte.com, qsd.com, uyl.com, bii.com. lsk.com and ynj.com) and a total of 25/30 .com domains. The remaining 5 being made up of 1 .tv, 2 .info, 1 .org and 1 .de.

While Sedo hold the 2nd highest sale of the week (Cadilac.com for $68k), they unusually don’t feature much in the top 20. The nwe top 30 list this week is made up of sales from  Sedo (11), Snapnames (5), Moniker (5), NameDrive (1), TDNAM (3), DRT Auctions (2),  Greatdomains / Sedo (2) and  Afternic DLS (1).

The ccTLD list changed slightly in the sense that .de wasn’t so dominating. We also notice new extensions appearing that we have seen for a few weeks. The top 20 ccTLD includes 5 .de (biggest seller was HongKong.de at $35k), 4 .tv (biggest seller was hot.tv at $35k), 2 .eu (biggest seller was Relocation.eu at $9k), 3 .ca (biggest seller was BabyPhotos.ca at $3k), 2 .co.uk (biggest seller was iGame.co.uk at $4k) and 2 .us, 1 .se and 1 .be

Visit DnJournal to keep up to date with the latest sales >

A good post spotted over at Domain Name News discussing the need to further develop content on parked domain name pages. I couldn’t agree more with this.

Clearly existing parking tools are good and mostly strong, but I agree that it’s time now to develop new ways to populate pages with richer content, focusing on greater growth in the long term. We currently do well with simply PPC listings on most of our pages, but we have a handful of “good” domains that don’t receive much traffic or revenue. However I do beleive given the correct development (not just PPC links) they could over time be good earners for us. We also have a few domains that receive high levels of traffic, but 0 revenue. For these I’m thinking of creating our own pages for these sites (i.e. making mini sites for them) and loading with AdSense, Affiliation tools etc.

We don’t really have time to develop individual sites for all of these domain names, but a tool to allow more than just PPC listings would allow us to grow the site in terms of traffic and focus on growing revenue in the longer term.

I have read this morning about a tool, still in Beta version, called Domain Embarking. It generates content based on keywords you enter, but it is still in Beta version. However, it is a start. I’ll probably try it for a couple of domains.

The new weekly domain sales report for perdiod 3rd September – 9th September has been released by DnJournal. The biggest sale this week was lifts.com selling for $67k through Sedo, less than half the value of the previous weeks biggest sale (BoiseIdaho.com for $175k). Other top sales included adriana.com ($29k through SnapNames), phonenumbers.mobi ($28k private sale), college.co.uk ($27k through Sedo) and the 3 letter eia.com ($26k through Sedo)

As ever the top 20 list saw a lot of Sedo sales, but SnapNames also generated it’s fair share this week with 8 of the top 20, compared with Sedos 7. Other top 20 sales were generated through Moniker (2), Afternic (1) and 2 private sales.

The ccTLD top 20, according to DNJournal, this week was again dominated be .de sales and included 8 .de (biggest seller was autoatlas.de at $10k), 3 .eu (biggest seller was kleur.eu at $3k), 2 .co.uk (biggest seller was college.co.uk at $27k), 2 .cc (biggest seller was serials.cc at $3k) and 2 .tv, 1 .in, 1 .ec, 1 .fr.

Visit DnJournal to keep up to date with the latest sales >

It appears we’ll shortly see several hundred dotMobi domain names up for auction through Sedo. Apparently at launch, dotMobi decided to set aside over 5000 commonly used words to stop their registration – and are now intending on releasing them into auction.

However, certain restrictions do apply. All bought domains must show a dotMobi compliant parking page and have a live site with relevant content launched within 6 months. Each site must reach a certain level on .mobi’s compliance scale.

This should be a good money earner for dotMobi, although the restrictions put in place will no doubt have an impact on overall revenues. Many people would have been interested in snapping these names up purely as investments, not with an intention to develop relevant sites.

It does however highlight a way in which money could be made, although it would obviously have some moral issues. Create and launch a new domain extension, advertise it a lot, keep thousands of keywords aside until your new extension picks up, then sale the keywords at inflated prices when there is a high demand for them! Nice!

The new weekly domain sales report has been released by Dn Journal. The biggest sale this week was BoiseIdaho.com, selling privately for $175k. Other sales included discountperfumes.com ($80k through moniker), theaters.co.uk (£16k through Sedo) and post.net ($26k through Afternic / Buydomains).

This weeks sales saw quite a few geodomains, which are becoming ever more popular, including rome.net ($17.5k), bangkok.net ($17.5k), ohio.info ($12k), ontario.info ($10k) and greenland.net ($6k).

In terms of ccTLDs, according to DNJournal, the top 20 this week included 6 .de (biggest seller was mygame.de at €20k), 4 .co.uk (biggest seller was theatres.co.uk at £16k), 4 .eu (biggest seller was iloveyou.eu at €5k), 2 .us (biggest seller was clik.us at $3.1k), 2 .tv (biggest seller was tvbox.tv at $5k), 1 .ca and 1 .jp

As usual, the list makes for very interesting reading, and as I’m sure once again we’re all wondering “If those domains are selling, why aren’t mine?”!

As part of our new focus on keeping our blog up-to-date, we’ve added a new Industry Links section to point readers in the right direction of other high quality domainer resources. This includes links to domainer blogs, marketplaces, forums and general resources.

Have a read and leave a comment if there are any others you’d like added. We’ll continue to grow the list of resources over time.

VeriSign have released their most up to date Domain Name Industry Brief and it looks like the domain name market is still growing rapidly. According to this most recent report, new domain registrations hit an all time high in the second quarter of 2007 with 14.5 million domain name registrations, bringing the total base of domain name registrations worldwide to a staggering 138 million across all Top Level Domains (TLDs).

ccTLD registrations also increased dramatically, mainly driven by the growth of .cn, to 51.5 million registrations by the end of the second quarter of 2007. The report does however suggest that while there are now more than 240 ccTLD extensions available, 66% of the total registrations are made up of the top 10.

According to Verisign, the top 10 ccTLD registreis by domain name base (second quarter 2007), were:

1.  .de (Germany)
2.  .uk (United Kingdom)
3.  .cn (China)
4.  .nl (Netherlands)
5.  .eu (European Union)
6.  .it (Italy)
7.  .ar (Argentina)
8.  .us (United States)
9.  .br (Brazil)
10.  .ch (Switzerland)

View the report online for yourselves: http://www.verisign.com/static/042726.pdf