The United States has no intention of giving up control of the Internet's Domain Name System. That's the bottom line in an interesting article posted by Monika Ermert at the 

Intellectual Property Watch website today. Ermert wrote "In a letter to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the Department of Commerce National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) clearly knocked down plans presented by the ICANN President’s Strategy Committee at the organisation’s June meeting in Paris for a full privatisation of ICANN."

Ermert added, "For years there has been a back and forth on the issue of complete privatisation and internationalisation of the DNS core resource management. The topic nearly led to a failure of the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) because of demands by governments from the Arab world, Asia and Europe to end the privileged oversight role held by the United States. 

This is repeated in the new statement sent to ICANN: “The department believes strongly,” the NTIA letter reads, “that it is important to clarify that we are not in discussions with either party to change the respective roles of the department, ICANN or VeriSign regarding the management of the authoritative root zone file, nor do we have any plans to undertake such discussions.”

So even if ICANN, which has also presented plans to set up a second legal entity in another region, becomes a completely privatised body governed by its so-called multi-stakeholder structure, the heart of the DNS would stay where it is."
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Research firm Borrell Associates has released a new report that underscores the dramatic shift of traditional media to the Internet. This time the forecast for extremely stormy weather is directed at the ubiquitous phonebook Yellow Pages that have long been cash cows in the print world. Borrell said that "Over the next five years, we are expecting 39% of the ad spending on print yellow pages to vanish. After 12 years as an advertising medium, the Internet has finally reached small-business owners with viable marketing opportunities in the form of keyword

advertising, interactive directories and low-priced online video commercials. The recession appears to be triggering the shift. Borrell offers a download of a free executive summary of the full report here. 

In another interesting finding Borrell reported that "there are now more than 34,000 local sales reps peddling online products - more than for any other medium.  The chart at right shows that 84% of these reps are being fielded by newspaper and yellow pages companies, 

all cross-training sales reps to rush toward their most-promising growth opportunity (online). To date, and in the foreseeable future, directory companies have fared better than any other legacy media at this strategy, garnering about 14% of their total gross revenues from online sales."

Borrell's report also details how online video commercials have emerged as the fastest-growing online ad format for small businesses. "By 2012, we expect streaming video advertising to surpass all other formats, including banners and paid search," Borrell said.

In a related note, Moniker is now accepting submissions for their live domain auction at T.R.A.F.F.I.C. New York. More information on that process is available here.
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Sedo's Chief Strategy Officer Matt Bentley will be leaving the company as of Friday (August 1). Though Bentley will transition out of his operational role with the company he will remain close to Sedo in a non-operative role as Strategic Advisor. Bentley has been with Sedo since 2002 when he signed on as Director of International Operations. He was one of the first 

dozen employees at the company. 

Bentley played a central role in helping to expand Sedo's global footprint outside of Germany, in particular by launching (together with Sedo Co-founder and President Ulrich Essmann) Sedo's Boston-based U.S. subsidiary company Sedo.com, LLC in 2004.  Bentley served as CEO of Sedo.com for two years before returning to Germany to assume his current role.  

Bentley also played a key role in shaping Sedo's successful domain parking product, forging one of the industry's first parking partnerships with Google, and managing the launch of Sedo's premium brand for domain professionals, SedoPro.

Bentley said, “It has been an incredibly rewarding experience to participate in Sedo’s 

Matt Bentley
will leave Sedo August 1

worldwide growth and witness the company’s emergence as a dominant player in the market. I’m definitely going to miss working with the many great people there, but the time was right for me to find a new challenge.  Sedo is a strong organization, and I expect to see the company continue to thrive at the forefront of the domain industry.” 

Sedo CEO and co-founder Tim Schumacher said, “Together with Sedo’s founders, Matt has played an important role in helping Sedo become the recognized, global domain marketplace leader it is today. Matt will no doubt continue to be a tremendous asset to Sedo in his new advisory role.  We thank him for his years of dedication and wish him success in his future endeavors.”

Bentley has not yet announced what his next career move will be but, on a personal note, I will add that I have no doubt that he will continue to be exceptionally successful in whatever he chooses to do. In covering the industry for DN Journal, I have gotten to know Matt very well over the past five years and he is without question one of the sharpest young executives I have ever met in this or any other business. 
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Today's post is for computer geeks only. Fortunately I think that covers a lot of us in the domain business so I'm hopeful today's post won't bore everyone to tears! When I returned home from this month's GeoDomain Expo in Chicago and fired up my desktop computer (a slightly over 2-year old Compaq)  I was alarmed to find the computer would not boot. I tried over and over and finally on about the 10th try, it wheezed its way into Windows. Though I back up critical data to an external drive, getting the computer to produce one last gasp was a big relief because there was other data, accounts and settings on it that I wanted to save. 

All of the components cost a total of $1,100 and went together fairly easily (most of my issues with the build involved software problems rather than hardware and I eventually resolved all of those). To complete the set up I gave my wife my 22" monitor and replaced it with a new 24" Samsung 245BW (unlike the  computer parts, I bought the monitor at Buy.com where it was under $400). The extra screen real estate is great and I am thrilled with the speed increase I've gotten over the old store bought clunker. I feel like I have doubled my efficiency just through the equipment change which makes the cost negligible.

Online advertising growth has been booming and much more will becoming the web's way when advertisers who don't yet fully understand the medium figure it out. In an interesting 

Peter Chernin
President, News Corp.

Fortune Magazine article this week, News Corp. President Peter Chernin talked about that. Chernin said an advertiser recently told a sales rep from News Corp's MySpace.com to come back when the social network has a “Super Bowl level” event. What the advertiser failed to recognize, Chernin said, is that the MySpace home page has as many viewers every day as the Super Bowl has once a year. 

Chernin indicated that despite their off the chart traffic, MySpace currently has a hard time getting decent prices 

for ads displayed on the site that currently relies heavily on Google for monetization. Chernin said ,"The answer may be to look beyond banners and text ads. What drives ad prices is scarcity and the place that is most promising is probably in video. By definition there’s more scarcity in video, and there’s even more scarcity in premium video.” Video, of course, is also a format that TV advertisers like those who flock to the Super Bowl can relate to. 

When I entered the domain business in the spring of 2002 there were some independent drop catchers around who made it possible to occasionally get some great domains for next to nothing. Canadian Gordon Martin's DropWizard.com was one of those. I remember him catching two 3-letter .coms for me for what was then his flat rate for going after a domain - $120 apiece! Now THOSE were the good old days! I wound up doing an article about Gordon in our first year of publication (2003).

DropWizard.com 
sees magic in ccTLDs

Martin got out of the drop catching business in 2004 but now he is back with a new venture devoted entirely to his latest passion - country code domains. "In 2004 we made a decision to exit that market and start catching for ourselves," Martin said. " What many don't know is I felt the .Com market was rising rapidly and future progress would only be made at a huge expense. Given today's prices it appears that prediction was right on the money. I felt that Country Codes were seriously underestimated and seriously undervalued. Accordingly that is the direction I moved in."

Martin added, "there are far more local and national companies selling goods within each country than international enterprises. People (buyers) tend to trust local (country) domains and local enterprises over international companies." Martin said he believes the local ccTLD for each country will become the domain "extension of choice" in the consumer's mind.

"Local search is becoming a larger and larger part of the search market, therefore, local extensions will become increasingly 

important in providing local search results. For all the above reasons I believe that CCTLD's are vastly underpriced and represent one of the best opportunities in domain investment today," Martin said. 

Martin may be on to something. In our latest weekly domain sales report, seven of the Top 20 domains on the all extension leader board were ccTLDs (including three of the top ten).
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Foreclosure.com Founder, President and CEO Brad Geisen announced today that he has reached an agreement with “Domain King” Rick Schwartz to acquire the domain name Property.com. The price paid was not revealed but Geisen indicated it is one of the largest URL purchases ever.  Schwartz had purchased the domain for $750,000 in 2005.

Brad Geisen
Foreclosure.com Founder

“For the past several years, I’ve built and run one of, if not the, most successful Internet foreclosure businesses, but the business was always exclusively distressed real estate. I’ve achieved in Foreclosure.com what I set out to accomplish and I am ready for a new challenge in a different market."

The .ME Registry has released some early stats covering the opening days of public registration for the extension. .ME is technically the country code for Montenegro but it has been re-introduced as a globally available extension geared to personal users. The registry said 

50,000 .ME domains were registered in the first 48 hours after the extension opened to the public July 17. 30,000 had previously been registered in the land rush period so total regs hit 80,000 by the end of the day July 18.

50% of the registrants were from the United States. 11% came from the United Kingdom, 9% from Germany and 5% from Canada. No other country accounted for more than 3% of registrations. 

Though registry partner Godaddy suffered through a lot of registration glitches that upset customers, Afilias, 

who handles back end operations for the .ME registry, said there were no problems on their end as they handled .ME requests from over 60 registrars around the world. GoDaddy was the most active registrar in promoting .ME, so a lot of those seeking .ME domains went to their site but their systems were not up to handling the volume. Smaller registrars, like Dynadot, reported no problems processing registrations in a timely manner. 

The Incredible Shrinking Newspaper - like so many others around the country my local daily paper, The Tampa Tribune, continues to wither away before my eyes. It has been like watching a death by a thousand cuts. First the width of the pages was sliced, then whole sections 

How much skinnier can newspapers 
get and still be visible to the human eye?

started disappearing. When we got today's paper I remarked to my wife that they would have to rename the publication the Tampa Pamphlet as there are only a few pages left, especially on Mondays and Tuesdays. It turns out that the latest step in their irreversible descent into anorexia was completely eliminating the local news section for our suburban area the first two days of each week.  

The Tribune of course is not the Lone Ranger. As more and more people get their news from the Internet the papers grow weaker with every passing day, cutting both jobs and content. In fact over the weekend, Editor & Publisher Magazine wrote "U.S. daily newspapers aren't shrinking just their newsrooms, an extensive study (from Pew Research) finds stories, page count, sections, international and national news are all smaller too - and only a minority of editors think online journalism will save their papers." That's what you call up the creek without paddle. 

As the print publications scramble to find a way to survive, some are rolling out new formats to 

see if they can find one that readers will rally around. Tomorrow (July 23) the 120-year-old Sporting News will launch Sporting News Today, a daily editorial product styled after a traditional newspaper but which will be e-mailed each morning to a list of subscribers - a hybrid format that the company is calling a "daily digital sports newspaper." 

Major congratulations go out today to long-time domain investor Howard Hoffman (who also operates PPCIncome.com). In addition to his domain endeavors Hoffman owns a fast-growing bottled water company that distributes an oxygenated water called O2Cool, previously known

Howard Hoffman with Mariel Hemingway, 
the new spokesperson for his company O2Cool

as hiOsilver (if you have attended many domain conferences you have probably met Howard and had him hand you a bottle of his refreshing product). 

Today Hoffman's company announced a major coup, the signing of actress/author Mariel Hemingway as the spokesperson for O2Cool. In Ms. Hemingway’s most recent book, Healthy Living from the Inside Out, the granddaughter of legendary author Ernest Hemingway listed hiOsilver (now O2Cool) Oxygen Water as the first product in the book’s Index of Products that she uses.

Even before the book came out, in a February 2007 interview in Rachel Ray Magazine Ms. Hemingway had said “. . . I also drink tons of water. My fave is hiOsilver Oxygen Water – it has this smooth texture I adore.”

Bido.com has confirmed they will be one of the five companies presenting live domain auctions at the next T.R.A.F.F.I.C. conference Sept. 23-26 in New York. On his blog at 

Conceptualist.com today, Bido co-founder Sahar Sarid wrote about what attendees can expect from his company's live auction saying, "None of us here at Bido has any idea as of yet what we will do. We will think it over the next week or two and come up with something, hopefully to exceed your expectations! Ideas? please let us know!" 

Bido currently runs a unique one name a day online auction so doing a live conference auction with multiple names will be new territory for them. Knowing Sahar and his teammates I'm sure they will come up with something that will make their turn at the auction block entertaining. With Moniker, Thought Convergence and Rick Latona.com previously named as live auction providers, only one spot remains officially open, though speculation has been that Sedo.com will fill the final slot. 

Bido Co-Founder Sahar Sarid

New York State's beautiful Adirondacks area appears to be turning into something of a "spiritual retreat" for domainers. Rob Grant (who was the subject of our April Cover Story) is based there and in recent weeks he has welcomed a number of prominent domainers to his Lake Placid home and treated them to a taste of the local lifestyle. The latest to make the trek north was DomainsForMedia.com and DNCartoons.com founder Eric Rice (the subject of DN Journal's February 2007 Cover Story) and his partner Clausen Ely. Grant soon had his visitors out on a local lake for some bass fishing but from the looks of the photo Rob sent me below, Eric and Clausen were eating light at the fish fry that night!

(Left to right): Clausen Ely, Rob Grant and Eric Rice in the Adirondacks

At first glance, Rob's catch (middle above) looked impressive by comparison but upon closer inspection the soft edges around Grant's image indicate that Photoshop may deserve more credit for that fish than he does! Another clue is that Rob's head in the picture is about half the size of Clausen and Eric's. I know Grant is a humble guy but, unless some lost tribe of Adirondack headshrinkers caught and released him recently, his noggin is not that tiny!

I hope you all have a wonderful relaxing weekend. I am going to be busy putting the finishing touches on our 2008 GeoDomain Expo review article that will be published before everyone is back at work Monday morning. We posted daily items from the show in our Lowdown column while it was underway last week in Chicago, but those were just an appetizer for the big wrap up article we're working on now.
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RickLatona.com has been named as the third live auction provider for the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. conference coming up Sept. 23-26 in New York City. Moniker.com has always been the only  

live auction provider at T.R.A.F.F.I.C. conferences but the show's organizers have decided to let up to five auctioneers set up shop at the next show in New York City Sept. 23-26. The third spot was taken today by RickLatona.com who joins Thought Convergence and Moniker, with 

two other auction providers expected to be named soon. T.R.A.F.F.I.C. said Moniker will remain the "premiere" auction at the show with the newcomers running sales that will concentrate on fewer names and be of shorter duration. Latona said he would have one hour for his auction.

.ME opened for public registration today. Though the extension is officially the country code for Montenegro it has been opened for unrestricted global registration and is now being marketed as an extension for "personal" use. The world's biggest registrar, GoDaddy, is 

partnering with the registry operators to promote .me and many of those who have been trying to register .me domains today have been trying to do it at GoDaddy. 

According to a long thread at the NamePros forum, it hasn't exactly been smooth sailing with many reporting they were charged for domains they thought they got, only to find out later that they had already been registered by someone else. GoDaddy will issue refunds of course, but it has still resulted in a lot of disappointment and upset customers. Some in the thread reported having better luck with smaller registrars like Dynadot.com that were not as besieged by registration requests as GoDaddy has been today.

On Tuesday we told you about Video.us being back on the market after the domain had been stripped from its non U.S. owners twice in the past year. After the previous owners paid (and lost) $75,000 and $18,500 respectively, the name was auctioned off again today by Galcomm.com. The price slipped again, with the winning bid coming in at $12,000 this time. Let's hope the new owner has better luck meeting the .us Nexus requirement (be a U.S. citizen or have a business presence in the U.S.).

Elsewhere Sedo's latest GreatDomains.com premium online auction opened today with names including Color.com, Villas.com and House.net up for bid. Like all of the GreatDomains monthly acutions, the event will run for one week, ending July 24. You can see the full auction inventory here.
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We have compiled the domain sales data reported to us in the just concluded second quarter of 2008 to see how it compares to the same quarter last year. At first glance Q2-2007 (when the general economy was in much better shape than it is now) looked much stronger than 2Q-2008. $36.6 million in total sales were reported in Q2-2007 vs. $27.7 million in Q2-2008. 

The domain aftermarket remains on course despite 
severe disruptions in the general economy.

Since I had not noticed any significant decline in sales in my weekly reports on the aftermarket I figured there must have been an outlier or two that accounted for that big year over year difference. On closer inspection I found that was indeed the case. Q2-2007 was the quarter when Porn.com sold for $9.5 million. In Q2-2008 all reported sales were under $1 million so there was no blockbuster deal to offset the landmark Porn.com sale a year ago. 

If you look at the comparative sales without Porn.com, then Q2-2008 was slightly better than Q2-2007, $27.7 million vs. $27.1 million. That is a much slower growth rate than we have been seeing, but I said late last year that given the rapid deterioration of the general economy, it would be a major victory if domain sales could just hold their own. They continue to do that and the past three weeks have been especially solid as shown in our weekly domain sales reports.

I also looked at how 2Q-2008 compared to Q1-2008 (the first quarter of each year is often the strongest of the year). Again the raw total showed Q1 was much stronger at $38 million in reported sales. However, again another major outlier was involved. $10 million of that Q1 total was for a single domain, Fund.com. Without it, Q1-2008 was about the same as Q2-2008, $28 million vs. $27.7 million. Q1 also benefitted from two other sales over $1 million: DataRecovery.com ($1.6 million) and Cruises.co.uk ($1.1 million). 

Those comparisons confirmed what I believed I was seeing anecdotally, that the domain aftermarket has been holding its own while the real estate and credit markets are collapsing around us. I think we are clearly blessed to be in an industry that continues to perform well when so many others are struggling to survive.
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In the past 15 months, two previous owners lost big bucks after buying Video.us only to see the registry delete the domain for Nexus/WhoIs violations. Now we will see if the third time is the charm for this star-crossed domain. The story began in April 2007 when a European company 

bought the domain from its American owner for $75,000 (the highest reported price for a .us domain to date). 10 months later, someone alerted the registry to the fact that the contact information in the WhoIs record was no longer valid. The .us registry, Neustar, responded by deleting the domain which was then caught and auctioned off by Pool.com in February 2008. 

The previous owner lost their $75,000 investment and the new owner, based in Luxembourg, paid just $18,500 to win the 

Pool auction and gain control of the domain. But they ran afoul of the registry too. Citing Nexus requirements that .us domains be owned by a U.S. citizen or someone with a business presence in the U.S., Video.us was deleted still again, only to be caught again Monday, this time by Galcomm.com. They too are auctioning the domain off, with the bidding scheduled to end at Noon Thursday (July 17).

It will be interesting to see what the domain is valued at this time and whether or not a non-U.S. buyer will risk going after it again. If they do, history shows they had better be able to convince the registry that they have a valid presence in the U.S. and keep the information in their WhoIs record up to date (wise advice for all domain owners). 
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The 2008 GeoDomain Expo closed in Chicago Saturday (July 12) with a 12-hour day packed with big events. It opened with a morning session featuring stories from five geodomain pioneers (all seen in the photo below showing, left to right); Josh Metnick (Chicago.com), Dan Pulcrano (Boulevards New Media), the Castello Brothers (David and Michael) and Skip Hoagland. 

Metnick is the man who originally came up with the idea for an association of .com city domain owners and got a ball rolling that led to the formation of Associated Cities, the group that presented the GeoDomain Expo in association with the Kelsey Group. All five panelists are founding board members of Associated Cities and are geodomain pioneers in every sense of the word. Associated Cities will soon be renamed Associated Geos as the organization starts welcoming state and country geo domain owners to their membership ranks. 

The Saturday luncheon featured a powerful address from Internet Commerce Association Legal Counsel Phil Corwin. Corwin detailed current theats to domain owners (including specific threats to geodomain owners) and what the ICA is doing to meet those challenges. I'll have more on his talk as well as greater detail on all of the show sessions in our comprehensive review of the conference that will be published by the end of this week.

After lunch I sat on a five-man panel discussion about GeoDomains In the News that also included David Kesmodel (author of The Domain Game), Andrew Allemann (DomainNameWire.com), Elliot Silver (ElliotsBlog.com) and Steven Morales (SimplyGeo.com). David Castello moderated the session and though I am a bit biased on this specific topic, I thought it was an exceptional session that shed a lot of light on the rising interest in geodomains.

Phil Corwin
ICA Legal Counsel

The final informational session of the Expo was a GeoDomain Town Hall meeting that Mark Burgess (SanDiego.com) and Skip Hoagland presided over.  There were open mikes for attendees to bring up any topic they wished with Burgess, Hoagland and various audience members providing the answers.

Organizers of the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. conference recently announced that the live domain auctions at their events would start featuring multiple auction houses. In the past Moniker.com has been the sole provider of auction services  at T.R.A.F.F.I.C. shows.  We have learned that

effective with the New York City conference coming up Sept. 23-26, Thought Convergence (parent company of T.R.A.F.F.I.C.'s main sponsor, TrafficZ.com) will be one of the new auction providers at T.R.A.F.F.I.C. events. A third auction provider is expected to be announced in the next week or so. 

Thought Convergence acquired live auction expertise this spring when they bought Name Intelligence, the parent company of the Domain Roundtable conference where live auctions have been a staple the past two years, 

T.R.A.F.F.I.C. is also about to offer a new "T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Auction Rewards" program that will give frequent bidders and buyers in T.R.A.F.F.I.C. auctions greatly reduced admission prices to future T.R.A.F.F.I.C. shows.  The discount amounts will be based on the level of money spent in their auctions.
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Dan Pulcrano
Boulevards New Media

The first full day of the 2008 GeoDomain Expo at the W Hotel City Center in Chicago kept registrants busy from early morning until well past midnight last night. Dan Pulcrano, a founding board member of Associated Cities, the geodomain owner's association that is staging the show in concert with the Kelsey Group, kicked off the Friday (July 11) agenda with a GeoDomain State of the Union address. Details from Pulcrano's talk as well other addresses and seminar sessions will be covered in our comprehensive show review article that will be published by the end of next week. 

Pulcrano is the founder and CEO of Boulevards New Media and he had some good news yesterday when it was announced that the Boulevards network (including LosAngeles.com, Seattle.com, MovieTimes.com and

many other popular sites) has earned a spot on Quantcast Corporation's list of the Top 500 most trafficked properties on the web, reaching #360. “We are pleased to be counted among the world’s largest Internet properties," Pulcrano said. "Quantcast has performed a tremendous service for the industry by becoming the first ratings service to transparently aggregate data from multiple sites into a unified ranking. This is the Forbes 500 of traffic ratings.” 

The 2008 GeoDomainExpo officially got underway last night in Chicago with a wall-to-wall crowd packing the welcoming cocktail party at the W Hotel - City Center (part of the room can be seen in the photo below). The turnout was truly stunning especially when you consider that the dates and location for this show were not announced until we did it May 20 - just 7 weeks ago! Equally remarkable is the fact that this show is devoted to just one sector of the domain industry - geo domains - yet managed to draw a crowd on par with the last two general interest domain conferences.

The crowd was not only large, it was loud. The high volume level produced by animated conversations throughout the hall generated an atmosphere crackling with electricity. A lot of the excitement stems from the fact that falling PPC rates have caused interest in domain development to hit an all time high and development is what geo domain owners (especially those who are Associated Cities members) are all about. In fact our current Cover Story on AC co-founder Skip Hoagland is devoted to that topic. This week's seminars will center on how to develop geo assets and turn them into profitable businesses. That theme appeals to just about all domain owners, whether they own geos or not.

While the cocktail party was the official kickoff for the Expo, there was actually a round of seminars earlier in the day. A major benefit of Associated Cities membership is that you get into a private series of informational sessions held in the afternoon before the public Expo opens with the evening mixer.

Just before noon, Associated Cities chairwoman Jessica Bookstaff (PigeonForge.com and Durango.com) welcomed members to Chicago and introduced the first of five private seminars that ran right up to the start of the evening cocktail party. A scene from the first of those, devoted to how you make money with a geo website, is shown in the photo below. Scottsdale.com's Fred Mercaldo is at the podium and you also see on the dais (left to

Jessica Bookstaff
Associated Cities Chairwoman

right) moderator Dan Pulcrano (Boulevards New Media), Natalie Lambert (Castello Cities Internet Network) and Pat and Michael French (Santa Fe.com).

Today's schedule begins with 10:30am State of the GeoDomain Industry comments from Ms. Bookstaff and Dan Pulcrano. The keynote address from local media expert John Kelsey of the Kelsey Group follows at 11. I'll be giving a brief talk at the noon luncheon then join attendees for the three afternoon seminar sessions that round out the day. 

Tonight's cocktail party/buffet dinner will feature a book signing by Wall Street Journal reporter David Kesmodel who recently released his book, The Domain Game, to rave reviews. The night continues with a big TrafficZ.com party at a local nightspot that will run from 9pn into the wee hours of the morning. I'll try to turn in early enough to get a Lowdown item covering today's activity posted in this space Saturday morning (wish me luck with that)!
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The 2008 GeoDomain Expo officially gets underway this evening at 6pm (local time) with a welcoming cocktail party at the W Hotel - City Center in Chicago. Though that is the first event on the published agenda there was already a lot going on in the Windy City when we 

TrafficZ treated early arrivals to a Lake Michigan 
dinner cruise aboard the Odyssey II Wednesday.

arrived yesterday afternoon. The first person we bumped into when we arrived at the hotel was Jessica Bookstaff (PigeonForge.com), who chairs the board of directors of Associated Cities, the geodomain owners association that stages the Expo. 

The board met Wednesday afternoon then joined a group of about three dozen people invited on a spectacular Lake Michigan dinner cruise aboard the Odyssey II that was hosted by Expo sponsor TrafficZ.com. The get-together also served to celebrate TrafficZ's acquisition of Name Intelligence this spring.

In the photo below you see one of the three tables filled with TrafficZ guests as the Odyssey cruises past the Chicago skyline just after sunset last night. TrafficZ COO Ammar Kubba is sitting at the front left and local domainer Anthos Chrysanthou is at the front right.

Soon after night fell, the ship served as the ultimate vantage point for watching a spectacular lakefront fireworks show launched from Chicago's famous Navy Pier. We snapped the shot below from the Odyssey deck.

This afternoon there will be a series of private seminars at the W Hotel for Associated Cities members only (one of the benefits of joining the trailblazing group whose members cross promote each other's developed websites). The cocktail party for all Expo registrants follows at 6, then the first full day of the conference gets underway Friday morning. We will have a daily Lowdown post from the show in this column.

In other domain conference news, the organizers of the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. show just announced that starting with their New York conference Sept. 23-26, they will be the first to offer multiple live domain auctions staged by multiple auction houses. In the past Moniker.com (who will stage a live auction at the GeoDomain Expo Saturday) has handled all of the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. auctions. Details on the additional auction service providers and their events at T.R.A.F.F.I.C. New York are to be released soon.
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I'm traveling to Chicago today for this week's big GeoDomain Expo at the downtown W Hotel. The show starts tomorrow evening and runs through Saturday (July 10-12). I'm heading 

to the Windy City a day early to attend a private pre-conference event tonight that I will tell you about in this column tomorrow morning. I'll post a daily item here while the show is going on, then once we are back home I will put together our exclusive comprehensive show review that will be published on the home page by the end of next week. 

This is shaping up to be a great show and 

I hope to see many of you there. The organizers, Associated Cities, expect to break their attendance record and they have a lot of interesting speakers and seminars lined up, as well as top notch social events and of course another Moniker live domain auction. By the way, in case you missed the news we broke in our current Cover Story about geodomain giant Skip Hoagland, Associated Cities is changing their name to Associated Geos and will open membership to state and country geodomain owners, as well as the .com city owners the organization was originally built to serve. 

Incidentally, if you want some excellent tips on domain development, regardless of whether your domains are geos or not, be sure to read that Skip Hoagland Cover Story. He has a ton of experience and details exactly how he uses partnerships to tackle the task of developing domains on a big scale.
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We've written a lot about how the Internet has sent the newspaper industry into what is looking more and more like a death spiral, but other forms of traditional media are facing the guillotine too. The TV networks and film industry may be next. Yesterday Lehman Brothers

analyst Anthony DiClemente issued a report saying the TV and video business is about to face a nasty downturn of their own, and that it could happen much faster than most people expected - reaching a crescendo in as soon as two years.

Commenting on DiClemente's report, Wired Magazine wrote, "If the television or video business model is broken, you can blame the internet for that: Digital distribution, audience fragmentation and widespread file-sharing are eating into network and studios' profits, and those profits may not come back". The big winners are expected to be digital distribution as embodied by sites like iTunes and YouTube.

In a related item, a new research report from Interpublic's Magna Global was released today projecting growth rates for various forms of media. Magna predicted that "Emerging Media" (new forms of media, led by online platforms) would soar 31.1% in 2009. By contrast traditional ad-supported media is expected to grow just 4% in 2009 according to another Interpublic unit, Universal McCann. 

Online social media is expected to be the fastest grower next year expanding over 37%. Online search is expected to grow another 24%. These Internet media growth rates are actually starting to slow as the web matures, but they are still numbers that any traditional medium would die for. Joe Mandese has more on the Interpublic reports in his Online Media Daily column today at MediaPost.com.
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.Mobi is alive and well according to the registry's Director of New Markets Pinky Brand. Responding to our Lowdown post July 2 about a "Death of .Mobi" seminar scheduled for the 

Pinky Brand
.Mobi Director, New Markets

Search Engines Strategies conference next month in San Jose, Brand rallied to .mobi's defense in an email we received today.  Here are some of Pinky's counter punches:

• Since the general availability of .mobi in September 2006, more than 1,000,000 .mobi domains have been registered, and are actively used and promoted by thousands of top brands around the world. See a small sampling of those at http://mtld.mobi/node/997. 

• A few weeks back, http://zagat.mobi took the Best Listings & Updates site of the year in the Webby Awards' People's Voice Awards.

• This past week, two top tech magazines launched .mobi sites at http://zdnetuk.mobi and http://siliconuk.mobi. 

• Disney has just launched http://camprock.mobi  to go with its hit Jonas Brothers film. 

• The leading Spanish language channel has just launched http://univision.mobi. 

• Leading country stars Tim McGraw and Lonestar can be found on the mobile web at http://mcgraw2go.mobi  and http://lonestarnow.mobi, respectively.

• Papers around the world from the New York Post at http://nypost.mobi  to the Sun at http://thesun.mobi  use the .mobi domain to indicate that their content is designed for easy access on mobile phones.

"In short, I'd have to say - contrary to your posting that mentions the agenda at Search Engine Strategies 2008 - .mobi has been largely embraced, mostly by international brands looking to help their customers find mobile content that works," Brand said. "And by the way the iPhone is not a .mobi killer. It actually enhances our value proposition even more. You may recall by reading http://dotmobi.typepad.com/dotmobi/2007/01/what_does_the_i.html that we’ve been pro-iPhone since it was announced."

Brand added, "Any serious global brand or entrepreneur who wants their mobile content to find it’s way to the world and wants their content to display properly on the 5,000 plus handset varieties that are out there at any given time is sticking their head in the sand if they think the iPhone is the only thing that matters. At best the iPhone makes up barely 2% of the handset market. So you see reports of our death are unbelievably exaggerated, and we look forward to hopefully serving on that panel in San Jose next month."
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Marc Ostrofsky, who earned a permanent place in domain history when he sold Business.com in a deal valued at a record $7.5 million when it took place in 1999, was married to Beverle Rivers Gardner Sunday (June 29) in Aspen, Colorado. The ceremony was held at picturesque Maroon Bells followed by a reception at the exclusive Aspen Mountain Club. 60 close friends and family members were guests at the wedding including the couple's five teenage daughters (two of whom, Kelly and Shelly Ostrofsky, are identical twins that were recently featured on the front page of the Houston Chronicle after graduating first in their high school class of over 550 student to be named co-valedictorians). Below is an exclusive wedding photo showing Marc, Beverle and their five daughters on their big day:

Ostrofsky is also widely known as a co-founder of iREIT.com and owner/operator of Blinds.com, CuffLinks.com, eTickets.com and many others. Wedding guests included a former Disney President, a CBS Executive VP, Playboy's Barbie Benton, domainer Chad Folkening and Bianka Krausch. Marc and Beverle are currently off on a honeymoon that is taking them through Italy, Istanbul and the Greek Islands. Incidentally, Ostrofsky has finished work on a new book, Get Rich Click™ that is scheduled for release in 2009.

In another sign of the (good) times for the domain industry, a story at Internet Retailer yesterday described how a chain of flower shops in Texas (Marc Ostofsky's home state) gave 

their business a big boost by closing most of their brick and mortar stores and moving their business online. The six-store chain has already closed four stores with a fifth to be shuttered soon.

The owner of Forth Worth's Bice’s Florist, Keith Riewe, said  the company is buying up domain names as part of its strategy to drive more customers to their site and boost e-commerce sales. By purchasing 35 to 40 domain names such as eflowersite.com, nationalfloraldelivery.com and blossomlink.com, Riewe said Bice’s has increased traffic by 47% to about 68,000 unique visitors a month and that annual sales are up by $1.5 million to about $3.7 million. 

Riewe, who comes from a computer technology background, said he started looking into purchasing domain names as a way to drive traffic and sales soon after he purchased Bice’s six years ago. Most of the domains redirect to Bice’s home page with the BicesFlorist.com URL displaying in the address bar. The only difference is that a unique identifier is tacked on to the end to help track each domain.

The continued meltdown of the newspaper industry (under the heat of competition from the Internet) continues to accelerate. The news of declining circulation, shrinking ad revenue and 

layoffs at major papers has become so frequent that it almost isn't news anymore. Still I was struck by a couple of things in the latest report of cutbacks regarding the Los Angeles Times that came out today. One was the remarkable scope of their latest retrenchment - 250 jobs cut including 17% of the newsroom staff, plus a 15% reduction in the number of pages printed each week. 

Even more indicative of the unstoppable winds of change at work today, the print and online staffs at the Times are being consolidated into a single editorial department (noted in a 

report on the Times dilemma at MediaPost). The online division of this iconic American newspaper will no longer be the company's red-headed stepchild - recognition that Internet delivery of media is where the action is today and where it increasingly will be tomorrow.  

In a memo to his staff, Times Editor Russ Stanton wrote, "You all know the paradox we find ourselves in. Thanks to the Internet, we have more readers for our great journalism than at any time in our history. But also thanks to the Internet, our advertisers have more choices, and we have less money." 

This migration of traditional media outlets to the Internet is relevant to domains because many of them, especially city geo domains, are the perfect platforms for delivering all kinds of locally relevant media - print, audio and video - from a single, unforgettable Internet address. The owners of many of the best domains in the geo space will gather one week from today in Chicago for the start of the 2008 GeoDomain Expo. We will be there as well.
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Is .mobi already dead? The folks putting on the big Search Engine Strategies 2008 conference coming up August 18-21 in San Jose, California seem to think so. Their agenda 

has been posted online and includes a session titled Mobile SEO: Death of the '.mobi'. They are fingering the iPhone as the killer. The seminar decription states "The 'one web' premise of the iPhone generation of connected devices offers a stark contrast to the former

mobile standard, in which webmasters created a separate '.mobi' site, to specifically target mobile users. This session will outline what you can expect in the mobile space and how search marketers can use one site to leverage both mobile and traditional web search." Dhana Pawar or Yojo Mobile and Cindy Krum of Blue Moon Works are listed as the panelists. I don't think Dhana and Cindy will be getting any Christmas cards from .mobi fans this year, but the provocative premise of the seminar will certainly draw attention to this session and the SES show in general.

Pizza.com has finally changed hands, three months after it was auctioned off by Sedo's GreatDomains.com with a winning bid of $2.6 million. However, the new owner, 

Philadelphia's National A-1 (according to the updated WhoIs record), is not believed to have paid that high a price, apparently having stepped in and picked up the domain after the original winning bidder bowed out. It looks like the new purchase price was subject to a non disclosure agreement and will not be released. Sedo confirmed to us today that they could not release details. We also requested information from National A-1 (who has been a home page advertiser at DN Journal for nearly two years) but historically they have not disclosed details of their transactions. The seller, Chris Clark, told 

Domain Name Wire's Andrew Allemann that a deal had been completed, but he also declined to reveal financial details of the transaction.

Mainstream press around the world jumped on the story of the original auction sale, but none bothered to follow up and report that the winning bidder never completed the transaction. This is the reason we do not report "sales" from the industry's many live auctions until the domains have been paid for and transferred to the new owners.
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