Parked Domain Monetization

The previous post brought to mind an interesting question — how can you tell who used to own a domain after it is sold? Here are a few ideas:

• The Wayback Machine – you can always go to the Internet Archives, input the domain and see what the historically cached html reveals.
• You can use the premium version (costs money) of the Domain History service at domaintools.com to see historical whois records.

Do you know of a better way? Maybe you can share it?

Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter, revealed that he paid $7,500 for the domain twitter.com back mid 2006 in a tweet yesterday. Here is what he wrote in his Twitter stream:

@kul depends. Twitter was a side project. I bought the domain for $7500.

The price sounds about right, maybe even a little high. Robin Wauters posted about the revelation over on Techcrunch. The circumstance of the sale were revealed by some clever sleuthing in the comments of the article. It turns out it was owned by Park Myung Hwan from Korea who registered it in the year 2000.

I think it’s interesting when domain values are discussed on mainstream tech websites like Techcrunch. Here are some additional domain sale stories that were revealed (none of this is verified) via comments:

• Recruiting.com was purchased for $75,000 and sold for a much more (who knows the timing on that one).
• ShopCity.com sold for $25,000 in 2008, recently ShopLocally.com sold for $300,000.
• Bankruptcyservice.com sold for $2,500.
• CouponReview.com for $1,700 in 2008.
• PizzaTruck.com for $990 in 2010.

This brings up an interesting thought. You can usually find out who owns a domain (unless it’s a private/proxy registration) through a whois lookup. But how can you find out who used to own it? Next post…

VeriSign, the organization that manages the underpinning for ICANN is raising the wholesale prices it charges to Registrar organizations to manage the core base of .com and .net domains. The wholesale price of a .com domain that Verisign charges Registrars will go from $6.86 (does not include ICANN fee) to $7.34, effective July 1, 2010. That means you can realistically expect the yearly rate you pay your Registrar (example: GoDaddy) to go up by at least that amount of money.

ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has cleared the way to move beyond the standard latin characters for domain names and urls. They have approved the “internationalized Domain Name Fast Track Process” which will allow people to apply for new domain names in native languages/scripts such as Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew and others.

This is a process that has been working through the system since the mid-1990s. Now, rather than making the world conform to converting their native language into a string of roman letters, domain owners can provide internet address in their native language and characters.