First Coast News covers domain flipping and the story of Natalie Williams a Jacksonville, Florida resident who has gone from a single income family on welfare to owning a home and 2 cars by flipping domains, pulling in as much as $2500 a month. Sure there are guys pulling in millions on domains, but this story shows one of probably thousands of work-at-home stories that are proliferating behind the scenes in the domain world right now. Text version of story can be seen following this link.

Dark Blue Sea, parent company of Fabulous.com,  made a presentation to investors on Monday, a copy of which can be downloaded as a pdf here. DBS detailed their partnership implementation with Godaddy, company earnings and expectations. An interesting part of the presentation was the detailed examples given of the domain names that were sold and their prices. The presentation gives some valuable insight in to the domain after-market by one of the major companies in the space.  Also, check out DomainNameWire for some of the details and Andrew’s analysis on the numbers.

Dark Blue Sea, parent company of Fabulous.com have entered into a five year agreement with Godaddy to sell domain names from the Dark Blue Sea portfolio through Godaddy’s sales channels. The agreement also puts Godaddy in a position to become a major shareholder in DBS.

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Sedo has announced that the 2007 was a record breaking year for aftermarket domain names, with the demand reaching a new benchmark. The company was able to top the $70 million mark in domain sales for the first time in history, a number that almost doubles their domain sales from the previous year.

In their Domain Market Study for 2007, Sedo also announced that average domain price had gone up about 7.8 percent overall, which was helped by the increase of value by .co.uk, .es, .eu, and .mobi domains. Some traditional top-level domains, such as .info and .biz, saw a noticeable decrease in average value.

With over 10.5 million domains listed for sale in the Sedo marketplace, there seems to be a bright future ahead for the industry. Businesses and organizations are increasingly adding to the demand for aftermarket domains as they can no longer find ideal domain names through traditional registrars.

While aftermarket domains continue to rise, so do the payouts for domain parking. In 2007 Sedo paid out over $50 million in parking revenue to its members, with a noticeable per site increase across the board.

Tim Schumacher, chief executive officer of Sedo, stated in the annual report that “2007 proved to be another banner year for Sedo as even more businesses and investors became aware of the pivotal role secondary domain names play on the internet. We look forward to continued global expansion in both our domain brokerage and parking service offerings.”

The full report is on Sedo’s website.

Fusu, the world’s first Domain Stock Exchange, have announced that they have entered into a strategic partnership with EuroDNS in preparation for today’s public launch.

Fusu’s domain exchange platform allows participants to liquidate a fraction of their domain to the market and immediately receive money without having to give up control of the website. In return, stockholders in the domain obtain the rights to their share in future sales or advertising revenues that are generated through their Domain Stocks.

Until now, Fusu has been by invitation only. The private beta, which was introduced just over three months ago, has received a lot of positive response from the hundred key players that were invited to participate, many of whom are already using the real-money version which was launched in November.

The partnership with EuroDNS solidifies the platform as being a trustworthy environment for domainers to buy and sell on. “By bridging the gap between the traditional finance world and the innovative domainers” crowd, Fusu grants investors an unprecedented access to valuable properties while fueling a buoyant market,” said Xavier Buck, the CEO of Euro DNS. “Our company is proud to participate in a great venture that could become essential to domainers and Internet users worldwide.”

With today’s launch of Fusu’s Public Beta, everybody is now invited to buy and sell shares of premium domain names that are owned by a few of the industry’s most well known and trusted domainers.

For more information, visit Fusu.com for the full press release.

In an email sent out to customers today, NameJet announced lower initial bid prices, improvements and new features to their expiring domain name sales site. NameJet had received some early negative reviews for releasing a seemingly rushed version of the site and some unusual bugs and complaints are still being reported from time to time on forums. Many of the yet-to-be-added features such as displaying bidder IDs will be a welcome change to many who bid in the expiring domain after-market and build up trust in the marketplace. A copy of the email is available on page 2.

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In an email sent out today, Moniker.com has announced a re-auctioning of a batch of .mobi domains purchased recently from the TRAFFIC domain auction in Florida. The domains have now been placed back on the market by the winning bidder.

Note: I was not a .mobi buyer or bidder.

The buyer/bidder of these .mobi names at TRAFFIC wants to sell the domains at cost due to other financial obligations. Here is a list of the premium names sold at TRAFFIC to one bidder that now wants to sell them for cost .

Since you were a .mobi buyer/bidder in our most recent Traffic auction I am sending this email in regard to the .mobi names. We are giving you first shot at them but we need you commitment at of above the prices below.

These are available for purchase (on a first come -first serve basis) at these prices below thru this Friday November 9th.

Domain Venue Price

News.mobi Live $110,000.00
Shopping.mobi Live $55,000.00
ZIPCodes.mobi Live $8,000.00
elections.mobi Silent $3,000.00
jewelry.mobi Silent $15,730.00
move.mobi Silent $3,000.00
price.mobi Silent $3,993.00
weightloss.mobi Silent $3,000.00

From Godaddy representatives :

“Go Daddy Signature Auctions has worked with the sellers to reduce the reserves of some of the domains listed in the auction. As result, some of the names from yesterday will be relisted over the next two days. Many of these names were significantly reduced. There has also been a slight format change in that the opening price may not be the actual reserve price. A message will be displayed in the Auction History and Chat area notifying bidders that the reserve has been met.”

As was previously mentioned on this site about the domain auctions  “A great list of domains with good reserve prices and an efficient, trustworthy auction platform is a sure fire way to get professional domain investors interested.”  Godaddy only managed to sell one domain in the first round of auctions yesterday and the high reserves were likely part of the problem.

From documents published on the Dark Blue Sea website, it appears that Fabulous has sold one of their marquis domain names, in what one would expect to be a sizable transaction. The domain is referenced in the DBS Quaterly Update :

On the basis of October trading, gross secondary market domain name sales are expected to be approximately US$1 million. This is up from the September quarter but includes the sale of bedroomfurniture.com (the reference domain that the company had been using in its shareholder communications).

Domain Name News has not received a formal confirmation on the sale or the price of the domain name, but ownership has obviously been changed to CSN Stores. The domain name was one of Fabulous’ marquis developed domain names and has been referenced for years in their filings and presentations as an example of a direct navigation domain. The domain name was developed to incorporate ppc as well cpa advertisers into the site. The buyer, CSN Stores, maintains a vast network of e-commerce websites many in the home furnishings niche. CSN has also partnered with Internet Real Estate Group in development of their domain name Luggage.com.

Godaddy.com has released the final list of domain names to be auctioned off in their new Signature Domain Auctions beginning November 6th. The list of 30 domains was compiled from submissions from the Godaddy website. Godaddy put up a page about the Signature Domain Auctions earlier this year and have been vetting submissions and preparing for the release since the announcement.

The auction list includes several one-word .com domain names and one 2-letter .com domain, YB.com . There are also six .mobi domains included in the auction. The addition of the .mobi domains comes as no surprise with the release of the Signature Auction being on the heels of 13 .mobi domains selling for high prices at the TRAFFIC auction in Florida.

Godaddy is typically known as a low-cost retail domain name registrar. Godaddy currently runs an after-market auction selling expiring domains at TDNAM.com and has partnered with Fabulous.com to sell domains through the Domain Distribution Network. The addition of the premium domain auction to the Godaddy offerings shows a concerted effort to aggressively enter the domain name after-market.

In a previous press release on the Godaddy website, Bob Parsons, founder and chief executive of the domain name registrar talked about the auctions

“We’ve said it many times - domain names are real estate of the 21st century,” said Bob Parsons, Founder & CEO of GoDaddy.com. “We wanted to give people a chance to secure some prime Internet space through a fast-paced, easy to use auction.”

and in the recent release about the aucitons he says

“We have some impressive domain names in this auction. We were inundated with submissions for listings, but selected only the most memorable and coveted. We also worked to provide a good variety of names for a wide range of price points.”

The format to these auctions seems to be different than most domain auctions. According to the press relase “The domain names will be auctioned one at a time. There is no time limit to each auction. Once the bidding stops, the auction ends. A moderator will be on hand in a live-chat setting to answer questions potential bidders may have. ”

It’s never been a problem for the domain auction sites and events to get domain submissions for auctions, as Parsons found out, but sorting through and finding good domains at good prices is a daunting task. A great list of domains with good reserve prices and an efficient, trustworthy auction platform is a sure fire way to get professional domain investors interested. Looks like the Godaddy team has a good list which makes for a good start in that area, hopefully the reserves are reasonable to increase the interest level.

One interesting advantage Godaddy has in entering the premium domain auction space is their scale. The most important job for an auctioneer is to market the auctions in order to get as many bidders as possible. As the #1 domain registrar, Godaddy has a huge end-user customer base to market these domains to, which might provide an interest level not seen at other domain auction sites or events. It will be interesting to see how these auctions turn out with the different format, potentially larger pool of bidders and currently unknown reserve prices.

Here is the list of domains to be auctioned :
1x.com
Apartments.mobi
BargainBuy.com
BeautyCounter.com
BestPhone.com
BestService.com
Bob.com
Campaign2008.com
CollegeFootball.mobi
Dentists.mobi
DietAids.com
Earl.com
Even.com
ForeignTravel.com
Grapes.com
HDTVShop.com
Homes.mobi
HowToInvest.com
Maillist.com
Media.mobi
MobileSecurity.com
Moving.mobi
RoadWork.com
Smoked.com
SportUtility.com
TopBeaches.com
TravelUpdate.com
VirtualServer.com
WhyHybrid.com
YB.com