Clek Media Inc. (”Clek”) today announced that it has brokered the world-record sale of the domain FUND.COM for US$9,999,950 in an all-cash transaction. Clek, a media consulting firm, represented the seller of the domain, assisting in both the negotiation and closing of the transaction. The buyer is Fund.com Inc. (OTCBB: FNDM), a New York firm previously named Meade Technologies Inc. To date the buyer has revealed their plans for the domain mostly in filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Clek believes that the nearly $10 million purchase price for FUND.COM represents the highest price ever paid for an Internet domain. The purchase price tops what the Guinness World Records books report as the highest previous price, the memorable BUSINESS.COM purchase. Ex-Disney executive, Jake Winebaum of eCompanies Ventures, acquired BUSINESS.COM for $7.5 million in 1999, which created some public media controversy at that time for the seemingly high price. However, in July 2007 BUSINESS.COM was sold to yellow pages publisher, RH Donnelly, for $345 million, 47 times the purchase price of the domain.

Business and Wall Street investors continue to assign higher values to internet domains. According to MSNBC, the domain CREDITCARDS.COM was acquired for $2.75 million all-cash and SEC filings reveal that the $20 billion hedge fund, American Capital Strategies, and Austin Ventures invested $135 million in CREDITCARDS.COM. Regarding the CREDITCARDS.COM sale, MSNBC quoted ClickSuccess CEO Dan Smith, “It’s like prime real estate, there’s only so much of this real estate to go around. I feel like we bought a slice of Park Avenue.”

source CNN

.jp is the latest ccTLD to pass the magical one million mark, achieving the milestone last month. As of March 1 there were 1,003,285 domain names registered.

In the first three months of 2008 there was an increase of 14,399 registrations and 104,484 in the previous twelve months.

Of these domain names, around a third (316,829) are .co.jp names, half (480,890) are ASCII names and 142,013 are what Japan Registry Services call Japanese.

source DomainNews

The $611k runner up for Music.mobi — C. Roussos from Cyprus and owner of several music.* domains — has settled the Music.mobi case with Sedo and dotMobi. As you may all well know he took both the mTLD and Sedo to court and served them with an injunction and a lawsuit. During the last 4-5 weeks his lawyers have been in negotiations with the dotMobi mTLD in light of their final resolution proposal which required him to pay $616,000 for the name.

Source dotMobiz

Making comparisons to past results and using the data we gathered, the results of this auction aren’t very impressive. Total sales volume from this auction appears to be $4.2 million. 82 domains sold out of the roughly 230 names at the live event. The .mobi’s:

* dui.mobi $ 7,000
* vegas.mobi $ 20,000
* score.mobi $ 7,000
* tickets.mobi $ 60,000
* doctor.mobi $ 10,000
* banks.mobi $ 12,000
* property.mobi $ 26,000
* porn.mobi $ 110,000
* naked.mobi $ 10,500
* lottery.mobi $ 9,750
* hollywood.mobi $ 16,000
* shows.mobi $ 20,000
* broadway.mobi $ 17,000

Top 3 domains by price were : skiresorts.com at $850,000 , meds.com at $470,000 and dvds.com at $300,000. Nine names broke the six figure mark but no names were sold for seven figures.

Source dotMobiz

The owners of the .travel gTLD, The Globe, announced they will sell the Tralliance registry to The Registry Management Company LLC, a privately held entity controlled by Michael S. Egan, theglobe.com’s Chairman, CEO and controlling investor.

However Edward Hasbrouck has been digging around, and reports on his blog on the impending sale and says the pending sale raises “renewed questions about Tralliance’s compliance with its contractual commitments to ICANN as well as about the lack of transparency of ICANN’s decision making and ICANN’s compliance with its own bylaws.”

Hasbrouck goes on to note “ICANN delegated .travel to Tralliance only on condition that the TTPC would have actual authority over .travel policies. If it’s been reduced to a purely advisory role, that’s a violation of the agreement between Tralliance and ICANN.

“The sale of the .travel registry business may also be a violation of the contract by which ICANN delegated .travel to Tralliance.”

However Bret Fausett does not agree, saying he does not “think this poses any overarching ICANN policy issues — you can sell a company and keep its current bundle of contractual relationships intact — but I do wonder about the business decision.”

Bret is also intrigued as to why the business is not a good one. He cannot understand why they do not make money with 28,529 names under management, with 26 different registrars that they resell for about $99 Bret notes from the the October 2007 Registry Report to ICANN.

Source DomainNews

Shopping.de sold for €1.5million on Sedo according to a report in OnlinePC.ch. The seller, Andreas Malek, bought the domain name five years ago, along with a number of others including einkaufen.de (the German word for “shopping”).

Source DomainNews

Brussels, 25 January 2008 By the end of 2007, the number of registered .eu domain names in Poland had grown to 102,138, a staggering rise of 48.64 percent compared to the year before, according to recent statistics from EURid, the organisation that manages the .eu Internet top-level domain.

Marc Van Wesemael, the managing director of EURid, commented on the numbers: It is very pleasing to see the growth of .eu domain names in Poland. I am convinced that we will see even further growth of .eu domains in Poland in 2008 due to the strong economical growth in Central Europe.

Marcin Ilnicki, the manager of Polish timber manufacturing and transport and shipping service company Iltrans, says that his company has been using .eu since 2006 and testifies to its advantage: We registered a .eu domain name due to its international character. As a result we met many new partners throughout Europe; from England, France, Belgium and Germany.

Other countries that saw a significant increase in registrations of .eu domains were Lithuania and Finland. Registrations in Lithuania grew by 48.46 percent and in Finland by 39.91 percent.

Since April 2006 it has been possible for anyone living within the European Union to register a .eu domain name. So far more than 2.7 million .eu domain names have been registered, making .eu the third-largest European top-level domain.

Source EURid

Company acquires domain name for sports portal.

British internet media company MediaCorp has purchased Sport.co.uk for �135,000 (approximately $262,000 USD). The company plans to create a sports portal with the site.

MediaCorp sold Casino.co.uk for �3.0M in cash last year, with incentives of up to �0.625m if the domain sells well. From what I can tell, this sale has not been reported in the domain name industry and would be the highest ever reported sale of a .co.uk domain name. The current high was thought to be Recycle.co.uk at �150,000.

However, the sale of Casino.co.uk could be considered the sale of a business since it included related portal asset. The site contained a basic casino portal but received significant traffic. MediaCorp owns the extremely valuable Gambling.com domain and portal.

The domain Sport.co.uk was offered at Sedo’s first .uk live domain auction but did not sell. It is not immediately clear if Sedo brokered this sale.

Source DomainNameWire

Dot-fr domain names are on the rise. With currently more than 1 million .fr domain names, the French web market is being more and more sizable (see table 1). The rise of this extension is particulary due to the active internet policy of AFNIC (.fr registry) and corporate registrations. For example, in order to consolidate its assets, AFNIC has recently acquired the domain names nommage.fr and zonefile.fr, initially registered by a registrar since 2000.

Source Legitiname

France is the latest of the ccTLDs to reach the one million .fr registrations. The milestone was reached on January 11.Given the population of France, it has taken a while to reach this mark compared to other ccTLDs. For example, .de will reach their twelve millionth domain registration this year, and even smaller countries such as Australia with around a third of the population and similarly restrictive/protective, depending on who you ask, registration rules, passed the mark late last year. Switzerland (.ch) also reached the one million mark in 2007. A large part of the success of .de registrations has been the less restrictive rules.

There were restrictions on who could register a .fr domain name. Up until 2004 only companies, associations and community groups could register a .fr domain name. Then on June 20, 2006, .fr was opened up to all physical people within France.

So today, according to Lo�c Damilaville, deputy to the DG at Afnic, there are around 2,000 registrations each day with around 70 per cent of these for companies and 30 per cent for private individuals.

But there must be other reasons, and one reason often given for the initial slow take-up of the internet in France compared to other European countries was the success of Minitel, a Videotex online service accessible through the telephone lines, and is considered one of the world’s most successful pre-World Wide Web online services according to Minitel’s Wikipedia entry.

But the main reason for the slow growth, is that France still keeps the name .fr extension restricted to French Companies and French citizens. The Registry and the French Government still have not realized the harm they generate to their Economy by this restriction.

How should international investment and businesses even consider setting up structures in France if they can not upfront register their company names and industry generic terms as domain names. How could an international company or e-commerce start creating a customer base in France before considering coming to France, as they can not register a .fr name that could become indexed in Google in order to address that market from outside France!

Not every e-commerce can afford to register worldwide trademarks and have a local addresses before considering whether the market is worth investing into. That’s why it is important to open up a country TLD. To attract businesses! But this seems too difficult to understand for some registries like France.

Even though most registries have opened up their restricted rules over the last years it is strange that still a few registries (France, Norway, Finland, Island,.) can survive with their anti-european approach in today’s marketplace. Maybe somebody should point out this situation to their new President, Mr. Sarkozy, who seems to like to bring some changes to the country.

Once this change would be done done, then the number of registration will jump to 5 Million within two years.

This big News of one million domain is more a News that points out France domain registration problematic than a big achievement.

Source DomainNews