One good thing preventing Identity Theft was the invention of the Debit Card. The bad thing is, a lot of people are Old School and do not even use a debit card and if they do, they do not use it enough and still write checks.

Now I know this has Nothing really to do with domain names but I know you are human (most of you anyway) and it’s likely you have paper checks that you use to pay for things.

Think about it! The damn things have Your Address on them. Many have Phone Numbers, Your Banks Name and THE BIGGEST, Your Account Number right on them at the bottom.

Even if you use a personal check to pay bills, you do not know who process the check, opens the envelope etc. What information do you need to get checks printed? You get my point. Heck, just with the information on the check is enough for some hacker..

Just an FYI, if I were you… I wouldn’t be writing any more checks!

See latest update near bottom (in red)~

Earlier today I saw a thread on NamePros.com that was titled Domaining.com no longer free. I myself did not receive an email from Domaining.com but that is also because I provide content to the site.

You may have seen a message when going to Domaining.com today that looked like this:

What do I think of this charge?

1. Since I will not see a penny of it, it’s a bit upsetting to me since my content is used. Is my traffic that I get from Domaining.com worth the money they will make since my content is part of the site? Maybe… but I also see this traffic taking a Big Hit
2. It’s going to hurt the domain industry as a whole
3. One of the biggest things, is with the new feature of Selling Domains on Domaining.com, unless you have an account you can not click or purchase the domains listed for sale. The submission will greatly drop

Now $35 for a Year is not that big of a deal. A lot of great information is provided on Domaining.com but the content can also be seen on the blogs that are writing the content that is provided on Domaining.com .

Part of paying the $35 fee,  you get the Daily Domaining.com newsletter which features domain names for sale 24 hours before the domain(s) are listed on the actual site. Secondly, it speeds up your reading process instead of visiting all the blogs you like to read via RSS or directly. The third, the fee will keep spammers down for Francois. (Domain buyers)

When this idea of Domaining.com going to a pay site first started around November 20th, I wrote about it and the majority of people were very unhappy to here this. You can see that post here and the 50+ comments as well.

After that post, I had really thought that owner Francois was going to be happy with the new Domains For Sale section to prevent the site going to a pay site but I think the dollars coming in for that have not reached the dollar amount he was happy with.

Now some will pay the $35 annual fee, but many will not. Since many of these people that will not pay to use Domaining.com are also the same people that WERE paying to submit domain names for sale on the site. The ultimate question will be, will the people that pay the $35 yearly fee total up greater then the ones that would of submitted, sold and purchased domain names when the site was free?

Since Non-paying members will No Longer be able to purchase domains, this will be a Huge Hit to that feature that was just offered. I know I will not be listing any unless non-paying members that want to purchase Can or proof of paying members is High.

I also think that many people will be using the RSS features on blogs that they like to read. If you are interested in using the RSS feature on DotWeekly.com, it’s up in the header next to the search box. Just click the Little Orange Box. or just click here.

I hope something positive comes of this $35 annual fee, but I am just not seeing it currently for readers or the domain industry as a whole. Will the bloggers that fill Domaining.com with the fresh content ask for their feeds to be Removed since Domaining.com will be making further profit off their content and have less visitors visting Domaining.com? Again, something we will see with time.

I wish Francois the best with this decision, but my gut is telling me the site will be back to Free but many will have left and will not look back to it in the future.

UPDATE: Domaining.com seems to have a quick change of heart? Posted by the owner on NamePros.com thread mentioned above.

"Hello,

Francois"

I see a lot of things in the domain industry that are hard to explain. I see domain names that shouldn’t delete for 5-10 years and they delete. Domains you wouldn’t expect to sell for a certain price and they do. I see domain names delete the very same day they expire. I see spikes in traffic on domain names I own but never find out why. Many of these go unexplained.

Today I was checking my stats at Fabulous.com where I have 98% of my domain names parked. The odd thing that I noticed today was 30,000 + impressions for yesterday’s stats. That number is not normal to me, so I was interested to see what was getting all these impressions and figured it was just ONE domain.

Not the case. About 12-15 domains held the majority of these impressions and they never got even near that amount any other day that I have owned them.

So what makes a massive amount of impressions happen to 12 + domain names? I don’t know really and I tried to pick out a pattern (registrar, expiry date, length etc) but was unable to see one.

Now these domains would get maybe 5-20 impressions each on a normal day but yesterday and today’s stats are on track to do it again? These are the impressions for Yesterday alone.

• BorrowBucks.com 2154 impressions
• BlockAdult.com 599 impressions
• BuckYou.com 992 impressions
• CardioDrugs.com 635 impression
• CreativeServers.com 1145 impressions
• CustomDefense.com 1620 impressions
• EditHelper.com 1083 impressions
• ExpressCopyright.com 1593 impressions
• FaceCash.com 1274 impressions
• FieldWriter.com 647 impressions
• Sedie.com 623 impressions
• SeoBuddy.com 1519 impressions

The only thing that I can think of is Bot Hits which always show up as "impressions" but my big question is Why these domains? Again, no real pattern that I can see besides 3 start with B, 3 Start with C and the rest have 2 that start with E, F and S. It’s kind of odd, but that’s the only pattern besides them all being .com and all being parked with Fabulous.com .

Have you seen spikes like this for a group of domain names? I have seen it with One Domain but never a group that really do not show a clear pattern. If you have, were you able to figure out why?

It can be exciting to get an offer on your domain name or have somebody show interest in your domain name. If you are contacted, the next thing to find out is if the contact is Real or Fake.

A very well known FAKE is if you are contacted via Email and you see lines in the email that are like this:

"This is not our main business but we make money on buying/selling domains."

"Your domain name has been found online."

If you reply, the second email will contain lines like the following:

"Have you had your domain names evaluated in the past? I mean domain appraisals."

"Domain without content is ok with me. Web site is not necessary"

Many times you will get an email that is asking for a price on your domain. You can reply back with What Ever Price you want and they will reply back but they want to "Evaluate the domain" to make sure they are getting a fair price. 

This is where the scam part comes in…  to get an appraisal for your domain name and request the appraisal be done either through a company they suggest or put a company name down with a link. I have seen it several times that they refer to a Blog post that is on a site called domainblog.007sites.com

The scam is, they OWN the appraisal company and are NOT interested in your domain name. They simply want to make money off the domain name appraisal and never held interest in your domain name. Once you get an appraisal, you will be out your money and they will no longer hold interest in that domain name!

I have mainly seen these type of emails go to New Registrations. They simply get a list of domain names that were newly registered and target these people. I have also seen this scam be sent to people who newly list domain names on Sedo.

The Signature on the email is also a give away and would look similar to something like this:

George Sterling
President
PHR LLC

Or

Regards,
Michael E Myers
Vice President
OB Securities LLC

The latest one to be going around is from TheOnlineBrokerage.com . Some other domains used are: EasyNameSale.com, EliteInvestment.net, ToughGuy.net

Some actual emails from these appraisal scams look like this:

Latest one,

"Hello,

Regards,
Michael E Myers
Vice President
OB Securities LLC"

OR

"Hello,

Regards,
Jacob Cohen, Ph. D.
CEO
TGN Technologies"

If you happen to get an email like this, simply DELETE it. If you are unsure if it’s a Real Person interested in your domain name, just be sure not to PAY for anything like an appraisal or do not visit a Link if they provide one in an email. If a buyer is interested in your domain name, THEY should be the one ordering an appraisal if they want one. Not You!

The following are domain names that are "popular" of mine that are listed with Afternic.com. By popular, these are the domain names that have the highest "latest visits".

This information can be helpful to help guide you on domain names that are similar that you may want to purchase or you can visit the listings and maybe see why they would be getting visits from potential buyers. I do have all domain names Priced and all have categories as well which does help. I would suggest if you have domain names listed at Afternic and Sedo, that they have prices and categories.

UsMarks.com 15 Visits. Priced at $990. Nice domain for the price and is likely the reason for the higher visits.

OnlineStats.com 14 Visits. Priced at $4800. Domain speaks for itself. Has nice "age" and Online Stats are very important to many!

PlasticWorm.com 14 Visits. Priced at $3,280. If you are a fisherman, I’m sure you have many of them.

TransferPal.com 14 Visits. Priced at $2,350.

BudgetWills.com 11 Visits. Priced at $1,880. I really like this domain name and I think it’s priced Perfectly. Everybody needs a will (at least should have one) and doing one quick and Cheap online is something many are looking for!

uReload.com 10 Visits. Priced at $4,400. I might have this one priced a bit high, but since the Prepaid market is Big, uReload.com can be a Perfect Marketing domain name for a Credit Card company, Cell Phone company or even a Gun/Ammo reloading company.

FieInc.com 9 Visits. Several companies named Fie inc. Priced at $2,280 since I have seen several sold around this price range by Afternic.

KidsCards.com 9 Visits. Priced at $3,850 . Love this domain with it’s huge potential. KidsCard.com sold for $2,500.

AdoptSafe.com 8 Visits.com Priced at $2,880. Adoption is a massive market.

Now as I have said in the past, I really do not have any luck using Afternic for selling domain names and have heard from many that they do not either. I hope one day to figure out why this is but I still think I have a pretty good idea why. I still like to use the data that I find on Afternic and the domain names that people are looking at.

All visits to my listed domain names come directly from Afternic or one of it’s partner sites.

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Does any one know the correct accounting treatment for the purchase of a domain name? Is it fair to capitalise it and write it off over say 4/5 years? Jaine Number of comments: 1

LOS ANGELES–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Aftermarket.com, a division of Thought Convergence, Inc., announced today that it has been selected as the premier auction house for Domainer Mardi Gras. The live event is set to take place February 21, 2009 in New Orleans,

One of our WHIR writers, David Hamilton, got an email from Register.com today. It was an actual press release, submitted by an actual PR agency, with the headline ‘Register.com Asks ‘Haven’t we had enough meaningless flash?” It was a news release in

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