I just received an email from the administrators of DomainState.com, a domain forum that is now for sale. The owners have decided to sell it via auction on the site, which will be held January 13 – 15, 2010, starting with a $10,000 bid. My bet is the auction will result in a sale between $20-30,000.

Here’s the email I received:

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Thanks for your interest in the site, please note the following information about the sale,

General site info:

Started: 12th Sept 2002
Vbulletin Version: 2.2.7
Total members: 12238 registered and confirmed
Total posts: 480,595
Domains included: domainstate.com, domainstate.net, domainstate.org.

Revenue: currently unmonetized

Traffic stats: We haven’t kept stats as that wasn’t something of use to us how we ran it at the time but that as several people have asked for them we are adding in Google analytics. Obviously the amount of stats available before the sale will only be around a weeks worth.
Note also we currently block google from crawling the site via robots.txt.

User registrations:

Dec 2009 – 127
Nov 2009 – 109
Oct 2009 – 110
Sep 2009 – 116

Post numbers:

Dec 2009 – 1490
Nov 2009 – 1940
Oct 2009 – 2192
Sep 2009 – 1859

Other details: Vbulletin has been modified with some hacks (whois, showcase etc). You may or may not want to keep those features.

Bandwidth usage:

September 09 – 1.25gb / 10.02gb (In/Out)
October 09 – 1.21gb / 9.07gb
November 09 – 1.32gb / 9.92gb
December 09 – 1.01gb / 8.01gb

Method of sale:

Due to a fairly large number of inquiries we have decided to sell the site via auction. The auction will be on site but will not be publicly viewable and bidders will be asked to provide contact details. It will be held in a private section of the site that only bidders will be given access to. Bidders will be screened and we reserve the right to refuse any potential bidder.

A list of the usernames and real names of each bidder (but not contact details) will be available to other bidders in an effort to make the bidding process as transparent as possible.

The auction will take place from Wednesday the 13th to Friday the 15th of January 2010 (48hours) starting at 12pm EST (eastern standard time) ending at 12pm EST on the 15th.

If any prospective bidder is not a current member of the site they will need to join.

The starting bid will be $10,000 USD and increments need to be $500 or larger. Bids under $500 will be deemed invalid. There will be no reserve.

If a bid is received within the last 10 minutes of the auction the auction will continue until 10 minutes after the last bid. (example if a 2nd bid is received that will extend the auction for 10 minutes after the time of that bid).

We reserve the right to extend the period of the auction if the site experiences downtime during the running of the auction.

Other terms:

Posts in the administrators section of the site will be removed before transfer. (approx 17,000 posts).

Payment needs to be made within 3 business days of the conclusion of the auction.

Method of transfer:

The successful bidder will be required to move the site to their own server/hosting account within 2 weeks of receipt of payment.

After receiving payment we will immediately work with the buyer to transfer the domain names and the site.

We will do everything we can to make sure a stress free transfer is achieved from our end but the purchaser is responsible for the setup of the site on their end. We suggest bidders become familiar with the method of transferring a vbulletin forum.

http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/moving_servers

Please note also the site is currently administrated and moderated by the three owners and we won’t be continuing in that role after the sale.

Please respond to this email stating you domainstate username, real name and company name (if applicable) and contact details and we will setup access to the bidding thread for you.

For any further questions please email us,

Best regards

Paul Cotton
Paul Shaw
Matt Purtell

Domainstate Admins

Several months ago, I blogged about Fred Mercaldo and his team at Scottsdale.com who were launching their City in a Box platform, which they already successfully on sites like Sausalito.com, Chandler.com, Mesa.com, Tempe.com, and others. The sites are lauded for their contemporary look and ease of use, while the team behind the platform handles marketing and development duties.

Yesterday I received word from Fred that his team has launched Palermo.com, a domain name owned by domain investor Steve Kaziyev of NamePursuit.com. I’ve spent some time looking through the site with envy, and I think it looks great. The site has a lot of travel information, and visitors can make hotel reservations and learn about the city sites. Since Italians tend to use the .it ccTLD in their domain names, they are targeting American tourists with this site.

One of the challenges with a site like this will be finding local advertisers in Palermo. Restaurants, hotels, galleries, and other tourist attractions are presumably the target of Fred and his team, and it will be fun to watch the site progress. IMO, this is where the City in a Box platform outshines anything similar.

I am very impressed with the quality of the site, and I am hoping Steve and Fred will share results down the road. I am in talks with Fred and the Scottsdale.com team about developing one of my geodomain names, and I am sure I will share more information if and when something happens.

Congrats to Fred and Steve on this exciting launch.

As you probably know by now, Google launched their version of a mobile phone today called the “Nexus One.”  Unfortunately for Google, they don’t own NexusOne.com, since it was originally registered in 1998. At the moment, NexusOne.com is owned by Peter Villanueva, and the domain name forwards to several different websites depending on when you visit.

I would imagine the owner is probably sending traffic to other (non-phone related websites)  because of the significant traffic its servers are receiving. Should he try to monetize the traffic, Google could potentially have a claim that the owner is infringing on its rights. Of course I am no lawyer, but I do know the domain name is worth a significant amount of money now, and it wouldn’t be worth the risk of losing it to make short term revenue.

Back when it was revealed that Apple was coming out with their iPhone, they had intense negotiations with Mike Kovatch, which resulted in the sale of iPhone.com just prior to the launch. It would behoove Google to find Peter and make him an offer he can’t refuse. Of course, since they own the search engine where many people will go to search for this “iPhone killer,” it’s very likely there will still be significant type-in traffic that shouldn’t be lost.

The holiday season commonly features many infomercials and other television commercials featuring products to purchase online or over the telephone. There is a lot of remnant television time to purchase at great rates, and we generally see more commercials such as the one for the Prayer Cross discussed on my blog on Sunday.

One commercial I recently saw was for a laundry product called “Mister Steamy,” and of course they use the MisterSteamy.com domain name, which the company registered in March of 2008. Unfortunately for the makers of Mister Steamy, the company didn’t take into account the common abbreviation people in the US use for the word Mister, which is Mr.

It seems that someone in Shanghai, China was able to register the domain name MrSteamy.com in November of 2009, taking advantage of the typo traffic from the infomercials and television commercials. Making matters worse for the laundry product makers is the fact that the PPC advertising for MrSteamy.com is X-Rated, as Mr. Steamy could certainly be a porn name.

One reason I don’t like geodomain names (or other names) that have common abbreviations like Saint and Fort is because many people may abbreviate those using St. or Ft. If you don’t own both versions of the domain name, you risk losing traffic to the alternative. It’s a shame the makers of Mister Steamy didn’t think about this and spend the additional $8/year to register the other domain name, which was available.