I sent an email to several officials with the Boston Globe today, as I am considering the sale of a number of Massachusetts city .com domain names. One of the contacts I emailed is a Vice President at the company, and his email address is listed as the Whois contact. For some reason, this particular email address bounced, and the email was returned to me as undeliverable.

At the moment, Boston.com isn’t set to expire until June of 2012. I would imagine they have the name set to auto-renew with a credit card on file, but that isn’t always failproof. One problem they may have as the date gets closer is that as of 2004, the domain name was still to expire in 2012, meaning that they haven’t had to renew Boston.com for several years.

When June of 2012 comes around, the domain registrar will likely automatically email the Whois contact reminder notices to renew the domain name, and those could possibly bounce. In addition, if the credit card on file has since expired, they may not have a payment method on file to pay for the domain name – and they possibly wouldn’t even receive a notice until it’s too late.

Now, it’s unlikely this will happen, but it’s something the management at the Boston Globe (and maybe its New York Times parent company) should look into before it’s too late.

Oh… and if anyone from the Boston Globe happens to read this, I would consider selling Hingham.com, Harwich.com, Abington.com, Norwell.com, Mashpee.com, WestNewbury.com, and Topsfield.com.  I’d also love to chat about doing something with Lowell.com and Newburyport.com.

I was going through some of my mini site numbers today, and as I’ve done occasionally in the past, I figured I would give you an update on their performance. Prior to building these sites, none of the domain names had much traffic (under 1 visitor per day average), and a few of the domain names were hand registered by me.

These are all domain names I have wanted to sell, and if they weren’t used for mini sites, they would have continued to receive no traffic and virtually no revenue. Please keep in mind that on the sites I didn’t purchase, I did spend my personal time on them, and those costs obviously aren’t reflected in the overall cost.

Ultimately, as you can see, some of the mini sites did better than others and some look better than others.  When the domain names do sell, all of them are indexed in Google, which may not have happened had I parked them. Also, keep in mind that although the numbers are from March of 2009 through today, many of these sites haven’t been up for a full year.

TobagoVacations.com – Purchase Price < $800 on Snapnames

• Page impressions Since June: 7,901
• Clicks: 701
• Revenue: $201.11
• Monetization: Adsense
• Mini Site Built by: I used my developer’s template at a cost of $15.00

HockeyGoalieHelmet.com & BullRidingHelmet.com- Purchase Price < $8.00/each hand registrations

• Page impressions Since April: 5,261
• Clicks: 407
• Revenue: $113.77
• Monetization: Adsense
• Mini Site Built by: I used a free css template at a cost of under $5.00 for photos
• I used the same Adsense channel so I can’t break them out

ChainCatshark.com- Purchase Price < $8.00 hand registration

• Page impressions in last year: 3,506
• Clicks: 27
• Revenue: $3.74
• Monetization: Adsense
• Mini Site Built by: I used a free css template at a cost of $0
• This was my first mini site, and it was more for the learning experience

LynnAttorney.com- Purchase Price < $100.00 on Snapnames

• Page impressions in last year: 289
• Clicks: 5
• Revenue: $3.83
• Monetization: Adsense
• Mini Site Built by: I used a free css template at a cost of $0

CabCompanies.com- Purchase Price < $100.00 on Snapnames

• Page impressions since August: 4,933
• Clicks: 81
• Revenue: $47.90
• Monetization: Adsense
• Mini Site Built by: BigTicketDomains for less than $300

DubrovnikVacations.com and JerusalemVacations.com, – Purchase Price: private

• Page impressions Since September: 4,186
• Clicks: 98
• Revenue: $59.00
• Monetization: Adsense
• Mini Site Built by: WannaDevelop for $99/each

UniqueInk.com – Purchase Price < $1,000

• Page impressions since May: 10,502
• Clicks: 511
• Revenue: $39.60
• Monetization: Adsense & Affiliate
• Mini Site Built by: I used my developer’s template at a cost of $25.00
• This domain name has been sold