One of the domain world’s most notorious criminals, John Zuccarini, was busted again for typosquatting.  Instead of forwarding traffic to porno like he did last time, Zuccarini was sending visitors to websites containing legitimate products.  Zuccarini’s typosquatting violated the law, and he was surprisingly caught again.  According to  MarkMonitor CMO, Frederick Felman, “He must not be a very smart criminal.”  An expert from the article:

A so-called typosquatter who served pornographic advertisements on domains such as Bobthebiulder.com and teltubbies.com has been fined again by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.

John Zuccarini has agreed to give up US$164,000 in typosquatting revenue he is alleged to have raked in, the FTC said Tuesday in a statement. Five years ago, a federal court had barred Zuccarini from registering domains that are misspellings of legitimate brands, a practice called typosquatting, but he ignored the order, according to Carolyn Hann, a staff attorney with the FTC.

“He was engaging in practices that violated certain provisions of the order,” Hann said. “He had certain domain names that were transpositions or misspellings of popular domain names.” — Source: PC World

Pardon me for stealing a line from Prince’s “1999,” but I think it is relevant for the topic of whether Internet companies are currently suffering from Irrational Exuberance, creating an Internet bubble similar to the one in 1999 and bursting the following year.

“Dot-com fever stirs sense of déjà vu,” an written by Brad Stone and Matt Richtel featured today in the International Herald Tribune, discusses the idea that a great deal of Internet companies are overvalued, similar to the conditions that existed just before the .com bubble burst in 2000.  

Up until the bubble’s sudden burst, investors valued fledgling Internet companies at much higher revenue multiples than they could possible ever realize, effectively creating unsustainable valuations.  Investors were buying into unproven concepts, and unproven company founders were spending their newfound wealth unwisely. The article points out many similarities between pre-bubble 1999 to the conditions seen in today’s markets. The naysayers believe that today is different because many of the successful Internet companies are generating positive cashflow now, however, it seems like they are spending it recklessly on new startups without regard to potential revenue.

Like the original Kings of the Internet who wasted billions of dollars on unnecessary luxury items, the new Internet Titans should remember the failures of the past. A business is only as strong as its revenue and growth, and based on the experience of people in the online adult entertainment business, viewers don’t necessarily bring revenues. As Aaron Kessler of Piper Jaffray said in the article, Internet companies “are buying users instead of revenue and profitability.”

Stay tuned for an announcement on Thursday afternoon…  I am very excited about it and can’t wait to break it…

Extracurriculars.com is for sale with all proceeds going to the ICA. A Buy it Now price has not been set, so please make offers in the comment section of this thread or send me an email. The highest offer received by 8pm EST today will get the name.

The term “extracurriculars” has 343,000 references in Google.

The domain name is registered at Moniker.