Month: April 2010

Hallpass Media has launched a new company site that showcases the company’s collection of highly entertaining gaming and virtual world websites.  The owner of Hallpass Media is the March/April cover story at DN Journal and Bill has been the subject of several stories here on Fusible.com in recent weeks.

A week ago we wrote about the facelift to the Hallpass Meda site that was more a landing page, but that all changed today.  Bill emailed earlier and said the new site has been launched just today.

The new site has a cleaner interface that immediately draws attention to the popular internet properties such as StickGames.com, GirlGames.com, GuyGames.com and more.  There is also a section for advertising that offers information on the demographics so that companies looking to advertise to teens, moms, and women for example, can easily choose VirtualPets.com and WordGames.com.

In the last story run here on Fusible.com Hallpassmedia buyer of CookingGames.com, gets a facelift; over 3,000,000 gamers monthly, Bill commented and even offered up advice to domain investors:

Develop those generics folks!

The keyword software which is searched over 1 million times per month globally, has sold at Sedo for $313,618.90 USD.  Software.co.uk sold on Sedo in October 2009 for $249,000 after being purchased by Software.com Holdings Pty Limited.   While the price of the .de is considerably higher than the .co.uk name, .de domain names have been enjoying strong business in the last year. 

Currently the domain Software.de is registered in Sedo’s transfer service, but based on past sales, there is a good chance Software.com landed another great name for their portfolio. 

Software.com was purchased for $3,200,000 in 2005 in a private transaction and is one of the Top 100 domain sales of all time, just ahead of candy.com.

Software.co.uk redirects to software.com.

We’ve written about Retweet.com plenty of times here on Fusible.com, from the domain name accidentally listed for sale on the Expiring Domain Marketplace Namejet, to its rise in popularity, to its eventual sale on Flippa for $250,000 USD. 

Concerning the sale, it took a long time for the transaction to take place, but now the story has an ending.

Earlier this week, the registrant record for Retweet.com was updated.

The buyer?

Dollar Rose Holdings LTD
49-53 North Steyne Road
Manly, New South Wales 2095
Australia

Ever heard of them?  There isn’t much information on this company, at least that we can find.  However, the website DollarRose.com has a Coming Soon page online, but the registrant record is privacy protected, so we can’t say for sure whether it’s the company who purchased retweet.com. The domain dollarrose.com was registered on February 7, 2010.

It appears no one else has covered this story yet (not TechCrunch, not Mashable, no one) as the transaction took weeks to complete — but in the world of Twitter domains, this is big news.

What about the URL shortening service?
 
By the looks of it, Retweet.com’s URL shortening service hosted at RT.NU, still belongs to the founders of Retweet.com: Mesiab Labs.  It’s unknown whether the sale of Retweet, included the service.  At this point, it doesn’t appear so.

YummyNames (yummynames.com), the service of Tucows, with tens of thousands of domains in their portfolio for sale is publishing the pricing in more of their domain names.  Over the past two years, the site put a Contact Us link for the majority of their domains, but that has changed.

Not everyone knows exactly the best way to price their domain names.  We often use Valuate.com, but we also use our gut.  Would we ever let PocketPair.com go for $1,000 [the Valuate appraisal]?  No chance, but that’s because we’re familiar with Poker and pocket pair is a frequently used term among players.  But often if a person inquires about a domain we generally start pricing using Valuate as a guide.

Now YummyNames has published the pricing on hundreds and thousands of their names, so no more guessing at the prices or waiting to hear back from a rep.  This may have occurred weeks ago, but we just noticed the updates.

YummyNames owns “Yucky Names”, too
 
YummyNames lists so-so names that are pretty much yucky names like firstaid101.org, listed for $477.  But we own our own portfolio of bad names, and it’s good to see YummyNames does too.  However, many of their premium domain names like moonlighting.com and veggies.com though are still listed as negotiable.  One of the higher priced names we found so far was classacts.com for $9,777.

We took the site for a test drive to see what some of our names might be priced if they were owned by Tucows.  Tucows for example lists StudentLoanCompany.com for sale for $7,177 – and we own several similar domains like StudentLoancenter.com – which is in line with our own pricing.

Pricing depends on a lot of factors, but if you’re looking ideas on pricing of mediocre domains to premium domains, YummyNames might be a good place to look.