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News

NHN Corporation Korea’s premier Internet company, new owners of Like.me

facebook like

NHN Corporation, Korea’s premier Internet company which operates some of the largest portals are the new owners of Like.me which sold during the Premium .ME auction held in November at Sedo’s GreatDomains.  The sale price: $26,500 USD. 

According to the company’s website, NHN operates Korea’s top search portal, Naver (www.naver.com) the leading online game portal, Hangame (www.hangame.com) the nation’s largest children’s portal, Jr. Naver (jr.naver.com), Korea’s the first online donation portal, Happybean (happybean.naver.com) and microblog service Me2DAY (me2day.net).

NHN Corporation and .ME

The company has invested extensively in .ME domains.

NHN which already owned blog.me, also acquired several other Premium .ME domains during the auction including game.me for ($13,100), movie.me ($7,600), health.me ($6,700), note.me ($10,000), contacts.me ($15,600) and shop.me ($8,200).

Like.me might be the company’s best buy, given that Facebook has made “Like me” a well-recognized phrase throughout the world.  How the company plans to use the name has not been revealed, but given the popularity of the phrase, the company has a lot of options.

In case you haven’t seen how Facebook has grown, here’s a look at the latest statistics from Facebook.

People on Facebook
  • More than 500 million active users
  • 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
  • Average user has 130 friends
  • People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook
Activity on Facebook
  • There are over 900 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups, events and community pages)
  • Average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events
  • Average user creates 90 pieces of content each month
  • More than 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month.
Global Reach
  • More than 70 translations available on the site
  • About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States
  • Over 300,000 users helped translate the site through the translations application
Platform
  • More than 2.5 million developers and partners from more than 190 countries build with Facebook Platform
  • People on Facebook install 20 million applications every day
  • Every month, more than 250 million people engage with Facebook on external websites
  • Since social plugins launched in April 2010, an average of 10,000 new websites integrate with Facebook every day
  • More than two million websites have integrated with Facebook, including over 80 of comScore’s U.S. Top 100 websites and over half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites
Mobile
  • There are more than 200 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
  • People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
  • There are more than 200 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products
Categories
News Trademarks

Powered by the popularity of Citizen Journalism, YouNews.com sells at Sedo’s GreatDomains for $40,000

younews

It can’t be confirmed until the name transfers to the new registrant, but I’m guessing YouNewsTV a site that lets people share videos, photos and stories has purchased the domain name YouNews.com from Sedo’s GreatDomains.  The name is currently in Sedo’s Transfer Service.

GreatDomains reported the sale of the domain name for $40,000 USD earlier today on its web site.

Broadcast Interactive Media, which owns and operates YouNewsTV, also owns the trademark on “YouNews” for the purpose of: providing customized on-line web pages that allow users to post and view messages, photographs, videos and audio recordings, and that allow users to post and view user profiles and information and to communicate with other users; and creating and maintaining customized web pages for radio and television stations.

YouNewsTV was initially launched in June 2007 in 25 different markets in conjunction with TV station partners.  The site experienced spikes in traffic shortly after its launch when citizen journalists submitted videos of tornados and photos of thunderclouds during severe weather that hit Iowa in July.

Based on a rough traffic estimate provided by Compete, YouNewsTV.com receives well over 100,00 unique visitors per month, and in Dec. 2009 recorded over 250,000 visitors.

Citizen Journalism

Citizen journalism (news reported by everyday people, not professional journalists) has become extremely popular with the rise of social media services and tools like blogs, Twitter, and YouTube.  YouTube itself, has helped domain investors cash in on domain names with the word “You” or “Tube” in the name. 

According to Alexa,  YouTube is the #3 most visited site in the world.   Adult sites have fared very well since YouTube’s rise.  YouPorn, is #74 out of the Top 500 sites in the world.  Of the Top 200 – RedTube is #119, FilesTube is #121, YouJizz is #146. 

“News” Domain Sales

One of the most notable sales of a domain name used for the purpose of citizen journalism, was the sale of iReport.com to CNN by Rick Schwartz for $750,000.  Rick Schwartz who sold Candy.com for $3MM+Equity, originally bought the name iReport.com for “$70 to $100.”   In mid-2010, CNN decided to redirect the URL iReport.com to ireport.cnn.com.

CNET News runs on the domain name news.com.  According to Wikipedia:

CNET owns many domain names, including download.com, upload.com, news.com, search.com, tv.com, mp3.com, chat.com, computers.com, help.com, shopper.com, radio.com, and com.com.  In 1998, CNET was sued by Snap Technologies for its use of the snap.com domain

According to the Sales History database over at DomainTools, there have been a number of “news” domain sales in 2010.  FantasyNews.com sold in Oct. for $8,299.  News.net, the biggest reported “news” sale of 2010, sold for $150,000 in late September.  The site is a directory of news organizations from around the world.

Other noteworthy sales in 2010 include: RacingNews.com for $5,000 which redirects to 123racing.com, and newsbackup.com for $10,000.  For a full listing of “news” sales, refer to DomainTools.com.