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New Owner of Fiction.com happy with decision to pay $90K for a Great Domain, here’s why

published

While sellers of domains have boasted about turning a domain investment into a Big pay day, buyers also boast of buying a domain name at a bargain – and that’s exactly what the new owner of Fiction.com is doing. 

You might think you understand the true value of a domain name, but obviously, you might only be getting a fraction of the price in the eyes of an end user who may think they’re getting a steal even if you happened to pay pennies on the dollar for the domain name. 

You can certainly make money flipping domain names to other domain investors, but you might be looking back later and asking yourself, “What was I thinking?” – Especially when the domain name later sells to a company or individual with plans for development.

What would you be willing to pay for Fiction.com if you were a publisher?

Fiction.com

Fiction.com, which sold this past week for $90,000 in a Private Sale brokered by Moniker, sat unused for over a decade – going all the way back to 1994. 

Now, that’s all changed.

Hillcrest Media, the owners and operators of Published.com (A Free Book Directory) that has been online since 1997, have now acquired Fiction.com – at a price that many in the publishing industry would consider an absolute bargain. 

But don’t take our word for it. 

The landing page at Fiction.com boasts of the acquisition. 

 

From 1994 until July 9, 2010, Fiction.com, a coveted domain name, was held and never used. We bought Fiction.com on July 9, 2010 in order to turn it into what it should be — the premiere online destination to learn about great fiction, meet authors, discover new fiction books, and buy fiction ebooks.

Fiction.com won’t be a knockoff of other sites. It’s too great of a domain for that. We have many creative ideas for our new site. We’d love to hear from fellow fiction authors, publishers, reviewers, and others. Complete the form below and tell us your thoughts and ideas on how we can make Fiction.com a helpful site for you.

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News

Who owns the best Twitter domain names? It’s not Twitter

Twitter Lingo
Twitter helped to make popular generic keywords such as "Tweet", but doesn't own any of them on the internet

On July 11, Mike Berkens ran a story about who owns the best 3D domain names, in which Mike refers to 3D being the “Next BIG Thing”.  The article got us thinking: who owns the best Twitter domain names? 

Twitter has done extensive work towards making phrases popular such as “Tweet” and “Unfollow”. 

And while many of the phrases are generic terms, one thing seems certain:  Twitter doesn’t own them.

For fun, I decided to look at some the key terms on Twitter’s Learn the lingo page which can be found by clicking the Twitter 101 link on the company’s home page – then I added .com to the keyword.  You might not be surprised to see who owns the names.

Following.com

Following.com re-directs to VeryBest.com, an invitation only website that provides information on the “very best” in luxury products, services, and people – the site says.  In this case, the owners of Following.com, own one of the “very best” domain names when it comes to Social Media.

Tweet.com

Tweet.com is owned by prolific Domain Investor Mrs Jello, LLC of ExoticDomains.net.  There is a website online about birds, and while birds are somewhat popular, the 10,000 visitors per month on average that visit the website, can’t be explained by the simple minisite design that talks about binoculars and birdhouses – it most likely has to do with the popularity of the phrase tweet.  Tweets.com by the way, is owned by Frank Schilling.

DirectMessage.com

DirectMessage.com re-directs to RoaldMarth.com – the IdeaEvangelist, who apparently is an internationally recognized venture capitalist, speaker, technologist, CEO, fundraiser, author, strategist, television personality, and marketing guru.

DirectMessages.com is owned by Mobile Media Technologies LLC. who run TextCaster, a mass notification service.  The domain name however, doesn’t resolve.

Retweet.com

Retweet
Retweet.com exchanged hands earlier this year, but nearly exchanged hands accidentally on NameJet after being accidentally listed. Traffic to the website has nosedived since the site sold in 2010 on Flippa

Retweet.com has been in the spotlight repeatedly in the last year.  In June 2009, the Popular Twitter Term Retweet.com accidentally went up for Auction at NameJet.com.   Mesiab Labs the owners of the domain name at the time, launched a website in the summer of 2009 which quickly rose in popularity as a competitor to Tweetmeme.  Mesiab Labs finally sold the domain name and website on Flippa for $250,000 USD.

Tweetup.com

Idealab purchased Tweetup.com in April 2010 for an undisclosed amount before launching their Twitter advertising service that garnered lots of media coverage.   Idealab also acquired (or acquired through a consulting gig) the @tweetup username from the operators of tweetups.org. 

We happen to own the phrase Tweetups.com, a name we acquired on the aftermarket after the name expired.  If you’re not familiar with the term:

A tweetup is simply an in-person gathering organized via Twitter, often spontaneous. Companies use them for things like hosting launch parties, connecting with customers and introducing like-minded followers to each other.

There will always be opportunities with domain names, as new trends appear online.  The key is, who will strike first at buying the name? In this case, it wasn’t Twitter. 

ShortenedURLs.com

Strangely enough, Twitter even mentions the keywords “Shortnened URLs” at the bottom of the Learn the Lingo  page (referring to URL shorteners—that take regular links and shrink them down to a manageable length for tweets), and guess what?

At the time this story appeared online, ShortenedURLs.com is still available for hand registration.

UPDATE:  ShortenedURLs.com is no longer avaialable.  @MarketTaker acquired the domain name after reading this post.

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News

Fusible gets a facelift with WordPress

Fusible website
Old Fusible website (pictured) gets makeover

The Fusible.com website has been re-launched as a WordPress blog.  For regular readers of the Fusible blog, you may have been a little surprised in the last few days that the look and feel of the website has changed. 

After blogging on Fusible.com for nearly a year, we decided to shutdown our custom-built website, in favor of WordPress. 

Got the Push to Change, after being hacked

Our website had been hacked, and we had taken the site down earlier in the week to address the issue.  But even after remedying the issue, the site got hacked again, making it difficult to get anything done. 

While WordPress is a favorite of Hackers, protecting a custom-built site was becoming more costly. 
And essentially, we were having to custom-build enhancements – that were offered as free plug-ins by WordPress developers.

We got the push we needed this week to finally change platforms.  The new website will have the old content from our blog, but putting up all the stories will take some time (most likely a few weeks).   We’ll be focusing on re-designing the site for domain industry news, rather than a cluttered company site that prominently featuring our web properties, projects, and domain holdings – instead of news stories.

Nothing has changed, just the look and feel

New Fusible site
The new version of Fusible is delivered through WordPress

For readers interested in the WordPress theme we’re using for our facelift, it’s a Premium Theme from Solostream.  

The new version of our site will be much cleaner, much easier to navigate, and much easier for us to improve and maintain.  We’re gonna get dinged in the Search Engines, but long term, WordPress is the best solution, especially when writing was the main focus of the old website.

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News Video Games

Warner Brothers has been registering domain names for upcoming Batman Video Game Sequel

Batman Arkham Asylum
What name will Warner Brothers use for its sequel?

GameSpy and a number of video game websites are reporting that Warner Brothers has been registering domain names for its sequel to the Batman video game Arkham Asylum.

Arkham Asylum, according to Wikipedia, “holds a Guinness World Record for ‘Most Critically Acclaimed Superhero Game Ever’, with an average score of 91.67 from reviewers.” The game was released in North America in 2009.

Is Warner Brothers Going to get it right this time?

It looks like Warner Brothers may finally register the domain name before releasing the name of the video game sequel.

Considering Warner Brothers doesn’t own ArkhamAsylum.com (which is listed for sale by owner), but instead uses BatmanArkhamAsylum.com, it will be interesting to see if they actually registered the name they will ultimately settle on for the title.

If you’re a video game junkie, here’s a list of names registered earlier this month by Warner Brothers.

ArkhamCity.com
BatmanArkhamCity.com
BatmanAshesofGotham.com
BatmanBrokenGround.com
BatmanNewArkham.com
BatmanGrandDelusion.com
BatmanRiseofArkham.com
BatmanSiegeofGotham.com
BatmanStateofVillainy.com
CityofArkham.com
CloseArkhamCity.com
PeopleforGotham.com
StopMayorSharp.com
WarinGothamCity.com
WheresBruceWayne.com

Categories
News

You just got paid for tweeting about Domain Names

SponsoredTweets
SponsoredTweets.com is a wholly owned property of IZEA. IZEA is a venture-backed company that has raised $10 million from some of the world’s leading investors.

The Twitter market is only growing stronger in numbers and events like the World Cup demonstrate how powerful the microblogging website can be. According to the Associated Press, “Though Twitter normally sees about 750 tweets per second on an average day, there were 2,940 tweets per second”.

Having got on the Twitter bandwagon relatively late, we’ve still been able to grow our Twitter following to an amazing number: 31,000+.

Despite what people say about the ratio of your Twitter following to followers, high numbers of Twitter followers are still one of the best ways to get traffic back to your website and to monetize your Twitter account. Size does matter, and the quickest way to build numbers is to follow new people and to follow-back people who follow you first.

You’d be surprised who you’d meet and who retweets your messages, it’s not always the obvious – especially when it comes to Tweeting about domain names.

Monetize Your Twitter Account

If you spend time on Twitter, then maybe you should get paid to do something on Twitter. You can get paid to Tweet by web sites like SponsoredTweets, Twitter advertising platform that connects advertisers with tweeters, by tweeting messages from advertisers. You can also get paid by referring other people to Twitter and receive 10% of SponsoredTweets portion of revenue for each successful transaction that Tweeter makes.

We’ve been signed up to SponsoredTweets for some time, and even though Twitter changed it’s Advertising Policy, SponsoredTweets is still going strong. It’s a small niche market for the Domain Industry on Twitter, with a lot of potential.

It’s nice to receive email messages titled “Good News! You just got paid for tweeting” and “You earned money from a SponsoredTweets Referral”.

There’s no secret where our Twitter followers come from: we follow back and we follow new people. This is what some of the most successful internet marketers like Guy Kawasaki even do, who have written about the implications of a large following.

In 2009, Guy wrote an article for Entrepreneur magazine titled Create a Twitter Following that included tips like:

Follow everyone who follows you. Some people will respond to you and everyone who follows them will see this–which is more exposure for you.