Namecheck, a service powered by United-Domains that provides a free search report to reveal if your brand has been taken as a domain name, social media username, or trademark, purchased the domain name NameCheck.com at Sedo for $50,000 earlier this week.
The way the way site works is you simply enter a name in a field, then click Search Now and the site tells you right away if the name has already been taken or if it’s still available. It checks popular social media user names, generic domain names, country domain names, and trademarks.
I typed “fusible” into the search box for example, and found out that most of the generic domain names like fusible.net and fusible.tv are already registered, but the name on flickr is available.
Smart move, but odd results
Acquiring Namecheck.com seems like a smart move by United-Domains, which currently uses UD.com for its web site.
Oddly enough though, if you search on “namecheck”, United-Domains hasn’t bothered registering or acquiring “namecheck” across a number of popular social media web sites and domain names, even though they’re available on LinkedIn, Digg and other places.
The company hasn’t registered domain names like namecheck.biz or .tv either, which are both available at the time of this story, which makes you wonder why they run these extensions are part of their service if they haven’t even registered those extensions themselves.
Behind every domain name, there’s a story – and if you’re anything like me, during the Holiday season it’s always interesting to see what companies and people are doing with their domain names.
In the case of Halloween.com, its owner Christian Riley has an amazing domain name story that spans almost 20 years.
Christian Riley, not only owns Halloween.com, he owns a slew of category-killing domain names that he has developed into web sites. His passion for domain names started years ago back in the early nineties – some of which he has sold, some of which he has kept, and some of which he has developed.
Christian shows off his domain names and markets them on several of his properties. Visit Halloween.com, and at the top of the site you’ll see links to SantaClaus.com, PhoneBook.com, Hurricane.com and ThanksGiving.info.
On PhoneBook.com, Christian receives on average 100,000 visitors per month according to Compete. Scroll the bottom of the web site, and the footer links to other sites in Christian’s network including: whitepages.biz, scholarships.net, christmas.biz, easter.biz, diving.com, and jacksonville.biz.
What’s Christian Riley’s story?
What better way to learn about Christian, than to read his blog – at none other than ChristianRiley.com. The guy has some experience in the domain industry. In a post dating back to 2002, Christian writes about domain names he registered in 1993 and 1994. The list is long.
law.com (didn’t register, it but was Director of Operations, 1993)
games.com (July 15, 1994) – Hasbro/Parker Brothers wanted this. AOL has it as of 2009.
casino.com (July 14, 1994)
court.com (August 4, 1994)
gamble.com (July 14 1994)
hotel.com (August 4, 1994) – HotelSupplies.com Inc bought this
Halloween.com (August 30, 1994)
SantaClaus.com (August 1994)
EasterBunny.com (December 1995)
phonebook.com (July 14, 1994) – We began with web directories here, Miami.com, and at coral.net for clients and business in Florida and the Caribbean. Lots of realtors and destinations.
palmbeach.com (May 24, 1994)
rights.com (August 30, 1994)
dive.com (July 30, 1994)
Havana.com (Sept 1, 1994)
Coral.net (Sept 8, 1994)
Sequitur.com (June 1994) – The opposite of non sequitur. Ended up letting it go. Silly me. 😉 (We considered Sequitur for the corporate name, but ended up with Coral Technologies after a few people in the State of Florida government didn’t get what it me and thought it might be obscene. Just ended up using it as the follow-up name for The Rising Sun BBS (Ft. Lauderdale 1982-1993) which was running TBBS and we switched to private software, then FirstClass.
diving.com (July 29, 1994)
talk.com (June 1994) – HotWired need
sale.com (June 1994) – J.Lee bought it.
racing.com (July 30, 1994) –
national.com (April 1994)
cruise.com (May 1994)
cruising.com (July 30, 1994)
movie.com (June 1994) – Well, you can see who owns it now.
miami.com (April 12, 1994) – Miami Herald needed it.
Boca.com (June 21, 1994)
Pompano.com (June 1994)
FtLauderdale.com (May 1994)
ebank.com (1994) – a Bank
reservations.com (June 1994)
reservation.com (June 1994)
dolphins.com (August 10, 1994)
shark.com (July 30, 1994)
holiday.com (June 1994)
keylargo.com (June 1994)
honeymoon.com (July 30, 1994)
boating.com (July 29, 1994)
flying.com (July 30, 1994)
keywest.com (July 29, 1994)
flores.com (Aug 29, 1994)
oceans.com (Aug 30, 1994)
marina.com (June 1994)
bahamas.com (Sept 9, 1994)
medical.com (July 14, 1994)
read.com (June 1994)
mart.com (June 1994)
realtor.com (June 1994) – At the time I didn’t know it was a trademark, just thought it was generic like “realestate.” Younger and more naive. They were friendly about it all though!
islands.com (July 30, 1994)
zodiac.com (July 1994)
SonsOfLiberty.com (April 30, 1998)
Daughters-Of-Liberty.com (July 18, 2001)
Liberty-Tree.com (July 7, 2001)
What’s most impressive about the domain names and web sites that Christian has kept and developed, is that he operates everything on his own. According to the About page on Halloween.com, he writes: “Halloween.com is really just one person, no big companies here!”
On August 26, 2010, the domain name NewYorkKnicks.com expired.
The name is currently pending renewal at Network Solutions by its owner.
If the name isn’t renewed in time, it’ll end up going to the highest bidder on NameJet.
Pre-bidding action has already attracted over 30 bidders. The name must be backordered by October 1st, in order to participate in the auction.
NBA owns other names
The professional basketball team New York Knicks, are based in New York City. But in the internet world, the team’s official web site is based at http://www.nba.com/knicks/.
Though the NBA owns knicks.com and re-directs visitors to its official web site, the NBA doesn’t own the full team domain name, as it does for many other teams within the NBA.
The Knicks, whose original team name is New York Knickerbockers, also isn’t a domain name the NBA owns. NewYorkKnickerbockers.com is currently a parked page. That’s no big deal. Most are familiar with Knicks, not the Knickerbockers. And type in traffic is zilch.
But NewYorkKnicks.com is a domain name the NBA probably wants to own and should own.
According to Compete, the web address gets as many as 6,000 unique visitors per month. And NEW YORK KNICKS is a trademarked term.
Aftermarket Value of Domain Name
According to Valuate.com, the free domain name appraisal tool, the domain name NewYorkKnicks.com appraises at $9,000. While the price of the domain name might not fetch that amount at auction, it’s possible. Exact local search volume in the United States for the phrase “New York Knicks” was 165,00 searches in the month of August.
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