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News Video Games

Hallpass Media launches another website from their Portfolio of Domains: VirtualPets.com (in Beta)

"Virtual Pets"
Hallpass Media has been busy at work --- developing, testing, and launching websites --- with more to come.

Hallpass Media run by Bill Kara, has launched its newest website, VirtualPets.com (currently in Beta). The casual game company that acquires and develops killer game properties unveiled VirtualPets.com earlier today, where casual gamers can adopt, dress up, care for, or play with their favorite zoo, farm, exotic, house and ocean pets.

The site features an ‘Adopt a Pet’ section where players can adopt and care for anything from puppies to pandas. Other sites features allow users to take a visit in the Zoo games section to play with animals from around the world. Breed and train a stallion in the Farm section or enjoy an underwater adventure with some fishy friends in the Ocean section.

The site recently came out of testing after recently launching CookingGames.com in May 2010, which already ranks near the top of search engines for the phrase “cooking games” after only being online for a matter of weeks.

Bill Kara, Eric Borgos have more in common

Eric Borgos, another well-known and respected domainer-developer who operates Impulse Communications, currently owns the top spot in Google Search for the keywords “virtual pets” with his AdoptMe.com website. Eric, who made millions with his sale of Bored.com and 170 other websites – is also a big time domainer, who develops out casual gaming properties as well with properties like Dumb.com.

Bill Kara and Eric Borgos both have been buying and developing domain names for years and making millions in the process, so it should be an interesting competition in the search engines – with the newly launched VirtualPets.com pitted against the long standing AdoptMe.com.

It was only 7 days after launching CookingGames.com, that the site landed on the first page of Google…

Categories
Movies News

IndependenceDay.com – unused internet property by 20th Century Fox, What a Shame

"Independence Day"
Independence Day comes with plenty of big fireworks, family fun, cookouts and a slew of local and nationwide events each year.

Independence Day, otherwise known as the Fourth of July here in the United States, commemorates the day that the Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Second Contintental Congress on July 4, 1776.  

Independence Day also happens to be a Fox Film that debuted in 1996 and at one point according to Wikipedia – had the second highest worldwide gross of all time with a combined $816,969,268 in domestic and international box offices.

All that and more, but the domain name IndependenceDay.com (which is owned by Fox Film) doesn’t even resolve to a web page.

Fox owns thousands of domains

The unused domain, which has a stellar search volume of nearly 250,000 exact global searches, could make a massive splash on the internet, but instead, the killer domain sits under a pile of domain names owned by Fox – nearly 20,000 of them.

What a shame, that such a great domain isn’t worth pursuing development – or for that matter, even worth redirecting to one of the Fox Film pages.

FourthofJuly.com which is owned by Verimedia, Inc – redirects to GreetingCards.com.

Categories
News

Domain King Rick Schwartz sells two more domains in the six figures, one hand registered for less $100

Sydney Hotels

It’s not often that Rick Schwartz sells a domain name or least shares the sale publicly.  Since the nineties, he has only sold a handful of names out of his portfolio of thousands.  But the total sales for those domains is in the millions.  The Domain King, who got his start in 1995, with the purchase of lipservice.com for $100 has sold less than 20 names.

Today Rick Schwartz announced the sale of two more domain names, each in the six figures.  The first one, according to Rick’s blog cannot be disclosed at present, but the second sale which sold for $100,000 was a name he registered early on in his domaining career: SydneyHotels.com. 

A name he purchased for less than $100.

These aren’t Rick’s first sales in 2010.  In April Rick sold the numeric domain 273.com for $50,000 to a Chinese buyer.

It’s unlikely most domain investors, will see the same results as Rick Schwartz, but if there’s one thing Rick Schwartz can teach you – it’s that patience pays off.

Categories
News

Professional Poker Player and Domainer, Dutch Boyd wins second WSOP Bracelet

"Dutch Boyd"
Dutch Boyd not only blogs about his Poker exploits, but he also blogs about domaining.

He did it again. Dutch Boyd the professional poker player and domainer has won his second WSOP bracelet.  He won his second bracelet this past Sunday in the six-handed limit hold ’em event and collected over $200,000 in winnings.

The buy-in for the tournament was only: $2,500.

Not a bad return for the second youngest law school graduate ever, who chose poker and domain names over practicing law. 

Dutch Boyd has struck it big in 2010 with the sale of Cured.com at GreatDomains for $25,000, followed up by his second WSOP bracelet.

We’re fans of Poker and poker domains as well, so news of Dutch’s win at the six-handed limit hold’em event, prompted us to hand-register a few domain names while writing this story, including: Sixhandedholdem.com and ShorthandedHoldem.com.

Categories
News

The Perks of Writing a Blog about Domain Names

 blogging

You can read blogs about the domain industry, however, if you spend the time to write a blog about the domain industry, there are quite a few perks that often get overlooked.  Of course, getting long term sponsors like National A-1 and Domain Tools is a big plus, but the list of perks goes much further than just sponsorships.

Running a blog gives you a chance to promote your own products and services to a relevant, targeted audience.  With your own website, you have the power to market all you want.  While the idea is not to make every post a product pitch, readers who are on your site might find your writing interesting enough to browse around. 

When you can’t find an advertiser to fill a spot, you can create your own ads for your own products and services.  Beyond this, you can fill up spots with third-party ads like Google adsense or search out relevant affiliate offers that are tailored to your audience – such as discounts on domain registrations.

You can connect with readers, domainers, developers, and other people within the domain and marketing industry quickly who are willing to share advice and opinions.  I’ve had a chance to chat with Stephen Douglas, Bill Kara, Andrew Rosener, Shane Cultra, and a number of people in the domain industry.  Despite being anonymous, lots of people find the content acceptable.  Sure, it’s hard to build up trust when you’re anonymous, but people build up trust through their writing also, not just throug their name.

I started this blog in September 2009 and thanks to Francois Carillo (Cybertonic), I was able to quickly reach an audience by getting listed on his widely read Domaining.com website.  As a result of the listing, traffic to Fusible soared from 0 visitors in September to over 20,000 unique visitors per month.  The site has been mentioned in The Guardian, Calvin Ayre, and on a number of well-respected domain industry blogs.

To blog or not to blog?
 
If you’ve got a domain blog and you’re looking to reach an audience, I’d highly recommend getting set up on Domaining.com.  The set up fee is well worth it.

If you enjoy writing about domain names, you owe it to yourself to get a blog up and running.  It’s basically on the job training that gives you a chance to learn about the industry by writing about it.

Some might argue that blogging is a waste of time, but if you really enjoy it, you can reap a lot of benefits, even if it’s not all money.