Global market research and consulting firm Millward Brown and the Financial Times published the second annual BRANDZ top 100 ranking of the most valuable brands today. Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) is number one with a brand value of $66,434 million. This is followed by General Electric ($61,880 million; NYSE: GE), Microsoft ($54,951 million; NASDAQ: MSFT) and Coca-Cola ($44,134 million; NYSE: KO).
Link: Press Release (PDF)
Public Interest Registry (PIR), which runs .org, and Afilias Ltd., the operator of the .info extension, announced that they will increase the domain registration fees for these two TLDs in mid-October.
Prices will go up 2.5 percent. The latest contract between the two registries and ICANN allows a maximum price increase of 10 percent per year. Both PIR and Afilias chose to increase prices by $0.15 to $6.15 in 2007.
PIR will increase the .org registration on October 18th, .info prices will go up on October 15th.
Typosquatting, the practice of registering misspellings of trademarked brands in order to earn money from the typo traffic, has become a relatively big problem, especially since domain tasting got so popular.
California-based venture CitizenHawk launched a new product called “TypoSquasher” that should make it possible for TM owners to find misspellings of their trademarks and domain names.
The service worked quite good when I used the demo version on their homepage. It shows possible TM infringing typo domains and where they are parked.
According to a press release, online retailer Overstock.com, Inc. is one of CitizenHawk’s first customers. “Using TypoSquasher, we’ve already identified and removed affiliates from our program who were infringing on derivations of our brand URLs,†said Jake Bailey, affiliate program manager at Overstock.com. “Before utilizing this service, we had to find all the infringements on our own. TypoSquasher is the only solution that allows us to discover and deal with our ‘fat finger URLs’ in one place.”
The TypoSquasher service is definitely a useful tool for TM owners to protect their brands. But one must be careful that the public does not get a wrong impression of the domain industry and domain investors, because it is still a widely spread misunderstanding that all domain portfolio owners earning money from domain parking are cybersquatters. They are not. Only domain registrants owning domain names infringing on other companies’ trademarks are cybersquatters or typosquatters.
Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) announced it will acquire online advertising network DoubleClick Inc. for $3.1 billion. The purchase will strengthen Google’s position in the Internet advertising market. It is also the biggest purchase in Google’s history, happening six months after the $1.65 billion YouTube deal.
Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) was involved in the bidding too, but they backed out after the auction price was higher than $2 billion.
With its more than 1,500 corporate clients, DoubleClick should help Google expand into the markets of print, radio and TV advertising and it should help provide better ad targeting.
The Daily Domainer reports that Microsoft Russia purchased the domain name MSN.ru. The price has not been disclosed, but rumor has it that Microsoft might have paid as much as $1 million for it. The domain, which was originally registered by Roman Elkhadjiev in 2000, was put up for sale in June 2006. Mr. Elkhadjev had received a $350,000 offer before the domain was sold, but the deal did not go through at that time. The rumored $1,000,000 sale price is not far-fetched. In fact, other companies have also spent so much money on acquiring their company name ccTLDs (e.g. Google.cn and Google.com.cn were bought by Google for $1 million).
You see, domain sale prices are steadily going up and large corporations are entering the domain market to complete their portfolios by buying both brand names they failed to register and quality generic domains to support their brands.
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