(Thanks Cole!)

What happens when a site which is suppose to be giving out unbiased reviews of products is accused of changing it reviews based on ad dollars?

Welcome to the world of Yelp.com, which was hit with a second class-action suit this week, alleging that they “extorted” companies by offering to hide bad reviews and promote positive ones in exchange for advertising.

The suit, filed by D’Ames Day Spa, in the federal district court for the central district of California, alleges that Yelp removed 13 of 14 positive reviews of her business from the site after she refused to purchase advertising on the site.

The suit goes on allege unfair and unlawful business practices and further allege that Yelp acted in violation of the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act.

Yes that a RICO allegation, serious stuff.

Late month, a veterinary center in California alleged that Yelp had offered to bury bad reviews in exchange for a $300-a-month ad buy.

The CEO of Yelp, Jeremy Stoppelman said on Yelp’s blog: “This suit, like the other, is without merit, we will fight it aggressively and we believe we will win”

Of course there are always conspiracy theorist and business owners looking for explanations of  why there services are rated low or their competitors are rated high.

Such is the danger of any any site that rates businesses while accepting ads.

It seems that lawsuits maybe part of the cost of doing business for such “rating” sites.

On the other hand with eyeballs comes a lot of power to make and break businesses especially restaurants which depend greatly on reviews and word of mouth.

There are those, including an article in the EastBayExpress, which claim these Yelp takes advantage of its power to get establishments to increased their advertising to hide bad reviews or add to good review, or will change reviews on based on the lack of advertising.

We will see how this plays out in the courts, but this is definitely something to think about if your planning on developing any of your domains into this type of site.

About six months after crossing the 30 million domain name mark, The Go Daddy Group is set to surpass 40 million domains under management, most likely on Wednesday. So if you register a domain name tomorrow, you might get some extra notoriety if you time it just right.

Ten years ago there were only about 17 million domain names registered, and now there is a single registrar with more than twice that many domains under management. When you do the math, it’s no surprise the company grossed about $750 million last year.

It was on March 10, 2000, coincidentally the same day Go Daddy is likely to hit 40 million domains under management, that the .com bubble is generally thought of to have “burst”, with the NASDAQ topping out at 5132.52. In the period that followed, many people and companies let their domain names expire. It was during this time that the domain name gold rush caught its second wind.

Network Solutions was the biggest registrar at the time. Ten years later it has only about 6.5 million domain names under its umbrella.

Given the role Go Daddy played in bringing domain names to the mass market, I’m somewhat surprised it wasn’t nominated to The .Com 25. But rather than look at the past, I’m sure the company has its eyes on a bigger milestone: 50 million domains under management. At this pace, it could hit that number later this year.

© DomainNameWire.com 2009.

Review and rate domain name parking companies at Parking Judge.

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2. Go Daddy Revenue Tops $750 Million
3. Go Daddy Goes Big with $3 Million Holiday Party and Record Donations

• Domain Name '3DCameraRecorder.com' is available for purchase!

See the full sales list and some translations after the jump.

(c) 2009 DomainNameNews.com

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One of the big questions facing registries of existing top level domain names is how they should pursue Internationalized Domain Name “equivalents” of their domain names when they become available. These so-called IDN.IDN domain names will be available once new gTLDs — such as .nyc and .music — come out.

Last month we learned more about VeriSign’s plans for .com and .net; today I reached out to Lance Wolak, Director of Marketing & Product Management for Public Interest Registry (PIR), which manages .org.

PIR hopes to take a leading role in IDN top level domain names, as it has in other initiatives such as DNSSEC.

“We’re not primarily commercially driven in what we do,” explained Wolak. “We’re really driven to do what helps and protects the domain name registrant.”

When it comes to IDN top level domain names, PIR wants to show support for various communities.

“We’re doing this in the public interest and to show our support and respect for the different language communities,” said Wolak. “Idn.idn is a technology that we want to see move forward.”

IDN.org domain names, with the standard .org at the end, have been available in many languages since the middle of the last decade. Wolak said that many of these have been registered for search engine optimization purposes (i.e., exact match to what the searcher types in his or her language/script).

Wolak said it would be premature for PIR to give definite plans for .org-as-IDN domains, given that new TLD guidelines aren’t finalized yet.

“Right now we are watching the information that’s coming out of ICANN, and looking over the Draft Applicant Guidebook,” said Wolak. “Until that is finalized, we won’t have a hundred percent picture of the requirements to launch a new gTLD, which would include IDN TLDs. So we don’t have anything to announce on how many scripts we’ll go after, which ones, etc.”

Wolak noted that, in addition to Chinese script, Cyrillic and Arabic, PIR is looking at other popular scripts that have large populations behind them. Script tables are currently being developed for some scripts sets, including Arabic. PIR has been working with the community as it develops the tables. In addition to settling the tables, there are other issues for IDN TLDs that need to be worked out, such as current getting them to work with email systems.

There are still a number of open issues for IDN TLDs. But regardless of how they develop, PIR wants to be a thought leader.

“We want to take the approach that we can bring the best practices with what we’re doing in the .org space to a new IDN TLD,” said Wolak.

© DomainNameWire.com 2009.

Review and rate domain name parking companies at Parking Judge.

Related posts:

1. Will IDN Top Level Domains Kill Existing IDN Domain Names?
2. ICANN May Consider Pre-Applications for New Top Level Domain Names
3. Tim Berners-Lee’s Thoughts on New Top Level Domain Names

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Looking for some domain inspiration? Check out the latest Sedo Market Study to help you identify market trends and new opportunities! Our market study gives insights into overall marketplace activity, top domain sales and successful domain extensions. Sedo’s continued focus on innovations around our marketplace strategy resulted in a record number of 10,070 domain sales in Q4 and helped solidify our position as the most successful global marketplace for domains in the secondary market.

The 2009 Market Study shows Sedo’s strong growth in sales through our global platform in 2009, versus 2008. Sedo represented 64 percent of the top 100 public sales in the domain industry, with the next closest competitor coming in at 8 percent. This growth was also fueled by impressive quarter over quarter results, with a 5 percent increase in domain sales in Q4 of 2009. In addition, Sedo accounted for 11 of the top 20 biggest sales industry-wide, compared to only 5 of the top 20 sales in 2008. This included a surge in geographical and descriptive domains, including the sale of Fly.com for $1.6 million, Russia.com for $1.5 million, Call.com for $1.1 million, and Brazil.com for $500,000.

Which extensions are the most successful ones?

The study reveals that the .com extension continues to be the most popular generic top level domain (gTLD), accounting for 44 percent of all domain sales on the Sedo marketplace in 2009. In looking at its place among other gTLDs, the .com displays an even greater lead. The extension accounted for 72 percent of all Q4 2009 gTLD sales and 74 percent of 2009 gTLD sales. In contrast, the second most popular gTLD, the .net extension generated 11 percent of 2009 gTLD sales, and only 6 percent of all domains sold on the Sedo marketplace last year.

In terms of the best-performing extensions for average sales price, Sedo’s study saw the sharpest rise in .biz domains. This growth can be attributed in part to the growth in sales of one character .biz domains, which first became available through the .biz registrar in September 2009.

Fixed price names represent a strong growth sector of the market

We’ve seen a significant four percent growth in the number of fixed price domains changing hands in 2009, as compared with 2008. This figure will continue to grow this year, as domain owners apply fixed prices to appeal to more buyers.

What are the top selling categories?

The top selling domain categories of 2009 included software, employment, services, regions, country and cities, tobacco, insurance, three-character domains, hardware and casinos.

Read the complete 2009 Market Study

What’s coming up in 2010

Looking forward into 2010, we expect to see ongoing demand for premium virtual real estate, with geo, descriptive, .org and .com domains leading the charge. Sedo is unique in it’s ability to actively reach out to domain investors and more importantly to end user buyers representing organizations of all sizes to leverage domains to meet their business goals. Our ongoing monthly GreatDomains auctions, our monthly changing Industry Spotlight features (check out sedo.com/tech) and our quarterly vertical promotions and auctions (see sedo.com/travel) will help us push these numbers even higher in 2010. If you want to be a part of these, feel free to reach out to me anytime!

If you have any questions, feel free to email Simonetta – simonetta at sedo.com.

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