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I thought the same after stumbling onto it in 2007. Now it seems surprising that that there is surprise, especially after the mainstream coverage of ireport.com, toys.com and property.com sales.

So if you're interested, check out http://www.dnjournal.com/ and look at the "Domain Sales" and "YTD Sales Charts".

http://www.dnforum.com/ is the largest forum for domaining.

http://www.domainnamewire.com/ is an insightful news source.

http://www.namebio.com/ is fun to peruse for past sales.

Auctions for drops and end-user sales are at http://www.snapnames.com/ http://www.namejet.com/ and Godaddy's TDNAM service. http://www.sedo.com/ and http://afternic.com/ are mostly end user sales/auctions.

Then continue onto http://www.ricksblog.com/ and finally http://www.domaining.com./

There's plenty of other sites to surf and and never ceases to be interesting. There's even a book ("The Domain Game") that's a good read from a historical perspective.

It's a tough, relatively unknown and tight-knit business. But a burgeoning business nonetheless.

It is refreshing to see that Obama is pulling from academia and groups such as ICANN ....

I'd feel better if the people from ICANN were left out - what with their recent and ongoing attempts to ruin the internet.

In brief, their plan to allow unlimited top level domains is a horrible idea ie there could/would be ".microsoft", ".help", ".newyork", etc.

Secondly they seem to be getting ready to allow tiered pricing on .coms (gTLDs) - you can imagine how it would feel to have the price of the renewal fee for your domain to be set at 25,000 (or whatever) per year if they feel like it.

Some info concerning that last can be found at Domain Name Journal.

I'm not sure exactly what Susan Crawford (from ICANN) thinks about it but I don't think that ICANN is looking out for the public too much - they seem to want to be rich and powerful instead.

Rule #1 - Don't let a hosting company register your domain for you. Register it yourself. It takes less than $10.00 and is a simple five minute process at any domain registrar.

Rule #2 - Make sure that your email address is updated regularly at your Registrar so you are notified promptly when the domain is due to be renewed.

Rule #3 - Recognize that if you don't pay your renewal bill, your domain is going to expire and the new registrant has as much a right to it as you did when you first took it over from the last registrant (You stated that you have no trademark).

It's pretty simple yet when we are too lazy to keep track of our own domain names we blame everyone else and their brother for our problems and call them names.

There probably isn't a single person here who wouldn't "farm" domains if they understood the value of good domain names and knew how profitable the business of advertising at a good domain name could be. Domains have become valuable assets with a healthy and legal aftermarket. Get used to it. Visit http://www.dnjournal.com/ or a few other domain sites and educate yourself.

This is the company who front-ran me:
http://srsplus.com/en-def-417bf0e62ada/en/srsplus/about_srsplus.shtml

I typed in a domain to search, next day it was registered.
Now its owned by someone in Oregon(lisalisalisa), and managed by a bogus
domain name called 'mws.net'

This is SCARY, apparently there is a 'domaintools.com' website with all kind of nifty 'were tracking your Domain interest' type of tools. If you want to find out how unscrupulus DNS or who is providers try seeking out 'BMUG.COM' I used to volunteer at 'bmug.org' and listened to the sheer number of problems they had with 'BMUG.COM' ( now, I think owned by tucows.com ).

" The domain name www.bmug.com is for sale Prices in the region of US$4625" ( this from Get On The Web Limited ) It gets better...much better "Get On The Web Limited registered for its own websites, portals and client projects a number of generic domain names (including this one) some years ago, "

Hmmm since BMUG.ORG is about 23 years old...it would have this statemake a COMPLETE AND TOTAL LIE:
"Get On The Web Limited does not knowingly register and/or offer for sale domain names which are registered trade marks."

http://www.dnjournal.com/domainsales.htm 'By Ron Jackson'
"The AfternicDLS targets small and medium sized businesses, selling the majority of their domains in the four-figure range, but despite that tight focus every now and then they reel in a whale."

http://www.afternicdls.com/ The aftermarket trading in your domain names.
with bmug.net Bid: 700 Ask:972 No Reserve Bid Now!!!
We dont need no stenkin trademarks...

The domain name industry is where all those used car salesmen ended up.

This isn't the first time I found snarkiness by being recruited. In late 1999, a spammer called me at a new job, thinking I was someone else who was about to pay $295 for 1M "electronic ads"; I begged off, saying I was a sysadmin, and he went right into an excited pitch. When I asked, "Is it legal?" he seamlessly launched a "not yet" diatribe, complete with the "forest industry conspiracy," e.g., they'd lost so much money with the lowered paper sales since the introduction of computers into the workplace...

I happened to actually do some piece work for a search engine manipulator shortly after that, fixing code that was supposed to generate doorway pages. Between realizing what I was contributing to and finding an interesting (not to mention full time) gig, I had about ten peeks into what they were doing and how they did it. The guy claimed to be getting $5K/month to keep one particular doctor at the top of "houston plastic surgeon" searches, and he said he'd learned everything he knew by attending quarterly seminars sponsored by the big pre-Google search engine concerns.

Maybe all that technology will be able detect the traffic going to mortage.com, which just sold for $242,000. Yep. So many people miss the "g" that the traffic to the domain is worth a quarter million dollars. Go figure.

The list of highest all-time domain sales is also interesting reading.

It's not hard to get a misspelling domain like yaho.com or googel.com on trademark grounds. Generic words are where most of the big money is spent on domains these days. Check out DN Journal to get a peek of what publicly announced domain sales are like these days. Plenty of 5-figures sales for the more generic terms.

While these domains have nice search result rankings, there is a dependency on Google's ranking algorithm that decreases their value. They could just as easily be blasted to page 5 next month, who knows?

What you're overlooking is the type-in traffic that "sex.com" gets. You'd be surprised at how many people just type in random URLs into their browser. What's even more interesting is that most of the "search results" at parked domains are handled through Google, Yahoo, and smaller outfits like sedo.com. Having a simple URL like "cellphones.com" can earn you a decent living from just type-in traffic alone. This article at Business 2.0 reveals how these domainers are making a killing from type-in traffic.

Here are the reportedly top selling domains of 2005.