Marchex, MDNH, domain names, and CyberBandits

This is an old post that was private that I decided to make public:

I was doing some domain speculating this weekend & kept running across Marchex sites everywhere. Then I read an article over at dnjournal that talks about Marchex and their $164M investment into direct navigation (domains). So I figured I’d get my hands dirty and see what they really had behind all those numbers. It kind of shocked me…

I wanted to get a sampling of domains owned by Marchex. But first how about companies owned by Marchex.

I found this “sample contract” and this case, which shows that MDNH is in fact a Marchex fully-owned subsidiary (the contract is worth looking at).

This PDF shows some other purchases:

• Industry Brains $30.6M
• Enhance & eFamily $13.3M
• Name Development $155.6M
• pike street industries $12.5M
• traffic leader $3.2M
• goClick $7.5M

Bottom line, they own a bunch of domains and ways to monetize them. Some good domains they own:

• debts.com, gorillas.com, salsa.com, petshop.com, puppys.com,tornado.com
• A ton of geo+category (like seattledentist.com)

Some bad spelling ones:

• ancrstry.com - russian ancestry? replace some of those vowels w/ consonants
• abercombrie.com - fancy cheese for annoying teens
• a few ebay typos (webwork convinced me to get/stay out of the TM typo world. I think these guys could stand to buy some of his time)
• Some gone ones?:
• adultfind.com - used to be owned by them, now not? getting out of the adult domain business? if so, they still have a long long long way to go (cumaggedon.com, upherbutt.com, xxxsexypussy.net)

One interesting finding is that a lot of their blatant trademark domains have admin contacts of Digi Real Estate Foundation but they are hosted on same ips as many (thousands) of other Marchex-owned domains. My guess is this is the offshore division of Marchex. This faux companyis all over WIPO claims (21 suits filed, they lost all of them - http://domains.adrforum.com). Digi Real Estate Foundation is based out of Panama City, Panama and the address is a PO Box - but I can find no other information about this business.My favorite quote from one of the filings:

“In short, the facts of the present case demonstrate that Respondent is a blatant cybersquatter,typosquatter, and a common cyberbandit.”

Doing a reverse IP you can find even more of their domain portfolio. Here are some/most of the IPs. Do a reverse IP lookup to see all the domains located on that ip. The number in parentheses is the estimated number of domains hosted on that ip. Below the ip is an example of the types of domain hosted there:

• 66.116.109.60 (5k)
• 66.116.109.61 (1)
  searching.net
• 66.116.109.62 (140k)
  moniker private admin - a.ns.ultsearch.com
• 66.116.109.63 (65k)
  gorillas.com, salsa.com, petshop.com, puppys.com,tornado.com,
• 66.116.109.64 (75k)
  all 5 digit #s only, zip codes w/ .com & .net
• 66.116.109.65 (2k)
  mostly porn and trademark typos. interesting about these is some have other admin owners. ip is marchex, name servers are mdnhparking, site design is marchex ppc landing page, but domain owner isn’t?? hmmm
• 66.116.109.65 (56k)
• 66.116.109.66 (61k)
  ebayrookie.com
• 66.116.109.112 (23k)
  moniker private admin- ns.mdnhparking.com
  66.116.125.112 (5k)
• 67.15.77.192 (36k)
  (digi admin,ns1.dnredirect.com)
  seadooboats.com, searrs.com many more typos.

1 more interesting finding:

yahama.com, gorillas.com, ETC
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

On most of their domain they don’t want them indexed in search engines. They seem to be very content with all the type-in traffic and not letting any bots in at all.

There is a lot I like about marchex. I think it’s incredibly smart that they’ve secured so many good and great domains. Excellent foresight. I also believe they’ve done the right thing in starting their own network so that they have the traffic and the full ad dollar. However, it seems weird that a public company - that Wall St. has seemingly liked - can be so blatantly reckless in some areas. Porn, trademark infringement, offshore divisions, etc. I don’t see how this fringe(?) is necessary when they have so many positives going for them already.

Update: Another online detective recently posted about some Marchex domain juicyness