Affilias And The .Me Generation

Affilias has laid out its own domain with the .me generation

Source - Philadelphia Business Journal - by Peter Key Staff Writer

Some .me that we (DomainBrokers.me) are brokering

HORSHAM — For Afilias Ltd., the past five months have been all about “.me.”
The Irish company, which employs 40 at its administrative offices and network operations center here, is involved in promoting and providing technical support for the “.me” domain, which was launched in May.
Although “.me” is the country domain for Montenegro, just as “.us” is the country domain for the United States, it has attracted international attention because of its potential use in such punning domain names as “date.me” and “love.me.”
Those, in fact, were two of the domain names sold in an auction that began at a domain industry conference in New York on Sept. 23 and continued online afterwards. “Date.me” went for $70,000 and “love.me” fetched $32,500. Prior to the auction, “chatwith.me” sold for $15,035 and picture.me commanded $10,240.”
“It’s not only an amazing domain to actually get into and have a site there, but even if you’re just investing in some names, this is the site to get into,” said Roland LaPlante, Afilias’ chief marketing officer.
Most of the proceeds from “.me” domain name sales go to the government of Montenegro. DoMEn, the company that operates the “.me” domain registry, won the right to do so by agreeing to pay the Montenegro government 70 percent of the proceeds it receives from all “.me” domain name sales.
Afilias gets a cut of the money that doMEn retains from the sales because it is one of three owners of the company. The other two are Scottsdale, Ariz.-based GoDaddy.com Inc., the world’s largest domain name registrar; and ME-net, a Montenegro-based company whose principals are leaders of the country’s information and communications technology sector.
Afilias also benefits from whatever success “.me” enjoys because it is contracted to provide doMEn with the technology services that allow Web browsers the world over to find Web sites with “.me” domain names.
Providing those types of services is Afilias’ main business. The company supports 15 domains, including “.org,” “.info” “.aero” and “.mobi,” with 14 million names among them.
Afilias doesn’t sell domain names directly to the public. Instead, it relies on registrars, such as GoDaddy to do that. The registrars usually also provide their customers with Web hosting and related services.
To sell “.me” domain names, doMEn has agreements with 105 registrars throughout the world.
“We want to be sure that there will be big marketing power that will be able to push ‘.me’ in a very short period of time globally,” said Predrag Lesic, doMEn’s CEO.
Afilias is helping doMEn work with registrars by providing some of them with ads for “.me” that include their name and contact information.
So far, 135,000 “.me” names have been registered. That’s nothing compared to the 70 million registered “.com” names, but Lesic said it makes “.me” the fastest-launching country domain ever.
“.Me” Web sites up and running include “furl.me,” a social bookmarking site; “wmw.me,” which shortens Web addresses to make it easier to link to sites on micro-blogs such as Twitter; and “ggl.me,” which provides Google searches with black screens, ostensibly reducing the consumption of carbon-based fuels in the process.