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Job.ca is getting auctioned through MyID
Yesterday, MyID has announced that they’ll be auctionning a huge domain name —job.ca— on June 24-25th 2009.
This is very big news since job.ca stands to be the biggest domain name ever auctioned in Canada.
And whoever gets it will likely keep it forever so if someone needs that incredible name, now is probably the last chance in their lifetime they are given to bid for and win it.
Billions upon billions of dollars are being spent and made every year, regarding employment, in Canada.
Using the job.ca domain name provides an unbelievable strategic advantage for whoever uses it over all those who don’t have such an outstanding name.
And the “job.ca” suffix is just the beginning because the current owner had already registered the provincial suffixes such as…
- job.bc.ca
- job.ab.ca
- job.sk.ca
- job.mb.ca
- job.on.ca
- job.qc.ca
- job.nb.ca
- job.ns.ca
…and they’re all going to be awarded to the winning bidder. The other provincial suffixes can also be registered by the winning bidder, when in control of the “job.ca” domain name.
By all means, this event is likely going to make history for two reasons:
- the biggest domain name ever auctioned in Canada; and
- the expected largest bid ever made for a Canadian domain name.
If a company deals in the Canadian job market and doesn’t bid on this name, the C-level managers need to fire their marketing manager. Job.ca is way too big an opportunity to miss.
Lots of interested parties will want to get their hands on the job.ca domain name, such as:
- Job boards, domestic and foreign
- The job.ca name is enough to completely reshape the job posting and resume acquisition landscape, in Canada.
- No job board can pass this opportunity up because the consequences of having a competitor get such a huge name could prove financially suicidal.
- Just imagine, for one moment, that “company A” gets job.ca and markets it, all over the country. How are all the other job boards supposed to counter that? That’s why every job board will likely bid way up to make sure they secure what will become the biggest “job-related” web address, in Canada.
- Employment agencies
- For any serious canadian employment agency, winning the job.ca auction would mean almost instant gains, in terms of lucrative new customers.
- Universities, colleges
- All educational institutions, in Canada, have placement services which, in many ways, are a vital cornerstone of their ongoing success. If students get a job once they graduate, more people will buy their education programs. It’s that simple!
- By getting their hands on job.ca, a placement service could benefit from untold publicity, prestige and instant credibility. Year after year. Basically forever. This is the hottest investment they can ever make.
- And the job.ca domain name will likely go up in value, forever.
- By all means, this is a blue chip domain name.
- Large employers
- Canada counts some of the richest employers on Earth and as such, they’d love to grab the job.ca domain name for their own job-related promotion activities.
- People instantly understand that a given employer is at the very top if it uses job.ca, the shortest and most powerful job domain name ever to be registered, in the country… even before the CIRA was created!
Among the bidders for job.ca, expect to find bankers who understand cornerstone domain names are a new form of highly valuable currency that goes up in value all the time. It’s highly portable and generates revenue on its own.
Domain name speculators might also feel the urge to chip in because if they win the job.ca domain name, they might be able to auction it off for much more, the next day. Potential buyers who missed the name the first time (and again, it would be unwise to ignore this historic auction) will basically go all out the second time around to get it so if a speculator gets the name, there’s a good chance a new record will be set shortly after the anticipated record bid, on the first auction at MyID, June 24-25, 2009.
These are exciting times, indeed.
While people realize the economy may have slowed down a bit, it changes nothing to the fundamentals. Employers want to find talented people and workers are looking for jobs. And both meet at job.ca. Naturally. It’s intuitive.
If you’re looking to buy up one super-valuable domain name this year, job.ca is most likely it.
Nothing spells unlimited profits like the job market which generates untold billions of dollars, per year, in Canada alone. Job.ca is a golden bridge, or so to speak, to one of the most, if not the most, lucrative market, ever.
There’s no question people all over the world, and especially Canada, know the true value of the job.ca domain name. It’ll be very exciting to see who gets the name and consequently, crushes the competition by using the most intuitive, memorable, credible and timeless Canadian job-related name ever to have been registered.
Tags: job.ca, job, job-related, canada, canadian, domain, name, domain name, domains, domainers, domaining, domain investment, domain blue chip, myid, myid.ca, myid auction, myid domain name auction, the biggest name ever auctioned in canada, canada’s biggest domain name, biggest auction ever, canadian namespace, cira, job.bc.ca, job.ab.ca, job.sk.ca, job.mb.ca, job.on.ca, job.qc.ca, job.nb.ca, job.ns.ca, job market, canada’s job domain name, auction in june, 2009
Finding dropped .ca domain names
Dropping a domain name is akin to recycling.
Where one domainers lets a .ca domain name go back to the CIRA, to be made available again, for someone else, that other person is likely to grab an excellent domain name which, with a little imagination, can be put to good use, perhaps in a very different context than what was originally thought.
Reusing previously owned .ca domain names is a good idea since some of them still have quality links pointing to them and between those and never registered names, chances are those that have previously been taken are either generic or of higher value, in one way or another.
As such, if you’d like to browse a huge database comprising hundreds of thousands of dropped .ca domain names, it’s now possible at MBNX, in its “dotca” subdirectory.
The names date all the way back to mid-October of 2006 and basically contain cleaned up versions of CIRA’s “To Be Released” domain name listings. To make searches more natural, the database has isolated the domain key in a field all by itself so a name like “domain.on.ca” has been archived as “domain”, “on” and “ca”, in three separated fields.
As such, finding a particular domain name with the “ca” keyword (probably meaning the short version of “canada”) is now possible. Previously, such a search would’ve “found” all the domain names because they all contain the “.ca” key.
So the very architecture of the database behind this free web service makes for an enjoyable dropped domain name browsing experience. Of course, this service is only offered for the .ca namespace so if you know about similar free services for other domain suffixes, please be sure to add them in the comments.
To get you started, you can check out the dropped .ca domain names for these particular keywords…
From this point on, you can search for any keyword you like. No censorship has been applied regarding these dropped domains so if it’s been dropped, in the last few years, it’s likely to be there.
Have fun finding domains you can’t resist registering, again!
Tags: domain names, .ca, dot ca, dropped domain names, dropped .ca, cira, tbr, to be released, good domain names, available domain names, search dropped domains, domainers, canada, canadian domains, mbnx
Revisiting the CIRA’s TBR lists
If you had a very good “.ca” domain name, chances are you’d never let it go but life being what it is, stuff happens and as such, very good domain names pop up here and there in the CIRA’s wildly popular TBR list, every Wednesday.
TBR means “to be released” so when you spot a domain name in that list, you’re more than welcome to watch it be returned to the “available” domains on Wednesday, from 3 PM up to around 9 PM.
The trouble is, you may not be the only one looking to get your hands on the best domains, namely the shortest, those why match generic terms and those with special contextual value. Those “superstar domains” are being heavily fought over so you’re chance of registering it “manually” when it becomes available is non-existent — unless you can query the name every 1/60th of a second for hours on end.
So how do you get those “soon to be available” domain names with significant street value? You bid on them, just like everybody else. Bare Metal offers an excellent TBR monitoring service which will work for you to get the domain names you want. You only pay if they get the name on your behalf so pretty much anybody can “play the TBR game”, with Bare Metal.
Of course, if Bare Metal scores your domain name and more than one potential registrant has requested it (at Bare Metal, specifically), then if goes into an auction that can quickly bump up the price for a domain name in the tens of thousands.
As such, CIRA has allowed for Canadian registrars to offer the names they “catch” through auctions and although this system makes sense for the richer domainers, it’s a total nonsense for the average Canadian attemting to buy a relatively good “.ca” domain name — this is becoming a real problem as most of the very good names are being concentrated in the same hands, creating huge portfolios of “parked” names.
So while the CIRA presents the TBR lists as a fair way for Canadians to grab domains which aren’t required anymore by their previous owners, the reality of the TBR is more a matter of money than fairness.
If you intend to win at the TBR monitoring game (and it can happen, from time to time), you better keep in mind that the system is being predated by rich domainers who will likely have an unfair advantage of you, the average Canadian looking for a good name.
To make matters even trickier, a handful of very rich domainers also own their registrar licence so they can buy up a domain, try it for seven (7) days and if it performs well, they can keep it and if it doesn’t, they just file for a full refund and return it to be “released” again. Since these domainers (who also happen to be registrars) are free to check the performance of as many domains as they want, with this scheme, almost all good TBRed names are likely to be grabbed before the average Canadian even has a chance to get to them.
So the Canadian TBR system isn’t fair.
It’s a nice try but it’s profoundly broken in the sense that money will almost always win over “a fair chance for everyone”. But that shouldn’t stop you from monitoring TBR names, especially if you’re seasoned in a specialty niche, because even rich domainers may miss “niched names”, once in a while.
For instance, on this very day, the following names are scheduled to be released:
Several more quality names, out the thousands being released, might turn out being excellent buys. You have to look at the list by yourself to locate those which relate with your areas of interest.
Keep in mind that you don’t necessarily need to grab the hottest domains because sometimes, a niche portfolio will do just fine to bring you that much closer to financial freedom.
Tags: cira, tbr, to be released, soon to be made available, domain names, domains, domainers, registrars, canada, dot ca, ca, dropped domains, expiring domain names, expired domains
Turcotte’s CIRA answer to ICANN
Those who know Bernard Turcotte, President and CEO of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA), can fully appreciate his undeniable wit, intelligence and integrity.
The ICANN, on the other hand, isn’t so reliable.
Accountability, transparency and a general inability to properly conduct consultations continue to be documented weak spots, among others.
It so happens that the ICANN invited the CIRA to answer its Request for Public Comments regading the ICANN’s performance. That was on May 8th, 2007. Three days later, Turcotte answered that… he wasn’t going to answer!
Turcotte hits all the nails on the head, in his carefully crafted answer to the ICANN. On every account, Turcotte is right on the money. The ICANN needs to clean up their act before bothering every domain name authority into providing them with valuable feedback they’re likely to entirely disregard.
Here’s part of Turcotte’s letter to the ICANN:
“In the past we have raised concerns over the transparency and accountability of governance at ICANN including how it conducts its public consultations. More recently, we have been encouraged by the steps ICANN has undertaken to increase transparency, and have stated this opinion publicly at the ICANN Lisbon meeting.
Although improvements have been made, ICANN’s recent Request for Public Comments represents a clear step backwards in ICANN’s journey towards becoming a truly transparent and accountable organization.
That’s exactly how many Canadian domain name owners feel about the way the ICANN is currently handling its business. Furthermore, Turcotte adds:
“Due to the poor design and implementation of this Request for Public Comments we, as most serious stakeholders should, see few – if any – advantages to contributing to this effort which cannot produce any usable results while potentially further alienating constituents.”
Everybody wants the ICANN to improve but the way things are going nowadays, it’s better for the CIRA and other country-level domain name authorities to focus on helping the ICANN get back on track than sending out recommendations that aren’t likely to be properly handled.
The domain name business, worldwide, needs more professional administrators like Bernard Turcotte to bring back absolute accountability and transparency to the way domain name matters are dealt with.
Tags: domain names, cira, icann, bernard turcotte, accountability, public comments
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