The final weekly domain sales report for 2008 is now out at DNJournal.com. Moniker closed a $275,000 sale that took the lead position on our new Top 20 chart and the AfternicDLS weighed in with a solid 6-figure sale of their own to claim the runner-up spot. Sedo had the most overall chart entries sweeping 12 of the 20 positions.

Aftermarket.com’s home base of Seattle may have been cold and frozen over the past week, but, things continued to heat up at the live auction with the market leader in sell-through rate. Thought Convergence, Inc. is pleased to announce that Aftermarket.com has been selected as the premier auction house for Domainer Mardi Gras (DMG).

The live event is set to take place February 21, 2009 in New Orleans, Louisiana. DMG is being sponsored by our friends at Parked and Modern Domainer with an agenda focusing on “Risk Management for the Modern Domainer”. This is your opportunity to submit your risk management related domains or names akin to Mardi Gras for consideration in the auction!

The domain submission period for the simultaneous online and in-person auction is currently underway at Aftermarket.com and will remain open until January 30, 2009. Log into your DomainTools account, or create one today, and go to the Aftermarket.com Live Auctions in navigation bar to submit your domains today. Aftermarket.com customers can choose to ‘move’ previously submitted domains into the Domainer Mardi Gras Auction for review. Select the domain(s) to move and then “Migrate Lots to Domainer Mardi Gras” in the drop-down selection box.

Here are some important dates to keep in mind:

• Open submission: NOW
• Priority reviewed submissions: January 16, 2009
• Submission deadline: January 30, 2009
• Auction Open / Pre-Bidding (silent): February 13, 2009
• Live Auction: February 21, 2009 2:45 PM CST
• Post-bidding (silent) ends: February 27, 2009

If you have any questions or for additional assistance please email, Aftermarket.com Support, support [ at ] aftermarket.com.

The geodomain industry’s premier event will be moving to the West Coast in 2009 for a spring time conference that will close the weekend before the next T.R.A.F.F.I.C. conference opens in Silicon Valley. This will allow California visitors to take in two major events in the same week.

Name Media has decided to pull their planned IPO offering citing market conditions. The Massachusetts-based domain conglomerate (parent
company of BuyDomains, the AfternicDLS and several parking services), originally filed for a $172.5 million IPO in November 2007.

Do you know what the first .Com domain ever registered was? PC World magazine took us back in time with a new article published this week that runs down the 100 oldest .com domain names on the Internet. It all started in 1985 when no one could have guessed how valuable domains would eventually become.