The high bidder’s ID was Maxbid.

In all there were 174 bidders in the auction with 7 bidding $5K or more.

The domain name ePhoto.com was a pure drop domain, meaning it didn’t drop to a certain service, and could have been caught by anyone.

According to DomainTools appears to have been last owned by Verisign and registered at melbourneit.com.

Whether Verisign actually owned the domain or took possession of it years ago on an earlier drop, and why they would simply allow it to drop again is anyone’s guess.

According to Screenshots.com the domain has been parked for a number of years.

Here is the old whois record:

Domain Name.......... ephoto.com
  Creation Date........ 1995-10-18
  Registration Date.... 2009-09-27
  Expiry Date.......... 2011-11-19
  Organisation Name.... Verisign Inc.
  Organisation Address. 21355 Ridgetop Circle
  Organisation Address.
  Organisation Address. Dulles
  Organisation Address. 20166
  Organisation Address. VA
  Organisation Address. UNITED STATES

Admin Name........... Verisign Hostmaster
  Admin Address........ Verisign, Inc.
  Admin Address........ 21345 Ridgetop Circle
  Admin Address........ Dulles
  Admin Address........ 20166
  Admin Address........ VA
  Admin Address........ UNITED STATES
  Admin Email.......... vshostmaster@verisign.com
  Admin Phone.......... +1.7039484300
  Admin Fax............ +1.7039484331

Tech Name............ Melbourne IT Tech
  Tech Address......... 636 Ellis Street
  Tech Address.........
  Tech Address......... Mountain View
  Tech Address......... 94043
  Tech Address......... CA
  Tech Address......... UNITED STATES
  Tech Email........... tech@melbourneitdbs.com
  Tech Phone........... +1.8669073267
  Tech Fax............. +1.6509633266
  Name Server.......... f4.nstld.com
  Name Server.......... g4.nstld.com
  Name Server.......... l4.nstld.com
  Name Server.......... a4.nstld.com…

FaceValue.com led the way in reportable sales at $20K.

Here is the complete list of reportable sales over $1K.

The reportable sales were led by:

geb.com at 40,000 EUR

Top ccTLD: football-betting.co.uk at 11,800 GBP

Top “other” TLD: lotto.info at 19,500 USD

34% of all sales where “Buy it Now”

Here is a list of all the reportable sales:

 …

This sale follows HuntingMoon sale of Eric Borgos’ adult domain portfolio for $1.3 Million.

Lets point out right away that PornStar.com is an operating site not just a domain and the sale included all content, affiliates and members.

The sale transaction started in 2010 and after a year and a half of payments, the buyer is now taking possession of all of the assets and plan to  redevelop the site according to Evan Horowitz, CEO of Hunting Moon.

Some other interesting facts Evan shared with us is that he along with this partner Michael from HuntingMoon, originally bought pornstar.com from L & H Apparel/Pornstar Clothing Company in 1999.

Evan and Michael sold the domain direct to Mallcom for the second pornstar.com transaction a few years later — and, then brokered the name via HuntingMoon for a third transaction on the same domain!

HuntingMoon’s founders have handled over $2.5M related to this domain.

A second interesting tidbit about this sale is the fact that the lead was generated via HuntingMoon’s partnership with the GFY.com community.  Not long after the partnership was forged, did the sale happen.  Any question marks about whether the adult community would continue to buy top web properties, during a reported contraction of the adult site market, were erased with this sale right off the bat in August of 2010.

A third factoid that is of note, is that the domain was sourced by David at HuntingMoon within a few short weeks of his hiring.  So, a new member of the team brought in a $1.5M sale during his ramp-up period of his employment contract.

HuntingMoon.com ongoing AVN Internext Adult Domain Auction featuring hundreds of adult domain names is taking place thru February 9.

For more information on the AVN auction or to bid please visit: bid.huntingmoon.com.…

This information came to light this week when Sedo inadvertently reported a sale that was supposed to be confidential and Francois from Domaining left a comment on TheDomains.com telling us that not only should have the sale been confidential but that Sedo.com only acted as Escrow agent for the transaction.

We reached out to Sedo which confirmed that its served solely as the escrow agent in the domain name in question.

In our opinion Sedo should not include domain names in their weekly sales report in which they only act as escrow agent.

There are two major problems IMHO with including escrow only sales in their weekly sales reports.

For one the Sedo weekly report as it is transmitted to blogs and other news sources weekly, including TheDomains.com always starts with the following language:

“”Please find the weekly sales list attached. This past week there were a total of …….. sales through our marketplace, totaling over $………”

For us when someone handles solely the escrow function of receiving the funds and transferring the domain, its misleading to say the “sale took place through our marketplace”

It would be like Escrow.com claiming it sold $X number of dollars of domains every week because they cleared the transactions.

Unless a domain is sold through and by virtue of a broker or the online sales and purchase system, commonly referred to as a marketplace, the domain should not be claimed to be sold through the marketplace.

Secondly including such sales in Sedo numbers can result in the double reporting of sales.

For example if we at MostWantedDomains.com sell a domain for $5K and uses Sedo rather than Escrow.com to act as escrow agent the sale will be reported by us to us to DnJournal.com and it will be reported by Sedo.com as well. Obviously if we sold the domain through Escrow.com instead of Sedo there would be no chance of double reporting.

We reached out to Sedo this week to discuss the issue who issued the following response:

“”Sedo has a policy of transparently sharing the percentage of external transfers that take place at our marketplace, and we publish those numbers as part of our quarterly and annual reports. ”

“In 2011 just 6% of all transactions were external transfers, which translates to only 2.3% of our published sales value (in dollars) for 2011.”

“External transfers are part of the marketplace, and we will continue to report them in our weekly marketplace report, and will also continue to transparently show the percentage volume in our quarterly and yearly reports (2011 report).”

“We will of course also continue to honor clients’ confidentiality requests, independently from the source of the transaction.…

The seller appears to be a Gerard Brady.

The domain is currently at Escrow.com awaiting transfer…

Here are some of the more interesting numbers out of the report:

“In total, there were 39,951 domains sold across Sedo’s Domain Marketplace in 2011″

The total sales volume was $84,431,965.

“80% of sales revenue consisted of confidential sales”

“47% of traded domain names during 2011 were sold at prices at or under $500.”

Only 6% of sales were $10K or more.

“44% of all sales were .com domains”

“18% were .De domains (of course Sedo.com is headquartered in Germany

“150 different TLDs being traded on the marketplace, and for the first time, previous top ten candidates such as .fr and .es dropped down the list to be replaced by .co and .me.”

“Although the year saw fewer domain sales and lower sales revenue than 2010, the median prices of almost all domain extensions increased, with the most notable growth among TLDs that are seen as a viable alternative to the ever popular .com. ”

These were the top 10 categories for domains sold through Sedo.com marketplace in 2011:

1. Business

2. Shopping

3. Computers

4. Recreation

5. Arts

6. Society

7. Health

8. Science

9. Sports

10. Games

 …

In all Sedo.com sold 939 domain names totaling over $1.68 million with 34% of them being “buy it now” sales.

Sofi.com led all sales at $45K followed by Naturkraft.de selling for around $30K

Here are the reportable sales:

GAYS.DE has just bought two domain names Gay.de and Gay.at for “a staggering €165,000 (approx. $218,000)”

According to a press release, “Prior to purchase GAYS.DE was already one of the largest dating communities in the market with around 250,000 members.”

“In the next step we want to transmit the community’s editorial content into mobile internet so we can meet our members’ increasing needs for location-based information and contacts,” explains Griese, adding with a smile, “for that to happen, we’re also looking for experienced web developers to reinforce our gay team!”

The Seller is Special Entertainment GmbH, headquartered in Munich.

The domain name Viajes.com which is Spanish for Travel has been transferred by Domain investor Christian Chena to World Internet Projects, of Barcelona Spain.

Chris is a very successful domain investor especially in Spanish domain names.

Ron Jackson, did a cover story on Chris on DnJournal.com a few years ago which you can check out here.

We don’t have any details of the deal but we congratulate everyone involved.…