De.tv was sold on the 12th of May for $21,500 in a directly negotiated sale between me and John van den Berg.

I was a 50% owner in DE.TV along with one of my business partners, Timothy Suggs.

John van den Berg is a well known and very much respected domain investor, with a particular love for the .tv extension.

In my negotiations with John, we both felt that if we were to reach an agreement on the price, then we would be making it available for public consumption and reporting the sale to DN Journal.

As I write this, I realize that I was late to the .tv game.

“In 1998, the Geneva based International Organization of Standards, assignor of country-doe, ‘top level domain’ names on the Internet, assigned .tv to Tuvalu, just as it had dealt .jp to Japan. As a result, Tuvaluans owned that Web address, and could license it for non-Tuvaluans to use.

In 2000, Tuvalu agreed to lease its .tv extension for 12 years to dotTV Corp, an Ideallab company, for close to $50 million in cash, a minority ownership stake in dotTV Corp., and a seat on the company’s board. VeriSign, the company that maintains registries for .com and Dot Net domain names, subsequently bought the dotTV Corporation, which became a wholly owned subsidiary of VeriSign.”

At least this is what I could piece together from my research. 

I attended a dinner party that I almost did not make because I really was not interested in going. In fact, I pulled off the freeway and thought about saving myself the half an hour I would sit in traffic; I wanted to meet up with some friends who I had not seen for almost 8 years. Something in me said to go so I pulled back onto the freeway, fought traffic, and attended the party.

Keep in mind, most people at this party either have no experience in the Internet world or they have experience with real property and no experience in the Internet world. Consequently, they do not truly understand the state of the Internet and the direction it is going.

Back to the story: I was introduced to a man in his mid to late forties. He used to develop Internet properties for other companies, he was offered jobs at some of the major price comparison companies that you see on the Internet, and he now works closely with video game companies. Nevertheless, we enter an engaging discussion about the Internet and online domains as property, like real estate. Meanwhile, nobody around can believe we are nerding out on this and they cannot fully grasp the depth of the conversation.

I inadvertently discovered this from a cached Google page of http://www.tv.

Given the number of us who probably asked some of these questions at one time or another, I felt this would make for a useful post.

Disclaimer: Some of this info is more marketing oriented and I have separated in the second set of quotes below.