Domain name management and brand protection are quickly becoming an extremely important issue that a lot of companies and individuals are over-looking or under-estimating, and as DomainTools Blog reports, for large corporations such as Apple this is more than just a problem and one that we are certain will not happen (quite as badly) again:

Apple has bought iPhone.com from Michael Kovatch. Michael would not disclose the sale prices but he said it was well worth it to sell. This was at least a million dollar sale. Michael said this last week was a very busy one inside of Apple. He was holding out because he truly wanted to use the domain. Michael had his business partner (and lawyer) handled the negotiation. He considered not selling at the very end, he had registered the domain back in 1995 and was building a company on the domain. The Traffic on the domain had begun to skyrocket in the last 6 months and it showed good signs of potential. Michael settled for a huge check instead of trying to realizing the potential of the domain. It turned out that domain was so valuable that Apple just had to own it.

Still, other than causing problems to companies who do not plan ahead when it comes to brand protection, or who have no one on-staff or that they work in partnership with to research and secure domain names and their relations, the other effects upon the global domain name market-place is that highly publicized products such as iPhones create new land in the ever shrinking domain name real estate business:

Domain registration patterns can tell a lot about the world and what news is breaking. The number of iPhone domains skyrocketed on January 11th 2007 when the official announcement came out from Apple. 453 domains with the word “iPhone” were registered that first day and the explosion of iPhone domain names have been steady since that day.

The initial spike was a lot of people going after domains so they could have the best domain for marketing purposes.

After the earth shattering announcement and the huge spike in registrations the amount of people registering iPhone type of domains names each day cooled off to a simmering registration rate that was steadily averaging a health 25 domains a day. A lot of people still feel they are clever because they have registered a good iPhone website domain prior to the launch of the product and the demand will only get better after the launch of the device.