Yesterday’s Aftermarket.com auction started out great. Then it flopped.

I thought yesterday’s Aftermarket.com auction went great. And I still thought that well after the auction was over.

Why? Because I didn’t watch the second half.

I watched the first 25 or so auctions from my office, and then packed up and headed home. The first 25 lots went great. The sell through rate was high and the auctioneer was lively. The online interface was greatly improved from last time.

Schilling’s company comes down on wrong end of ChilliBeans.com decision.

Frank Schilling’s Name Administration has lost its first UDRP decision, spoiling a perfect record of success (according to searches at National Arbitration Forum and WIPO).

Schilling, teamed up with attorney John Berryhill as usual, failed to convince a three person WIPO panel that its use of the domain name ChilliBeans.com was generic. The complainant is a company selling sunglasses under the “Chilli Beans” brand, mostly in Brazil.

Sitebox rapidly scaling down as it is no longer strategic to company.

Local search and advertising company Marchex (NASDAQ: MCHX) is scaling down its third party domain name parking service Sitebox. Company executives believe the service is no longer strategic to the company.

Sitebox produced revenues of $5 million in the first half of the year, but less than $1.5 million in the third quarter. The company expects revenues to drop further to $0.5 million in the fourth quarter.

During the company’s latest investor conference call, Marchex CEO Russell Horowitz said focusing on premium content partners and its own traffic sources provides greater relevance to its advertisers:

A recent UDRP decision begs the question, do big companies get the benefit of doubt in UDRP?

Most UDRP arbitration filings are against small time domain owners. So a recent case caught my eye because the respondent was a major media company, Scripps Networks. Scripps networks owns HGTV, Food Network, and DIY network among others.

The case was brought by Automotive Networks Corporation over the domain names WheelsTV.com and MyWheelsTV.com. Scripps won because the panelist found that Automative Networks didn’t have trademarks for the terms prior to Scripps’ registration of the domain names in 1998-1999.