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As first reported by DNN, Keydrive bough Monikter and Snapnames from Oversee.net. The official Press Release was published today and can be found after the jump.

KeyDrive S.A. Acquires Moniker and SnapNames from Oversee.net

Luxembourg and Los Angeles, Calif. (February 1, 2012). KeyDrive S.A., an internet solutions holding company with subsidiaries providing domain registration, monetization and aftermarket services, announced today that it has acquired the Moniker and SnapNames business units of Oversee.net, a leader in online performance marketing.

Moniker® and SnapNames® offer businesses and individuals an array of services for domain name registration, acquisition, brokerage and sales. Moniker introduced the live domain name auction concept. SnapNames operates the largest online auction of expired and deleting domain names, giving its customers access to valuable names.

“The purchase of these two leaders in the domain aftermarket perfectly fits our global growth strategy”, said Alexander Siffrin, Chairman of the KeyDrive S.A., and CEO and founder of Key-Systems®. “We now have the opportunity to extend our global outreach, target a broader customer base and cross-sell our services. Furthermore, our European clients will gain access to US buyers and sellers of domain names. We’re delighted to welcome the Moniker and SnapNames teams to KeyDrive S.A.”

“The sale of these assets allows us to focus more on our core monetization and vertical markets divisions which are the fundamental building blocks of our global performance marketing network,” noted Debra Domeyer, Co-CEO of Oversee. “As the domain industry landscape changes, it is essential that we invest in new technologies that leverage our existing platform and unlock the potential of domain traffic. Our focus is on developing new monetization alternatives for both publishers and advertisers. We also want to thank Craig Snyder and the Moniker and SnapNames teams for their years of dedicated service. ”

Oversee was advised in the sale process by Petsky Prunier LLC.

(c) 2011 DomainNameNews.com (4)

According to industry sources, Keydrive S.A. will announce this morning that they have purchased Moniker & Snapnames from Oversee.net. Information about the sale has already been posted on the companies website and was also added to ICANNWiki yesterday.

KeyDrive S.A./Luxembourg includes the Key-Systems Group in St. Ingbert/Saarland (Germany), the NameDrive Group (Luxembourg/USA) as well as Moniker and SnapNames (Florida and Oregon/USA) with more than 160 employees.

After the takeover of Moniker in January 2012 the group ranks among the TOP 10 biggest ICANN registrars in 6th place; the group currently administers a total of more than 5.4 million domains.

Rumors about a potential sale of Moniker & Snapnames had been circulating for  a while. DNN expects an official announcement to be published shortly and will update this post accordingly. Keydrive was created by merging KeySystems and Namedrive.

(c) 2011 DomainNameNews.com (2)

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SnapNames/Moniker’s year end auction ends today. At the time of this post (about 10 hours before the end of the auction), 15 domains of the 53 domains in the auction have currently received bids and apparently “answer.com” (which was listed for $150,000) has been removed from the auction.

(c) 2011 DomainNameNews.com (3)

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As announced via email by Ovesee.net today, the company has laid off 13% of its workforce. The official announcement sent to DNN in an email says:

As part of its plan to address new growth opportunities, Oversee.net has realigned its work force resulting in a staff reduction of 13 percent. These moves, along with pending new hires, will allow the company to leverage core assets to innovate more effectively, improve competitive positioning and achieve growth.

When question about the areas of reduction, the company stated they would not provide details, but stated that ”the workforce reduction was across all functions”.

(c) 2011 DomainNameNews.com (4)

Miami journalist Gus Garcia-Roberts wrote a blog post on for the Miami New Times attacking “Moniker Whois Privacy Services” as a company that distributes child pornography, based on a lawsuit that names them as one of the defendants in order to get them to reveal the actual owners of the names. Unfortunately it appears that he neither tried to contact Moniker, nor felt it necessary to research more about “whois privacy”.

(c) 2011 DomainNameNews.com (8)

We are were live blogging the auction results of the DOMAINfest Global 2011 Live low/no reserve domain auction held in Santa Monica by Moniker/Snapnames today. As always we do not guarantee the accuracy of these results. Any unsold names will be sold in the extended silent auction until Thursday, Feb 17 at 3:15pm ET (12:15pm PT).

See the full premium live auction results after the jump.

(c) 2011 DomainNameNews.com (3)

We were are live blogging the auction results of the DOMAINfest Global 2011 Live low/no reserve domain auction held in Santa Monica by Moniker/Snapnames today. As always we do not guarantee the accuracy of these results. Any unsold names will be sold in the extended silent auction.

See the full live low/no reserve live auction results after the jump.

(c) 2011 DomainNameNews.com (2)

(c) 2011 DomainNameNews.com (9)

Domain Industry blogger and broker at Domain Name firm Moniker, Patrick Rudell, also known as Chef Patrick, has launched a new website at ScienceFiction.com. He purchased the domain name after previous lease owner defaulted for $175,000 USD. The whois still currently shows Domain Capital. Rudell partnered with two sci-fi geek friends, one of which has a journalism degree and has been writing for 20+ years.

[as reported by TechCrunch and the Facebook Domain Name Network]

(c) 2010 DomainNameNews.com (4)

What some Afternic members may have already noticed yesterday, when they logged into their interfaces and were prompted to enable some domains registered at the newly supported registrars for the highest promotion level, has become official today: Moniker and eNom can now fully integrated, meaning that you can now list domains registered there on the DLS Premium level and can be instantly transferred to the buyer.