Squarespace acquired Google Domains in 2023. All domain names that were registered at Google Domains at that time were migrated to Squarespace.
Squarespace is primarily a website building platform with a focus on small to medium sized businesses. The domain name business was acquired in support of its primary services. To that end, the company has never put out a marketing campaign focused exclusively on its domain name registrar line of business.
I appreciate that GoDaddy now shows how many searches are made by its customers for specific domain names that have relatively high search volume. This isn’t simply the case for domain names that are for sale. GoDaddy is also showing the number of searches within its Domain Broker Service call to action box within the search stream.
With this information, we are able to compare the number of searches between extensions. I thought about this while searching for the price of Luminous.ai, which is listed for sale via GoDaddy. My company owns Luminous.com and was curious about the asking price for the .ai domain name.
This morning, I shared that Namecheap Founder Richard Kirkendall stepped down as CEO of Namecheap following the company’s acquisition. I noticed this when he transitioned off of the @NamecheapCEO account on X and he is now using the @NamecheapCEO123 account.
Longtime Namecheap COO Hillan Klein was promoted to the role of CEO. In taking over the executive suite, Hillan also took charge of the @NamecheapCEO account on X. His first post was made this afternoon:
Last night, I noticed that Richard Kirkendall no longer had the NamecheapCEO account on X. Instead, his account handle changed to NamecheapCEO123, which I was following. I mentioned this precautionary in the event he had lost control of the account for some reason. Fortunately, the change was intentional.
In a post on X early this morning, Richard shared that he has stepped aside as Namecheap CEO. This change comes in the wake of CVC Capital Partner’s $1.5 billion acquisition of Namecheap. According to Richard, the new CEO of Namecheap is Hillan Klein, who has been the company’s Chief Operating Officer for 12 years.
The SERP.com domain name was acquired in July of this year for $210,000. This, according to the former owner of the domain name who is a longtime domain investor. SERP.com was sold via Afternic, according to an Afternic transaction activity screenshot I was sent.
Prior to the sale of SERP.com, the buyer had a price expectation of $500,000. After multiple rounds of negotiations, the buyer and seller agreed to a $210,000 sale price.
Anything.com is a legacy brand name in the domain name space. Anything.com has long owned a portfolio of exceptional domain names. Off the top of my head, I can think of Home.com, Marketing.com, Blade.com, Kitchen.com, and many other meaningful .com domain names the company has owned.
This afternoon, I saw a post on X from Alan Shiflett that highlighted a massive rebrand. A company called Anything, which has been using CreateAnything.com, acquired the Anything.com domain name. Anything is an AI-based, no-code software development company founded by Marcus Lowe. The company recently announced an $11 million round of funding. A press release was published this evening pegging the acquisition at $2 million.
Marcus shared the news about the new domain name this afternoon:
