I am sure that most people in the domain investment space read about the Sumo.com acquisition. Noah Kagan, the founder of the company, spoke about the importance of the Sumo.com domain name on Domain Sherpa and in an article he wrote on Entrepreneur.com.
I was looking through the NamesCon auction on NameJet, and I want to share my thoughts on 10 companies (or people) that could benefit from buying 10 domain names at auction, notwithstanding the reserve prices. Most of these domain names don’t match the brand name, but I either instantly thought of the company when seeing the domain name or I saw their major industry presence when Googling the keyword.
10 domain names and the company that would benefit from owning it:
- SW.com – Southwest Airlines
- OL.com – Olympique Lyonnais (professional soccer/football team)
- Leads.com – Salesforce
- Raspberries.com – Driscoll’s
- HomeShow.com – New York Home Fashions Market
- WatchMaker.com – Rolex
- GunOwner.com – NRA
- Charlize.com – Charlize Theron
- NOBE.com – NOBE Aloe Vera
- RoadSigns.com – Brimar Industries
There is a lot more than goes into a domain name acquisition. Companies need to have the funds to acquire the domain name (unless they use a domain funding company like Domain Capital) and they also need to have the desire. It is very possible that I am looking at this the wrong way and the domain names and companies I identified above might not be a good fit. In fact, Domain Gang shared some thoughts on why buying Sumo.com was not a good idea.
Although the prices are high on some of the domain names listed above, I think they could be beneficial. The auction ends in a few hours.
Crazy that after so many years a lot of big companies and marketing people still don’t get it. Companies that have tens of millions in advertising budgets year after year but they somehow can’t be convinced to invest a tiny sum – compared to their overall budget – in a perfect domain name that really could help their business grow. When it comes to M&A or taking over a competitor the pockets are always deep and every deal can be funded with debt if needed. But a no brainer like a domain… Offering $10k max and then threat you with lawyers who charge 3 grand a day. Ridiculous. Over $500 billion are spend in advertising every year yet we see only 4 maybe 5 million dollar domain sales each year. Something’s wrong.
@Richard – Good points. You probably meant 4-5 million in sales are being reported monthly (just the top 100 domain sales reported last year totaled more than 25 million).
Namejet still seems to report $500k to 2 million+ monthly in sales. GoDaddy/Afternic and Sedo used to publish $1 million+ (each) in domain sales each week. GoDaddy/Afternic stopped about 2 years ago. Sedo stopped reporting transactions under $2k at the end of 2015 which probably cut their reported sales volume in half. BuyDomains used to report a large amount but stopped at the end of 2010 I believe.
Reporting is definitely way down, but with what I’m seeing I’d guess that sales volume and prices, on average, have been steadily increasing over the last few years.
No I meant the number of domains that are sold (and reported) over $1m each year is usually not more than 4-5.
Makes sense, my mistake. 🙂
“Crazy that after so many years a lot of big companies and marketing people still don’t get it. ”
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Don’t get what? If Brimar Industries buys roadsigns.com how will they benefit from that? It would likely be a redirect to their main site and isn’t like to have much traffic. I think it is domainers who don’t get it a lot of the time expecting people to be queuing up and when they don’t they blame those non existent buyers.
The market is what it is.
I’ve sold plenty of names to end user buyers who didn’t necessarily *need* them. Some bought them opportunistically for a chance to get another site indexed in Google, for a redirect to an existing site, to prevent a competitor from using it to compete with them, or for other unknown reasons.
Most companies I listed don’t *need* these domain names but would benefit in some way by owning them.
I’m not doubting it Eilliot, lots of companies buy domains that they don’t really need it. But it is a waste of time to say companies “Don’t get it” just because they won’t buy our inventory. It is blaming the customer, or blaming the customers who don’t even exist.
If companies don’t feel they need to own a particular name that is our problem, we don’t get it.
Excellent point!!!
The listed names are not overpriced when compared with the marketing budgets of those companies and entities that will benefit from owning them.
SalesForce.com would never want to be known as a “lead ” company. They’re one of the largest cloud based platform companies in the world but it’s a great name.
BodyPartinsurance.com could be owned by Lloyd’s of London for example, they could benefit from that address.