143.com is pending auction at NameJet, and it will enter the auction phase in a couple of hours. The current high bid is $60,000, but the reserve price has not yet been met. There are 239 bids placed as of the time of publication.
The 143.com domain name is owned by Finlead, a domain investment firm based in Switzerland. The company also owns other liquid domain name assets such as EG.com, EO.com, Soft.com, Season.com, and Leading.com.
I checked NameBio, and I do not see any public sales records for 143.com. Based on historical Whois records from DomainTools, it looks like Finlead acquired the domain name in May of this year for an undisclosed price.
As you likely know, numeric domain names have been hot for the last couple of years. Michael Berkens’ company sold 345.com for $800,000 earlier this year, and Rick Schwartz reportedly just sold a NNN.com domain name “for an amount which will land him as the 2nd highest reported sale of 2015.” Many other NNN.com domain name have changed hands privately for large sums of money.
Finlead CEO Daniel Bruderer commented to me about why the company chose NameJet as the venue to auction 143.com:
“We chose Namejet because we have a high opinion of them. They seem to be a small dedicated team, fast responding with a great ability to market high profile names. We also believe that they have a large group of chinese bidders on their platform which is very important to us. Our experience – both as buyer and seller – could not be better.”
In a press release issued by NameJet, the company identified a couple of reasons for why this domain name is special:
“143.com is special for a number of reasons. Namely, the number 143 was extremely popular as a pager code for “I Love You”, because of the number of letters in each word. Although pagers are no longer widely-used, the number still retains that identity. Additionally, based on Benford’s Law (the First-Digit Law), numbers beginning with 1 occur with more probability. This adds value to the domain in that it would likely relate to a wider range of numbers that would be significant to potential buyers and end-users.”
Once the auction concludes and the domain name sells (if it sells), I will share additional information that I learn.
