Super Bowl Sunday is one of my favorite days of the year. Either my team (New England Patriots), is playing in the Super Bowl, or I am excited to hang out with friends and watch the commercials. Whatever the case is, the Super Bowl is usually played right in the middle of the Winter. This means that the days are starting to get longer and I can begin looking forward to the Spring. I love the Winter in Boston, but I am very happy when it is over.
This evening, Tom Brady will be playing to win his fifth Super Bowl. I thought I would share 5 thoughts and updates prior to the big game tonight. You are welcome to share some of your thoughts as well.
- It looks like two domain industry companies have Super Bowl commercials – GoDaddy and SquareSpace. Interestingly, only one commercial makes mention of domain names, and it’s not GoDaddy’s Super Bowl commercial. It will be interesting to see the reaction to John Malkovich’s Square Space SB commercial, which depicts him negotiating with someone who is seemingly cybersquatting. For the record though, it looks like he has controlled his domain name for many years, according to DomainTools’ Whois History tool.
- Last week, I bought a small group of domain names in a private acquisition. Within 5 minutes of changing the nameservers, and even before I had a chance to edit the “for sale” message at the top to redirect to my Embrace.com landing page, I had an inquiry for one of the names. The prospective buyer ended up making a 4 figure offer but it wasn’t enough to close a deal. I couldn’t believe how quickly it happened, and it goes to show that timing is everything. You can own a domain name for 10 years and not get a single offer, but within a day of selling it, a qualified buyer makes an offer. I am sure I’ve been on the other side many times.
- I wonder how many inquiries Falcons.com has received over the last several weeks. Like Cowboys.com, Falcons.com is not owned by the NFL team named after an order of birds. Falcons.com is owned by Future Media Architects.
- The NamesCon extended auction on NameJet ends later on this week. The Bar.com package has a bid of $2.1 million but has not hit its reserve price yet. The auction with the highest bid that has its reserve met is Realest.com at $4,300. There are quite a few other names with higher bids but none of those have met their reserve prices yet.
- In 2013, Escrow.com began accepting Euros for payment. It looks like the Euro option has disappeared from Escrow.com, and I am unsure why. I reached out to Escrow.com GM Jackson Ellsegood to ask about this and will provide an update when I hear back.
Congrats, Elliot!
You’ve got a win.
Great article, Elliot. Thank your for sharing.
Lets see if I understand this correctly.
Basically, the John Malkovich in the commercial is ‘pissed’ because someone else named John Malkovich owns johnmalkovich com . And, he thinks he is more important than the domain owner. They spent $ 5 mil to make this point?
If I was a client of SquareSpace, I would look into why I am overpaying for website services. If the company can waste $ 5 mil on this misleading commercial.