One thing you will notice on yesterday’s report about professional sports team domain names is that the Dallas Cowboys, one of the most valuable sports franchises in the world, does not own Cowboys.com. For those who may be new to the domain name industry, there is a pretty wild story about why the franchise doesn’t own Cowboys.com today.

10 years ago this month, the Dallas Cowboys thought they purchased Cowboys.com at a Moniker live domain name auction for $275. After the auction, it was reported that the Dallas Cowboys “misunderstood what the pricing system was” because their bid was actually for $275,000. As a result of this confusion, the Dallas Cowboys retracted their bid and did not purchase the domain name.

Making the story all the more interesting, the domain name ended up selling for $370,000 in the silent auction that followed the live auction. Cowboys.com was purchased by a group of investors. As I recall, some people in that initial investment group were privately (and profitably) selling ownership shares to other investors who wanted to participate, although that is based on my own recollection. YouTube has a couple of videos of interviews Darren Cleveland did with Eric Rice and Rick Schwartz shortly after the group won the auction:

Since that time, Cowboys.com has had a bit of an interesting history. For some period of time a few years ago, Cowboys.com was used as a dating website. That got quite a bit

Cowboys.com is now a dating website, and a number of sports and mainstream news publications have picked up on the news. Some people have speculated that the new website may be a ploy to get the NFL Dallas Cowboys to buy Cowboys.com. In the words of one commenter, “I just can’t help but feel this is a ploy to shock the Dallas Cowboys into action. If so very well played.”

The Cowboys.com ownership group once put the domain name up for sale via Sedo, but a deal it never materialized. I would not be surprised if the group would be willing to sell the domain name now for the right price.

That said, I am wondering if you think the Dallas Cowboys will ever purchase the Cowboys.com domain name. My guess would be that many people type in Cowboys.com looking for information about the Dallas Cowboys to buy tickets, memorabilia, and clothing. Most will likely go to Google or directly navigate to the correct site, but there may be some traffic loss by not owning the brand.

So… do you think the Dallas Cowboys will ever buy Cowboys.com? Answer in the poll below.

I came across a domain name yesterday afternoon, and a change to its prior landing page caught my attention. It looks like domain names utilizing the MarkUpgrade domain brokerage landing page have added a Stand with Israel logo along with a link to the American Friends of Magen David Adom website. Magen David Adom is Israel’s national emergency medical, disaster, ambulance and blood bank service.

I think this is notable because of the extensive reach of the domain names utilizing the MarkUpgrade landing page. For instance, ten high profile domain names that I found that use this landing page include: