Two years ago, I was presented with a mid six figure cash offer to buy one of my domain names. The catch was that just 10% of this would be paid immediately, and the remainder would be paid in installments over a couple of years. This was a solid offer, especially since the initial payment would not be refundable.

After considering the offer, opted to decline it because the planned usage of the domain name made me uncomfortable. Pierluigi Buccioli, an investor in gambling domain names, shared his thoughts on why he doesn’t like to offer payment plans for his gambling domain names, and his rationale is along the lines of mine:

There are a lot of great tools that can benefit domain investors. Some of these tools are made for domain investors and other tools weren’t specifically created for domain investors to use but can be extraordinarily helpful to us. One issue investors should keep in mind is that any data they input into these tools may be seen by the data providers and potentially associated parties.

I use third party tools for many things. I perform Whois lookups on domain names I am looking to buy and those I am researching. I check various metrics for domain names I own. I do research on prospective buyers for my domain names and domain names I want to buy. I have not built my own tools, so I use third party companies.

I was chatting with a business friend yesterday, and I mentioned one of the domain names I recently acquired in the context of the number of registrations with the keyword. He mentioned DotDB.com, and I generally use DomainTools for that type of search, but that is taking things off topic a bit. When I mentioned the domain name to him, he remarked that it was not resolving anywhere. I had a look and confirmed what he was saying. Yikes.