Domain Names Are Relatively Cheap

Elliot Silver
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5

I read an Inc. article about a company called Swag, which uses the exact match Swag.com for its domain name. What grabbed my attention beyond the killer domain name was how they reportedly got the domain name:

“They also observed that no one owned the domain name swag.com, so they quickly grabbed it.”

This stood out to me, and a couple of quick searches proved this to be incorrect (I imagine it is misunderstanding). The Swag.com domain name is registered privately, but Whois records show that it was created in 1995 and owned by someone else for quite some time. A search of my Gmail shows that this domain name had been brokered before – Swag.com was listed for sale for $275,000 in September of 2015 in the Media Options newsletter. In fact, in an interview 4.cn did with Andrew Rosener, he confirmed that his company brokered the sale of Swag.com.

That really is neither here nor there, but seeing Swag.com marketed for sale at $275,000 really emphasizes how relatively inexpensive domain names are.

Just about every business has substantial startup costs. Want to start a local restaurant? A survey on

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Oscar Health Should Buy Oscar.com

Elliot Silver
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11

According to a news report on CNBC, a health insurance company called Oscar Health raised a $165 million round of funding from the likes of Alphabet, Founders Fund, and other firms. The company is now reportedly valued at $3.2 billion with over $725 million in total funding (per Crunchbase).

Unfortunately for Oscar, the company uses the less than ideal HiOscar.com domain name for its website. This isn’t great for a major health insurance company like this because of the potential for confusion. Yes, I think it is better than an alternative extension, but HiOscar.com could certainly be confusing to customers and prospects. Imagine being a customer and getting an email with a link to HiOscar.com. I think it could raise more red flags than the exact brand match Oscar.com domain name would raise.

So who owns the Oscar.com domain name? The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences owns the domain name. The organization uses it for it’s Oscar Awards, more commonly known as the Oscars. Oscar.com forwards to the Oscars landing page, Oscar.go.com. As you can see, this is a subdomain of the ABC / Disney Go.com website. The Academy also owns the better version for its Awards, Oscars.com, which forwards to the same website. Fortunately, there likely wouldn’t be confusion for Oscar Health customers who accidentally type-in Oscar.com, but I think the exact match .com domain name appears more trustworthy.

If I were advising Oscar, I would urge them to enter a negotiation with The Academy to try

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Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com May Be for Sale

Elliot Silver
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15

According to an article in the Wall St. Journal, IAC may be looking to sell two of its websites, which use exceptional domain names. Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com may both be for sale:

Here’s an excerpt from yesterday’s WSJ article:

“Dictionary.com is for sale—you can look it up.

The online definition resource is being put on the block by Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp , IAC -1.84% the company said.

IAC said it has hired investment bank Allen & Co. to explore a sale after two parties separately approached the company expressing interest in a possible acquisition of the property and its sister site, Thesaurus.com.”

Obviously this would be far more than a domain name sale. Both Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com are well developed and have active websites. From the domain name point of view, both of these properties use exceptional exact match domain names. Not only does the branding tell visitors exactly what they can expect to find on each of these websites, but they are also strong brand names.

I regularly encounter resistance from people who declare that domain names don’t matter as much anymore as they once did. While I would agree with the sentiment on long tail keyword domain names, I still strongly believe that short, relevant .com domain names still hold tremendous value. They can be used in the brandable sense (like Apple.com or Amazon.com) or in the literal sense like Dictionary.com or Thesaurus.com.

We’ll see if these two domain names move in the nearterm. If they do, perhaps we will see how much the buyer values the domain name vs. the underlying business in a subsequent SEC filing from the publicly traded IAC.

Philips Shows How to a Rebrand with Signify

Elliot Silver
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1

Philips Lighting, an entity operated by the Philips company, is rebranding. According to the news release published late last week, “Philips Lighting (Euronext: LIGHT), the world leader in lighting, today announced its intention to change its name from Philips Lighting to Signify..” The main company, Philips, will continue operating under its longstanding brand name.

Smartly, the company acquired the exact match .com domain name, Signify.com. From what I can see using DomainTools’ Whois history tool, it looks like the Signify.com domain name was acquired late last year. A historical Whois record from October 31, 2017 shows that the domain name was registered to Marksmen, Inc., a company that helps brands covertly acquire domain names from third parties. Prior to that, Signify.com was owned by a company called Signify Solutions Limited.

Because Signify.com was

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Here Are Some of Amazon’s Ring Domain Names

Elliot Silver
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4

Geekwire announced that Amazon was set to acquire Ring, in a deal valued at $1 billion. Ring is an innovative company, and of course, it operates on the high value Ring.com domain name. If you don’t know about how Ring acquired Ring.com, you will want to read more about it on NamePros, including a 2015 interview with the company’s founder, Jamie Siminoff.

Following the release of the news, Amazon purchased/registered quite a few Ring related domain names. Not only was it smart to register these domain names, but it was even smarter to do it on the day the news broke to avoid tipping off others about the pending acquisition.

One thing of note is that the AmazonRing.com domain name was purchased quite a long time ago. In fact, AmazonRing.com was first registered in 2005, many years before DoorBot (the original brand name of Ring) was founded in 2012. It looks like Amazon has owned that domain name since at least 2007, and the company may have been the first registrant.

Here is an assortment of the domain names Amazon registered since news of the Ring acquisition broke (did not include many variations of ccTLD or alternative extensions):

  • amazon-ring.com
  • amazonring.audio
  • amazonring.ca
  • amazonring.cloud
  • amazonring.camera
  • amazonring.net
  • amazonring.solutions
  • amazonring.support
  • amazonringapp.com
  • amazonringcam.com
  • amazonringcams.com
  • amazonringcloud.cam
  • amazonringsecurity.com
  • ring-amazon.com
  • ring.cam
  • ring.house
  • ring.moi
  • ring.webcam
  • ringamazon.com
  • ringcloudcam.com

One thing to note is that Ring already owns its own portfolio of Ring-related domain names, such as RingDoorBell.com, Ring.net, and Ring.CO. I imagine Amazon decided to defensively purchase many of the available Ring-related domain names in alternative extensions. This is smart because it is obviously far less expensive to hand register these domain names rather than try to chase down potential cybersquatters in the future.

On a similar but separate note, I was

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Indigo.com Changes Hands

Elliot Silver
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7

One of my favorite color .com domain names appears to have changed hands. Indigo.com, which has been owned and used by a company called Indigo Instruments for many years, is now forwarding to IndigoInstruments.com.  The current Whois record shows that the domain name is now registered to someone affiliated with another company called Indigo, described as “Canada’s largest book, gift and specialty toy retailer.”

I reached out to the current registrant as well as the former registrant to ask if they could share details about the registrant change, and neither party replied to me to confirm that Indigo.com was sold.

When you visit Indigo.com and land on IndigoInstruments.com, there is a message noting the domain name change. On the page with more information about the domain name change, it states, “We have changed our domain. “INDIGO.COM” has moved to “INDIGOINSTRUMENTS.COM” SAME NAME – DIFFERENT DOMAIN.” Smartly, it looks like Indigo Instruments has owned the longer IndigoInstruments.com domain name since 1999. This likely made the domain name shift a bit easier and less costly for them. Whether the company bought this domain name for defensive reasons or in anticipation of a future sale of Indigo.com, it was wise and showed great foresight.

The company that appears

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