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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Startups Choosing Longer .coms Over Alternatives

Elliot Silver
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13

Chris Sheridan, Head of Strategic Partner Sales at Weebly, shared a link to a TechCrunch article covering startup branding:

The article discussed quite a few funded startups and their brand name choices. Brands mentioned in the article include Waldo, Morty, Pie Insurance, Carrot Fertility, Lemonade, Oscar, Herb, Bud, Radish, Purple Squirrel, and quite a few other companies with interesting (or even confusing) brand names.

I was interested in the brand name choices, but I was particularly interested in the domain names the companies chose for their websites. The article

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Neustar Webinar About Launching .Neustar TLD

Elliot Silver
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1

Neustar is obviously a big proponent of the new gTLD domain name extensions. Last year, the company launched its .Neustar brand TLD, and its website can now be found at Home.Neustar. In an effort to promote .Brand extensions, the company is hosting a free webinar to share some of the things the company learned when it launched its own extension.

Here are some of the topics the company intends to cover in the webinar, as shared by them:

What technical and operational steps went into our launch
How we built a communications plan for stakeholders around the change
Where we see some of the biggest opportunities and challenges of a .brand transition

There is quite a bit of technical

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