Confusing Company Name is Rebranded as Monday.com

Elliot Silver
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19

In an article published this morning, Business Insider wrote that “The Israeli project management startup Dapulse is changing its name after three years of people not understanding what its name means.” The company will now be called Monday.

A DomainTools historical Whois search shows that the domain name appears to have changed hands in early June of 2016. I do not see any public sale report on NameBio, so I am unsure of the purchase price of Monday.com.

The company explained why it rebranded as Monday.com in a YouTube video I embedded below:

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21 Inc Wisely Rebrands as Earn.com

Elliot Silver
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5

When I think about the branding of 21 Inc. (aka 21.co) without any knowledge of the company, the only thing that really comes to mind is blackjack. 21.co is arguably a nice, short .CO domain name, but 21 doesn’t really say much about its brand. The company appears to have solved this brand issue by rebranding as Earn.com, according to an internal news article on its website.

Not only is Earn.com a short and meaningful domain name, it easily explains what the company does. Here’s how the company explained its rebranding:

“Our product is unchanged: you still earn digital currency for replying to emails and completing tasks, and you can still earn tokens for signing up for our token launch later this year. But we think “Earn.com” gets that concept across more quickly than “21.co”, especially to folks who are new to digital currency.”

I agree with their rationale. Even without much insight into its business model, I think the new branding resonates with what the company’s goal is. People presumably sign up to earn extra money for themselves or for charity, and Earn is the perfect branding for what they do.

From what I can see, it looks like the Earn.com domain name was acquired

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What is the Most Valuable Professional Sports Team Domain Name?

Elliot Silver
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18

The majority of professional sports teams own their exact match team .com domain names. In fact, of the 123 professional sports teams in the four major US sports leagues (NBA, MLB, NFL, and NHL), 76 of them own their nickname .com domain name (61.7%).

I thought it would be fun to have a look at exact match team .com domain names to see which I think is the most valuable domain name. When it comes to “value,” I am strictly thinking about the generic nature of the domain name rather than the relation to the specific team or its branding strength. For instance, I think a domain name like Wild.com (owned by the NHL and Minnesota Wild) is a more valuable domain name than RedSox.com (owned by the Boston Red Sox).

Using the information from the article about sports team domain names I published yesterdat morning, I narrowed it down to my top 5 domain names. The list is not scientific by any stretch, and it is reflective of my personal opinion about valuation. Your list would likely be different than mine. Interestingly, if someone tried to use an automated tool like Estibot to figure out the values, that tool takes into account many aspects related to the actual team (such as Google references), and that would throw off the intrinsic value.

In my opinion, here are the top 5 most valuable domain names (in no particular order) owned by a sports team:

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US Professional Sports Team Domain Names (Updated)

Elliot Silver
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13

In mid-2009, I wrote about the exact match team .com domain names owned by the teams or leagues in the 4 major US sports leagues (MLB, NFL, NBA, and NHL). At that time, NBA teams owned 76.7% of the EMD team domain names, MLB teams owned 73.3% of the EMD team domain names, NFL teams owned 53.1% of the EMD team domain names, and NHL teams owned 26.7% of the EMD team domain names.

This morning, I had another look at the team and league domain names to see how much this percentage changed over the past 8 years, and here is what I found:

Percentage of teams that own their .com team name:
NBA: 76.7%
MLB: 90%
NFL: 56.3%
NHL: 25.8%

The league that had the greatest increase in exact match team nickname .com domain names was

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Cover Upgrades to Cover.com

Elliot Silver
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1

Cover is a free app that tracks insurance rates and allows people to “cover” (aka get coverage for) items like cars, homes, pets, jewelry and electronics after taking a photo of the item using their phone. Cover uses CoverInsurance.com for its website, although the company has also been using UseCover.com to forward to CoverInsurance.com. Smartly, it looks like the company secured the Cover.com domain name.

This morning, I noticed a Whois change on Cover.com. The domain name was previously owned by Digimedia, and it is now privately registered. When I visited Cover.com, it forwarded me to CoverInsurance.com. Because Digimedia doesn’t generally comment about its deals, I am not certain if the insurance app acquired the domain name, and if the company did, I couldn’t speculate about how much the domain name cost with any certainty. I could see this domain name selling for mid six figures though.

Cover was founded in 2014, and it looks like the app is

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Mix Launches on Mix.com

Elliot Silver
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4

TechCrunch has an article about a startup called Mix. Smartly, Mix can be found on the exact match Mix.com domain name.

It looks like the domain name has been registered under privacy since early 2015 (according to DomainTools), so I am not sure when the domain name changed hands. NameBio does not have any public sales records for Mix.com, and I do not see any domain brokerage listings in my email archives for Mix.com. My guess is that Mix.com is likely worth mid to high 6 figures and possibly 7 figures depending on the seller’s desire to sell along with the buyer’s need for this domain name. Whatever it cost, having the exact match domain name should be helpful to the startup.

One thing that caught my attention in the TechCrunch article is that the founder of the company, Garrett Camp, has quite a bit of experience with startup businesses:

“Camp, who is the founder of companies like Uber and, previously, StumbleUpon, said that he has spent his life building products that he actually wants in his life.”

What this shows me is that

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