Despite All the Promotion, Amazon Doesn’t Own Prime.com

Elliot Silver
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9

Yesterday was dubbed “Prime Day” at Amazon. According to Amazon, “Prime Day is a one-day only global shopping event exclusively for Prime members.” There were a ton of news stories devoted to Amazon and its Prime Day deals all day. From my perspective, Amazon seems to be building a brand around its “Prime” membership. Of note, Amazon does not own the exact match Prime.com domain name.

If you visit Prime.com, you can see that it is a standard Uniregistry parked page with pay per click links. There is a message at the top of the page that says “This domain has recently been listed for sale Click here to inquire,” and clicking the link takes the visitor to a standard Uniregistry inquiry form. The domain name has been registered under private Whois for many years.

Prime.com has been up for sale before. In 2011, Prime.com was listed for sale in the Moniker / SnapNames year end auction. At that time, the domain name had a reserve price range of between $1 – $5 million. I searched through my email archive, and I see the domain name had been brokered in recent years. I looked at NameBio, and it does not look like the domain name sold during the Moniker auction, and I do not see any other public sale records.

My wife and I have a Prime membership. Generally when buying something on Amazon, I will tick off the “Prime” box on the search menu so that I only see items that are available for the free shipping. I think Prime is a great idea, and it definitely contributes to the regular Amazon shopping that my wife and I do.

It is somewhat surprising that

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Google Announces Dandelion, Which Uses Dandelion.CO

Elliot Silver
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5

Google’s parent company Alphabet runs a division called X. For X, the “mission is to invent and launch “moonshot” technologies that we hope could someday make the world a radically better place.”  In an announcement made on its X.company blog, the launch of Dandelion was announced. According to the blog post, “Dandelion will offer geothermal heating and cooling systems to homeowners, starting in the northeastern United States.”

From a domain name perspective, the announcement is interesting. Dandelion is using the Dandelion.CO domain name instead of a .com domain name. Dandelion.com is registered to someone in New York City, and it is unrelated to X’s Dandelion.

NameBio shows that Dandelion.CO last sold in 2013

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3 Great Domain Names That Were Owned by Jeff Bezos

Elliot Silver
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5

I saw a neat article on Reader’s Digest that discussed a few of the domain names that were originally registered by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. The article discussed how Bezos almost called Amazon “Relentless” and he bought the matching domain name, Relentless.com. According to the article, Bezos also considered using Awake.com and Browse.com.

As you might expect, the domain names mentioned in the Reader’s Digest article are all currently owned by Amazon. I did a Whois History search at DomainTools, and it looks like those domain names have been registered to Amazon for nearly two decades. Unfortunately, this means that people can’t find Mr. Bezos’ personal email address, which may have been possible had ownership records gone back further.

I think we can all agree that the Amazon branding has

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CNBC Article Illustrates Positive Aspect of Dictionary .com

Elliot Silver
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5

Mike Berkens shared a link to a CNBC article on Twitter about a company called Blockchain that just raised $40 million in funding. I think the article is a good illustration about why it is important for a business that uses a descriptive brand name to operate on the exact match  .com domain name.

While reading the article on my iPhone, I noticed that there was no url for the startup referenced or embedded. I know the company is called Blockchain, and I also know they are in the blockchain / cryptocurrency business. There are quite a few companies with Blockchain in their branding.

I (correctly) assumed the company operates on Blockchain.com, so I was easily able to navigate to the website to learn more about them. This is the positive aspect of a

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Squeeze Upgrades to Squeeze.com

Elliot Silver
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5

SqueezeYesterday morning, I noticed a Whois registrant change for the valuable Squeeze.com domain name. Because the domain name had been owned by Future Media Architects, I reached out to Uniregistry’s Vice President of Sales Jeff Gabriel, as Uniregistry typically acts as the domain broker on behalf of FMA. Unfortunately, Jeff could not provide details about the sale, but I believe Uniregistry was the broker.

When I visited Squeeze.com yesterday and clicked on the “Learn more” link, I was taken to a page within the SqueezeApp.com website. The company refers to itself simply as Squeeze throughout its website, so the acquisition of Squeeze.com represents a huge domain name upgrade. According to its Twitter profile, Squeeze is a FinTech app, and the website says it will be launching this Summer.

I reached out to Elias Janetis, CEO of Squeeze, to ask him about the acquisition. Although he couldn’t tell me the exact purchase price of the domain name, he did tell me that he

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Live With Kelly & Ryan Domain Registered A Year Ago

Elliot Silver
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0

For many years, there was a morning talk show called Live! with Regis and Kathie Lee. When Kathie Lee left the show, Kelly Ripa became Regis Philbin’s co-host, and the show’s name was changed to Live! with Regis and Kelly. After Regis retired, Kelly’s co-host became former NFL player Michael Strahan, and the show was called Live! with Kelly and Michael. Last year, Michael Strahan left the show, and a variety of people have filled in as co-host for short periods of time.

For quite some time, there had been some speculation about who would be  Kelly Ripa’s new permanent co-host. The speculation played out a bit on social media over the last few days as it seemed like there was an announcement coming soon:

One of the headlines in the news today is that the new co-host of the Live! show has been selected. The new co-host is

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