Marriott has been advertising its new loyalty and rewards program called Bonvoy, which was created to merge Marriott’s loyalty program with Starwood’s loyalty program following its acquisition of Starwood. The call to action in the television commercial I have seen numerous times is “Join at Marriott.com.” Based on a Whois changed I noticed yesterday, it is possible that the primary domain name for Bonvoy is going to change in the near future.
Bonvoy.com Acquired via CSC
Ammar Kubba Shares Rationale Behind 5 Figure .IO Purchase
On Saturday evening, Ammar Kubba shared a screenshot of his mobile phone home screen with an email notification from American Express Platinum showing a purchase of $18,888 at Park.io. In his tweet, Ammar asked people to guess what he just bought. What was most surprising to me wasn’t that Ammar spent nearly $20k on a .IO domain name, but that Ammar doesn’t use an AmEx Centurion card:
Looks Like Amazon Acquired Streaming.com and Streaming.net
The streaming battle is on! It looks like Amazon acquired the Streaming.com and Streaming.net domain names within the last few days. Streaming.com and Streaming.net both forward to PrimeVideo.com, a landing page directing people to click through to Amazon.com. Both of these domain names are now registered to DNStination Inc., the Whois privacy proxy service for MarkMonitor. Because of Whois privacy, it is not possible to independently confirm that Amazon acquired the domain names, but that seems to be the case.
Watch Out for the Upsells
No matter what domain registrar you use, it always seems like they are trying to upsell their customers. Whether I am transferring a domain name to a different registrar or I am hand registering a domain name, I almost always see some sort of upsell opportunity. Annoyingly, many of these upsells seem to be added automatically, and I need to remove them before making my purchase.
Here are a few of the upsells I generally avoid:
How I “Discover” Domain Names at Auction
There’s a thread on NamePros asking people how to get people to view specific private domain auctions. I am an active bidder at NameJet, GoDaddy Auctions, and to a lesser degree, DropCatch.com. I thought I would share how I find domain names to bid on just about every day. I don’t know if it will be helpful to people trying to sell via auction, but perhaps someone will find it interesting.
Stadia.com Acquired Before Google Announcement (Updated)
I saw a tweet from Techmeme with news about Google’s new game stream service called Stadia, which made me wonder if Google had acquired the brand match Stadia.com domain name in advance of the news:
Google announces Stadia, its game streaming service for Chrome, Android, and TVs (@technacity / 9to5Google)https://t.co/XqPOcyX4M1https://t.co/ruE3t1zCqc
— Techmeme (@Techmeme) March 19, 2019
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