Buying Domain Names

In my morning DomainTools Registrant Monitor alert email I received yesterday morning, I saw a few domain name registrations from Amazon that caught my attention. The domain names that Amazon recently registered are related to business relief and small business relief. My guess is that the domain name registrations are related to an Amazon program created to help small business owners whose businesses are impacted by the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak.

Several days ago, Amazon’s blog announced a program to assist local small business owners. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

At NamesCon last week, I had a chance to briefly speak with Andy Booth. I have known and done a modest amount of business with Andy and his brother James Booth, and I was sorry I did not have much time to speak with them. One topic Andy and I chatted about was if the value of a domain name changes (at least on a psychological level) when the domain name is acquired by a domain investor from a larger company. Andy thought it would be neat to spark a discussion about the topic, and we are both eager to see what readers think.

In December of 2019, I wrote about Mercury acquiring its brand match Mercury.com domain name. The company had been operating on the Mercury.CO domain name, but it had anticipated moving to the Mercury.com domain name at some point in the future. That migration has happened, and the company can now be found by visiting Mercury.com.

Notably, Mercury founder Immad Akhund shared how the company was able to acquire its brand match domain name. In a series of tweets, which I have posted chronologically below, Immad shared details of how it acquired Mercury.com from HP. Although he did not share the price of the domain name, I am sure it was very expensive. I think the eighth and final tweet explains why acquiring Mercury.com was so crucial for the banking brand: