Buying Domain Names

How to Buy a Domain Registered to Domains by Proxy LLC

Domains By Proxy, LLC (DomainsByProxy.com) may be one of the most prolific domain registrants. Domains By Proxy isn’t actually the owner of most domain names registered to the entity. Domains By Proxy, LLC is the Whois privacy service operated by GoDaddy.

Customers of GoDaddy who do not want their contact information shown on a public Whois record may use Domains By Proxy as the Registrant Name for an additional fee. By using Domains by Proxy, a domain registrant’s name, email address, phone number, mailing address, and other private contact details are not shown in Whois lookups. Earlier this year, GoDaddy began offering Whois privacy by default on most new registrations and inbound domain transfers, but some people still pay to use this service.

“Meh” Domain Names Are The Toughest to Acquire

Because of the niche nature of the domain investing business, I am regularly asked by friends of friends for advice about buying domain names. I don’t do any domain consulting, but I will try to give some advice if I think I might be able to make the acquisition process a bit easier for them. Buying registered domain names is not always easy, and it’s nice to be able to help someone if I can.

Friends of friends usually find me after they’ve made an effort to buy a domain name but failed. Sometimes this happens when they can’t get in touch with the domain registrant and other times it happens when they could not close a deal. Either way, the acquisitions I am called in to help on aren’t usually as simple as buying a domain name via GoDaddy or Sedo.

3 Biggest Factors When I Evaluate Domain Names

I spend quite a bit of time evaluating domain names to buy. Domain name auctions happen around the clock every day. Tens of thousands of domain names are up for auction at any given time, and new platform listings are added daily. Continuing to improve and grow my portfolio is critical, and evaluating domain names is essential.

There are many factors I consider when buying .com domain names. Tools I use daily – like ExpiredDomains.net and Dropping.pro – have many different search categories and filter options. There are a handful of search options I value more than others. I think the three most important factors I consider are these:

Tiny Upgrades to Tiny.com

A year and a half ago, Andrew Wilkinson, Co-Founder of a company called Tiny, shared some thoughts about how he felt when someone referred to his company as “Tiny Capital,” because the company’s slightly off-brand domain name was TinyCapital.com:

You’ll Never Guess How Deel is Now Using Deel.com

Earlier this week, Jamie Zoch reported that the Deel.com domain name was acquired by a startup called Deel. Deel.com had been owned by Francois Carillo, and the startup called Deel has been using LetsDeel.com for its website.

Judging by a few Twitter comments, it looks like the acquisition of Deel.com will be well-received by the startup’s customers and prospective clients who have been mistakenly visiting Deel.com instead of the correct LetsDeal.com. This is unsurprising since people tend to add .com to the name of the website they want to visit assuming the startup has its brand match domain name.

Alex Bouaziz, CEO & Co-Founder of Deel, excitedly mentioned Deel.com on Twitter a short while ago, and the company’s @Deel Twitter account retweeted:

Dharmesh Shah Comments on His $100k Acquisition

Sedo released its weekly domain name sales report yesterday, and the $100,000 sale of WordPlay.com was the largest public sale of the week on the platform. HubSpot CTO and Co-Founder Dharmesh Shah was the buyer of WordPlay.com.

I follow Dharmesh on Twitter, and like me, he is a big fan of the Wordle word guessing game that was recently acquired by the New York Times. Yesterday evening, I clicked one of his personalized Dharme.sh shortened url links related to Wordle, and I ended up on WordPlay.com. I recalled seeing the domain name on Sedo’s weekly sales list this morning and realized he was the buyer.

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