Gradient.com Bought by Founder of Google’s Gradient Ventures

Elliot Silver
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5

The Gradient.com domain name was sold in an expiry auction at GoDaddy Auctions last week. GoDaddy Aftermarket VP Paul Nicks told me that the $125,001 sale of Gradient.com set a GoDaddy Auctions record for the largest sale on its auction platform.

This morning, the Whois record updated, and the new registrant is listed as Anna Patterson. Although there is no organization listed in the Whois record, a Google search showed me that Patterson is the Founder and Managing Partner at Gradient Ventures. According to Crunchbase, “Gradient Ventures is Google’s new AI-focused venture fund – investing in and connecting early stage startups with Google’s resources, innovation, and technical leadership in artificial intelligence.” Gradient Ventures was founded earlier this year. I presume the domain name acquisition was related on behalf of the venture fund, despite the Whois record bearing Patterson’s name.

After the auction closed, some people expressed doubt about whether or not the sale would close. Because of the way GoDaddy Auctions works, domain registrants have some additional time to

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NameJet Now Tells You if Auctions Are Expiry or Private Lister

Elliot Silver
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3

NameJet made a step towards more transparency in the last day or so when it introduced a new field on auctions called “Domain Type.” From what I can see, there appear to be three options: Expiry, Direct Lister, and Pending Delete. These fields are visible when an auction is in pre-release status as well as when an auction is live.

I think this is helpful and makes auctions more transparent. Before NameJet added this field, bidders would only know if an auction was via direct lister if the auction was public, if it had a reserve price, or by performing a Whois search and possibly using the Whois history tool at DomainTools. This will make it more clear from the outset.

I have been bidding much less on

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GoDaddy Changes Domain Name Expiry Process

Elliot Silver
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31

I want to share an email from my GoDaddy account representative about a change to the domain name expiry process. I believe this is going to have an impact on the auction process as well, and this should be good news for people who have called for changes at GoDaddy Auctions.

The renewal timeline will shift from 42 days to 30 days. From my perspective, it looks like this means that a domain name that is won at auction will no longer be permitted to be renewed by the former registrant. The email I received did not mention anything about the impact on auctions, so that is my interpretation of the news.

Here’s the email I received a moment ago:

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Gradient.com Ends at $125,001 on GoDaddy Auctions

Elliot Silver
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11

I was following the Gradient.com auction on GoDaddy Auctions for the last few days, and the domain name sold for $125,001 yesterday. Because Gradient.com was an expired domain name, the domain registrant has several days to renew the domain name before the winning bidder will be able to close on the domain name and take possession of it.

I reached out to GoDaddy Aftermarket VP Paul Nicks about the auction, and he told me “this is the highest priced expired domain on our platform.” If the sale closes, it would rank as the 34th largest public domain name sale of the year in the DNJournal year to date sale report. On NameBio, you can see a list of the largest domain name sales via GoDaddy Auctions and GoDaddy’s domain buy service.

For many years, Gradient.com has been owned by a company called Gradient Resources. It is unclear why the company let the domain name expire. Because this name

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NameJet Addresses Missing Public Auction History

Elliot Silver
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4

Someone included me in a tweet me this morning mentioning that some closed auctions were missing their bid history at NameJet. This missing data was also discussed in a NamePros thread this morning as well, so the issue was not isolated to one account. I went into my Auctions Report tab at NameJet, and I confirmed that the bid history for some of my auctions was missing. For example, when I clicked on the auction report for a closed public auction I had back ordered I saw the following:

I reached out to NameJet GM Jonathan Tenenbaum to see what was happening, and he followed up

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NamesCon Auction Details and Submission Info

Elliot Silver
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6

With the NamesCon 2018 conference a few months away, the domain name auction is starting to take shape. Monte Cahn from Right of the Dot is helping to organize the auction event, and he shared some details about the auction as well as some information about submitting domain names to be sold via auction.

Monte shared these details about the types of domain names that are being sought out for the auction:

“I am looking for the best super premium .com names – meaning key words, dictionary terms in proper tense, N, NN, NNN, L, LL, LLL, etc. These will be at no and low reserve to drive as much bidding competition and bidding excitement as possible.

Although there will be some new TLDs, we will not get most of those from submitters, some will come from the registries and some from registrants but we will not allow any names with premium priced renewals or crazy tiered pricing, etc. But point is, that I am not looking for new TLDs from registrants yet for the auction – just super premium .com names for now.”

The auction will be run using NameJet, and the live auction will be held on

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