MutualFunds.com & MutualFund.com Acquired by Paul Rubillo

Elliot Silver
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The MutualFunds.com domain name was the main attraction in the innagural Heritage Auctions (HA) domain auction held at the end of last year. Although MutualFunds.com was not sold during the live segment of the auction, HA’s Aron Meystedt announced that a deal had been reached after the close of the auction, and the domain name was sold in private for an undisclosed amount of money. MutualFunds.com had been owned by Internet entrepreneur Mark Ostrofsky, and it originally had a reserve price of $1 million.

I recently learned who the buyer of MutualFunds.com was, and I also learned the company acquired the singular MutualFund.com in a separate private transaction consummated around the same time. The acquirer is Paul Rubillo, founder of Dividend.com, and he teamed up with a company called Mitre Media on these two domain name acquisitions. According to Rubillo, the purchase prices are both private, but suffice to say the total spent was seven figures. He did tell me that MutualFunds.com was slightly more expensive than MutualFund.com though.

Here’s what Rubillo told me about these two acquisitions:

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2 Chat Names Sell for Over $220k

Elliot Silver
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5

Sedo reported its sales from this month’s Great Domains auction, and there are a few notable sales to report. Chat.fr was reportedly sold for 99,999 EUR and Chat.de was reportedly sold for 65,000. The total of these two domain name sales was 164,999 EUR. At today’s exchange rate, this is approximately $221,872.51 USD.

Several of the other domain names up for auction received bids, but in total, only 6 domain names met reserve and sold. The auction totaled a little over a quarter of a million USD.

Listed below are the 6 domain names that were reported to me by Sedoas sold along with their sale prices:

  • losangeles.de EUR 3910
  • refrigerador.com.br $US 999
  • chat.fr EUR 99999
  • jtf.com $US 25100
  • chat.de EUR 65000
  • characterizer.com $US 99

I assume these deals have not closed yet since the auction concluded yesterday afternoon.

Bitcoins.com Auction Postponed

Elliot Silver
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2

I just received word that the Bitcoins.com auction  at Heritage Auctions scheduled for tomorrow has been canceled reportedly due to the legal proceeding involving Mt. Gox. Coindesk has the full story sharing this news.

I would think this news must be upsetting to Heritage Auctions. The company has spent quite a bit of time (and presumably money) promoting the auction, and I believe the Bitcoins.com domain name is/was the marquee domain name up for sale.  I reached out to Aron Meystedt, Director of the  Intellectual Property Department at Heritage Auctions, and he said that he could not comment on the situation.

All does not appear to be lost for HA though. According to Meystedt, “Once the legal issues are resolved we will attempt to sell this domain name privately.” When I learn about the Bitcoins.com auction in the future, I will keep you posted.

The rest of the auction is going ahead, as planned tomorrow at 1pm Central time. Digital.com has met its reserve at $200,000. You can see the full list of domain names coming up at auction on HA.com.

Three Domain Auctions Ending Soon

Elliot Silver
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8

There are three domain name auction events currently accepting bids that are ending soon. Sedo is running its monthly Great Domains auction, Snapnames is running its Summer auction, and Heritage Auctions is running its big live auction with some high profile domain names up for sale.

I thought I would share a list of 5 domain names from each auction that is ending on July 24th. I do not have any domain names listed in any of these auctions, and I didn’t do a Whois search to see if I know any of the names mentioned below.

What domain names do you like from these upcoming auctions?

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Change to GoDaddy Auctions Time Extension

Elliot Silver
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I want to pass along a change that is being made at GoDaddy Auctions that might have an impact on your bidding strategy. Here’s the message I received from my account manager at GoDaddy this afternoon:

“As it stands now, any bid that is placed in the last 5 minutes of an auction auto-extends the auction by 5 minutes. This will change to auto-extend to only 1 minute, and a maximum time of 5 minutes 59 seconds (5:59). For example, if you place a bid on an auction that has 4:30 left, it will auto-extend this auction to 5:30.”

“Also as it stands now, any increase of a winners proxy bid amount counts as a new bid and extends the time, this will be fixed to only extend when current price changes.”

Although this change may not seem major, it will have an impact on those who participate in domain name auctions at GoDaddy.

At What Price Will Bitcoins.com Sell? (Poll)

Elliot Silver
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7

Yesterday afternoon, I reported that Heritage Auctions will be selling the Bitcoins.com domain name on behalf of Mark Karples, founder of Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange. The auction will take place on July 24th, and it can be found on HA.com. The official reserve price will be revealed by HA on July 17th, but Aron Meystedt of Heritage Auctions informed me that “the reserve is between $500K and $1MM.”

I am curious about the price at which you think this domain name will sell. There have been some solid Bitcoin and cryptocurrency-related domain name sales in the last year, and some might say that Bitcoins.com is the best domain name for a company involved in the Bitcoin space.

I posted this poll below to get your take on the sale price for the Bitcoins.com domain name:


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