Bird.com has been sold for $2.5 million at today’s Right of the Dot live domain name auction. Fish.com was the next domain name up for auction, and that domain name was sold for $1.6 million. Based on the location information shown on the bidding page, the winning bidder appears to be the same for both of these auctions.
Two weeks ago, I reported that Fairway Independent Mortgage Corporation acquired Fairway.com in a deal that was put together by Andrew Miller. The seller in that deal was NBCUniversal. The Fairway.com acquisition came shortly after Fairway acquired Home.com.
Yesterday morning, Jamie Zoch reported that NBCUniversal acquired the Betcast.com domain name to go along with its Betcast brand. Andrew Miller replied to the tweet to confirm the acquisition since he was involved in that deal as well. While these two domain name acquisitions are unrelated, it is because of Andrew Miller’s dealmaking that they both came together serendipitously.
I reached out to Andrew to see if he could share some background about these deals without sharing confidential details, and here’s what he shared with me:
Many domain investors use Efty landing pages to broker their own domain name sales. They receive inbound inquiries generated from their domain names, and they negotiate the sale of their domain names on their own. I enjoy negotiating a domain name sale on my own, but it is very possible I am leaving money on the table every time I do a deal.
In a blog post this morning, Efty announced a new brokerage partnership with Saw.com, the domain brokerage co-founded by Amanda Waltz and Jeff Gabriel. Efty users will be able to assign leads to a broker from Saw.com who will broker the sale on behalf of the domain registrant. Efty users will set a target price and a floor price, and the broker will work to close a deal on behalf of the seller at the desired price.
This morning, I read a TechCrunch article about a company called Rows that was formerly known as dashdash, before a major rebrand. The article covered the company’s $16 million Series B round of funding, which followed its $8 million Series A round of funding in 2018. Smartly, the company acquired its matching Rows.com domain name in advance of the rebranding effort.
Historic Whois records at DomainTools show that Rows.com had previously been owned by Future Media Architects (FMA). FMA owns a large portfolio of exceptional domain names, and most of them are for sale. The company uses Saw.com to broker domain names on its behalf. From what I can tell, Rows.com was acquired by DashDash in late April or early May of 2020.
One must look no further than the company’s blog post about the Rows rebrand to learn how much the company paid to acquire the Rows.com domain name:
Last November, Jamie Zoch detected a change in the Whois record for the Wise.com domain name. Wise.com had been owned by Broadcom / Symantec, and the domain name transferred from CSC to GoDaddy under Whois privacy. In a tweet, Jamie predicted that an online money transfer service called TransferWise was going to be revealed as the buyer of the domain name:
It is likely that Broadcom/Symantec (they merged) sold Wise․com with the domain transferring to GoDaddy under privacy in June 2020. I will go on a limb and say Transferwise may be the buyer? They filed a “Wise” TM in April 2020 & both domains are using Cloudflare NS currently.
— Jamie Zoch (@DotWeekly) November 18, 2020
A venture capital company called Future Fund, which operates on Future.xxx, announced that it acquired the Sushi.com domain name for its SushiSwap protocol. The acquisition was announced in a tweet this morning:
Happy to announce we’ve acquired https://t.co/Hjsm7MOIYY for @sushiswap
A strong domain will greatly increase internet traffic and exposure to the sushi brand for their forthcoming new projects.
2021 will be a big year for $SUSHI pic.twitter.com/NWWkgTldWq
— Future Fund (@FUTURE_FUND_) February 19, 2021
