Domain Sales

Within the last few years, I sold a .com domain name for five figures via Afternic. I do not report my sales, and I did not make an exception for this sale. As far as I can tell, this sale went completely under the radar. I am thankful for this because I think it would look super sketchy if I had announced the sale.

The buyer of the domain name used Whois privacy, so I don’t have any idea who acquired it. A short time after the domain name sold, I saw it was listed for sale on Afternic when I did a Whois search of the name. The price was not very much higher than my sale price, so it caught my attention. Why would someone buy a domain name and almost immediately list it for sale just a bit higher than what was paid?

According to a Seeking Alpha article covering the most recent Gambling.com earnings call, the publicly traded Gambling.com has acquired the Casinos.com domain name from Caesars. Terms of the deal were not shared on the earnings call, but the company seemed elated with the acquisition.

Here’s what Charles Gillespie, CEO of Gambling.com, stated about the acquisition of Casinos.com on the earnings call:

Last week, Ankur Nagpal shared how much he paid to buy the Ocho.com ($45,000) and Teachable.com ($25,000) domain names. I thought he got a great deal on each of these acquisitions. In his tweet, Ankur asked others what they paid for “a dope domain“:

Whenever I see a startup with a premium .com (which I think is a dope way to differentiate, btw) I’m always curious to know how much it cost

Our numbers were:

$25K for teachable .com in 2015
$45K for ocho .com in 2022

If you own a dope domain, how much did you pay for it?

— Ankur Nagpal (@ankurnagpal) November 1, 2022

Quite a few entrepreneurs and founders replied to share the acquisition prices for their domain names. The Twitter thread is worth a read.

In a Domain Name Wire article, James Iles recently wrote about the launch of Ocho Wealth, which uses the valuable Ocho.com domain name. At the time of publication, the acquisition price of Ocho.com was not known. If I would have guessed the acquisition price, I surely would have been in the six figures. Ocho.com is a Spanish one word .com domain name, is easy to spell, and it is short. It has all the hallmarks of a valuable domain name.