Keep Track of Your Marketplace Listings

Elliot Silver
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Earlier this week, I received an offer for a domain name that had its BIN price listed on its landing page. I proceeded to negotiate with the prospect, and I told him he need to come up to a certain number to get a deal done. A couple of hours passed, and I received an email from Afternic telling me the domain name sold for the BIN price, which was lower than the BIN price on my landing page but in line with what I had emailed to the prospect.

I don’t typically have two different buy it now prices for my domain names. I think it is more fair for buyers if my prices are consistent across platforms, and I think it bring up questions if that isn’t the case. It is a case of fairness because a person would be (rightfully) upset if they paid $10,000 to buy a name via Afternic but found out that same name had an active BIN listing on Sedo at $7,000 after they already paid.

When I received the initial offer, I should have first looked at

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Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com May Be for Sale

Elliot Silver
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15

According to an article in the Wall St. Journal, IAC may be looking to sell two of its websites, which use exceptional domain names. Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com may both be for sale:

Here’s an excerpt from yesterday’s WSJ article:

“Dictionary.com is for sale—you can look it up.

The online definition resource is being put on the block by Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp , IAC -1.84% the company said.

IAC said it has hired investment bank Allen & Co. to explore a sale after two parties separately approached the company expressing interest in a possible acquisition of the property and its sister site, Thesaurus.com.”

Obviously this would be far more than a domain name sale. Both Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com are well developed and have active websites. From the domain name point of view, both of these properties use exceptional exact match domain names. Not only does the branding tell visitors exactly what they can expect to find on each of these websites, but they are also strong brand names.

I regularly encounter resistance from people who declare that domain names don’t matter as much anymore as they once did. While I would agree with the sentiment on long tail keyword domain names, I still strongly believe that short, relevant .com domain names still hold tremendous value. They can be used in the brandable sense (like Apple.com or Amazon.com) or in the literal sense like Dictionary.com or Thesaurus.com.

We’ll see if these two domain names move in the nearterm. If they do, perhaps we will see how much the buyer values the domain name vs. the underlying business in a subsequent SEC filing from the publicly traded IAC.

ImpeachTrump.com Domain Name in Auction at Flippa

Elliot Silver
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For the last several months, I have seen quite a few television commercials imploring the impeachment of US President Donald Trump. The multi million dollar ad campaign features a businessman named Tom Steyer, who discusses why he believes President Trump should be impeached. The website featured in the commercials is NeedToImpeach.com.

If Mr. Steyer is looking for a more obvious call to action domain name for his impeachment campaign, a better one is now on the market: ImpeachTrump.com.

According to a press release I received this morning, ImpeachTrump.com is now for sale via Flippa. The high bid currently stands at $250 but the undisclosed reserve price has not yet been met.

Depending on the reserve price and the reach of the marketing campaign promoting the auction, I would not be surprised to

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Escrow KYC Verification is Not Due Diligence

Elliot Silver
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In reading some forum threads and email chains over the last couple of years, I think there is some confusion about the Know Your Customer (KYC) verification at Escrow.com, Payoneer Escrow, and other escrow services. As far as I understand, the KYC verification process is not a form of due diligence for a buyer or seller.

From what I understand, KYC verifies that the buyer and seller in a transaction are who they say they are when the transaction is set up. If a scammer or thief is one party to a deal, the KYC process would likely not be able to “out” that party as a scammer or a thief. The process would simply verify that their banking details match their account details.

Let’s say that Joe is buying Example.com from Bob using a domain name escrow service. I believe the escrow service will verify that Bob and Joe are who they say they are. They do not verify that Joe has the funds to buy Example.com nor do they verify that Bob actually owns the domain name or has the right to sell the domain name. Essentially, if Bob stole the domain name or otherwise has no rights to sell the domain name, that is something that the escrow service would not check.

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Afternic Users Can Now Use Non-PPC Landers

Elliot Silver
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Afternic emailed its customers yesterday to let them know they could now more easily set up landing pages without pay per click (PPC) links on them. These types of “for sale” landing pages make it more obvious that a particular domain name is for sale rather than having a smaller “for sale” notice on them. These landing pages give visitors the option to call a toll free number to speak with an Afternic sales representative, or they can fill out an inquiry form. The asking price is not listed on the landing page.

An example of the landing page Afternic customers can implement on their domain names can be seen below:

Prior to yesterday’s news, customer were able to forward their domain names to this type of landing page, but it took more effort setting up forwarding for each domain name. This nameserver change option will allow users to set this up in bulk.

Commenting on this change, Afternic’s Alan Shiflett shared the following information with me:

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Heritage Auctions Selling Company-Owned Coin Domain Names

Elliot Silver
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Heritage AuctionsCryptocurrency domain names have been quite popular of late. Domain names related to cryptocurrency continue to sell for high prices at marketplaces and auction venues. Many sold domain names are very specific to cryptocurrency (ie they have “crypto,” “bitcoin,” or some other crypto-related keyword in them). Other domain names are less specific and have been somewhat repurposed to make sense in the crypto space.

Coin related domain names have also become popular because of cryptocurrency. NameBio has nearly 1,000 publicly-shared domain name sales archived with the word “coin” in the last five years. I would imagine many of these have been sold to cryptocurrency companies or people speculating on cryptocurrency domain names. Because of the increased value and demand for these kinds of domain names, companies have been listing domain names for sale that were bought for reasons not related to cryptocurrency. For instance, Token.com and Tokens.com were recently sold for substantial sums of money to companies in the crypto space.

This afternoon, Aron Meystedt announced that Heritage Auctions has listed some of its corporate-owned domain names that could be used in the cryptocurrency space. The company bought them for its own marketing purposes, but the opportunity to cash in was too great to keep the domain names on the sideline. Here’s what Aron told me about these domain names and why the company is selling:

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