Canadian Tire Acquires Triangle.com from McClatchy

Elliot Silver
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In early April, I noticed that the Triangle.com domain name had changed hands. I had made a couple of offers to buy the domain name, and when I went to do a follow-up, I saw that the domain name was no longer registered to the company that owned it for many years.

The Whois record for Triangle.com shows the Canadian Tire Corporation is now the registrant of the domain name. The McClatchy Company, a publicly traded media company had been the registrant and was using the domain name for a North Carolina news publication. When I learned the domain name had changed hands in early April, I reached out to a few people at Canadian Tire, and they said they could not comment on the acquisition.

Last week, Simeon Tuoyo mentioned

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F.org Sold by NameFind

Elliot Silver
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It looks like the F.org domain name has been sold by NameFind, the domain portfolio company owned by GoDaddy. I noticed the domain name changed registrants in my daily email from DomainTools. The new registrant of F.org is a company called Fincubator VC, a venture capital firm that invests in FinTech companies.

The website for F.org has already been launched and it is home to an entity called FinTech Labs. There seem to be multiple companies with a similar name to that, so having the F.org domain name should help them stand out.

In January of 2017, Jamie Zoch reported that GoDaddy sold

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Google Plus Can Help Identify a Prospective Buyer

Elliot Silver
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Some people don’t like dealing with prospective buyers who use a free email address like Gmail. The thinking is that it could be a corporate buyer with a big budget trying to go under the radar to get a better deal. I happen to like dealing with buyers who use Gmail addresses.

An “anonymous” looking Gmail address like BostonMAGrandpa787@gmail.com may seem to make it difficult to identify the prospective buyer. This is especially the case if the prospect fills out the form with the name “John” and doesn’t include a phone number. The first thing I do is search for that email address within my Gmail account. This will identify if the person has emailed me before, but more importantly, it will also show their Google Plus page if they have one.

On quite a few occasions, I have been

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Tip for Using DomainTools’ Domain Search Tool

Elliot Silver
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I use quite a few tools from DomainTools. One of the tools I like best for prospecting is the Domain Search tool. This tool allows me to see all of the domain registrations in a specific keyword, making it easier to target prospective buyers who own domain names with a keyword similar to mine.

To give you an example, I own KitchenConsultant.com. I think other businesses with longer tail domain names might want to upgrade to KitchenConsultant.com. For instance, if someone owned BestKitchenConsultant.com or KitchenConsultantNYC.com, they might want to purchase the domain name my company owns. Searching “kitchenconsultant” will yield all of the registered domain names with that particular search term.

One thing I like to do when using this tool is to alter my keyword a bit to broaden the number of prospects. Instead of searching

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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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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.

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