Spend.com Sold via Sedo for $275,000

Elliot Silver
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18

Dave Evanson is going to be having a great Thanksgiving. According to a tweet he just posted this morning, he brokered the sale of Spend.com for $275,000:

The Whois record shows that the domain name is currently in Sedo’s escrow account. This likely means that the buyer already sent the funds to Sedo and the domain name is pending transfer to the buyer. Once the domain name transfers, I will provide an update on who bought it (assuming it was an end user buyer). There are quite a few companies that would benefit by upgrading their domain name to Spend.com. The domain name had been owned by a company based in the UK.

Unless there are additional large sales reported this week that I am not aware of right now, Spend.com will rank as the 16th largest sale of the year on DNJournal’s year to date sales report. It will tie the $275,000 sale of WMP.com, which also sold via Sedo.

My Typical “Lowball” Offer Response

Elliot Silver
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5

One of the most difficult aspects of domain name sales is that many people still have no idea how much a domain name is worth. It is always a bit humorous to receive a $100 offer shortly after receiving a 5 figure offer for the same domain name. Although it can be slightly frustrating to deal with uneducated offers, it comes with the territory. If there was a pricing model for domain names, it would be more difficult to get good deals, so I will take the uneducated “lowball” offers.

I thought I would share a typical response to lowball or uneducated offers for domain names. Most of the time, prospective buyers take this good-natured rebuke in a positive way, although there is always the potential for someone to get angry about it. After all, many prospective buyers will think I (or you) own a domain name they can use and I (or you) are not using the domain name in a productive way. This is obviously flawed thinking, but it is how many people think. I often wonder if they would think the same way about undeveloped property owned by a private investor, but that is a different story.

Here’s a response I give to people who make a lowball offer:

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Purple is Now on Purple.com

Elliot Silver
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0

Earlier this month, I reported the sale of the Purple.com domain name. When the sale was reported, all signs appeared to show that the mattress startup, Purple, had acquired the Purple.com domain name. This has been confirmed.

If you visit Purple.com today, you can see the mattress company is now using the domain name. If you visit OnPurple.com, the domain name that was previously used by the startup, you will be forwarded directly to Purple.com.

This domain name acquisition makes a ton of sense. When people hear of a company called Purple, they generally assume it can be found on Purple.com. Now, there

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Keep Enough Cash for Taxes

Elliot Silver
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3

I generally don’t preface an article with a disclaimer, but I think it is important to note at the outset that I am not an accountant nor should any of this be construed as accounting or tax advice!

Let’s say I buy a domain name at auction for $1,000 and re-sell that domain name a month later for $10,000. I might be inclined to go out and acquire an even better name for $10,000 or purchase two $5,000 domain names. I might even be inclined to buy a domain name for $5,000 and upgrade my office with the remaining $5,000. By doing this, there will be no money remaining to pay taxes.

When I sell a domain name, my first inclination is to reinvest the funds in another domain name or several domain names. I always like to keep great domain names in my portfolio, and reinvesting helps to ensure that my portfolio continues to improve. Even with this inclination, I need to be cognizant of the taxes that will be owed as a result of a sale. With a fluctuating business like domain investing, this can be a big challenge and can become a massive issue for a person or a business.

Many small business owners in the US pay

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Purple Mattress Upgrades to Purple.com (Updated with Price)

Elliot Silver
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24

At the beginning of September, I wrote an article about the Purple.com domain name. After contacting the owner to ask about the status of Purple.com, Jeff Abrahamson indicated to me that he was in talks to sell the domain name. Judging by a tweet Jeff posted a few days ago with his new url, ISoldPurple.com, it looks like Purple.com was sold.

The buyer of the domain name appears to be Purple, a mattress startup that was reported by TechCrunch to have been involved in a $1.1 billion deal. The mattress startup uses OnPurple.com for its url, and Purple.com would obviously be a major upgrade.

Although some of the Whois registrant information is obscured by Whois privacy, the part that is visible gives away who bought the domain name. The Registrant Organization is listed as

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Looks Like HD.com Was Sold

Elliot Silver
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17

In my DomainTools Domain Monitor alerts this morning, I saw that HD.com was transferred from a China-based domain registrar to GoDaddy. The Whois registrant information has a privacy proxy service and the nameservers are generic GoDaddy nameservers, so the current owner of HD.com is still unknown. With this transfer to a different registrar (and a GoDaddy default landing page), it appears that the domain name was sold.

When I saw the transfer, my first thought was that Home Depot acquired the domain name. In my opinion, HD.com would be the perfect fit for the publicly traded company with a market cap of nearly $195 billion (disclosure: I own some HD stock). Based on the fact that Home Depot registers its domain names via CSC Corporate Domains and HD.com is currently registered at GoDaddy, my guess is that is unlikely.

There are quite a few large companies with HD as initials including:

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