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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Step Away from a Negotiation

Elliot Silver
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5

Negotiating a deal to its conclusion is an aspect of this business I enjoy. Negotiations can be exciting, frustrating, annoying, thought provoking, and emotional. Sometimes a negotiation reaches a point that it would be more productive to step away and hand the reigns to someone else.

It doesn’t happen often, but there have been times that a stalemate has been reached. It sort of comes to a point where the counterparty and I have dug our heels in so deeply that progress has stopped and we aren’t really getting anywhere. Taking some time to let things cool down is one approach, but it also gives the counterparty an opportunity to seek out a different domain name or find a different buyer. When this happens on a domain sale negotiation, it makes sense for me to hand the negotiation off to a trusted domain broker.

I don’t love involving a domain broker when it isn’t necessary. I value the effort and expertise of a domain broker, but I would prefer not to have to pay a commission and involve a third party in a private negotiation unless it is absolutely necessary. Sometimes it becomes necessary.

A domain broker may

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BrandIT Marketing SanFrancisco.com and LosAngeles.com

Elliot Silver
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4

 

 

 

I received an email earlier this week from BrandIT (formerly Igloo.com) announcing that they are brokering two exceptional California geographical domain names: SanFrancisco.com and LosAngeles.com. These two domain names have been owned by Boulevards, a company founded by Dan Pulcrano. Boulevards has owned a large portfolio of exceptional city .com domain names.

Curious about why Dan decided to sell these valuable geographic domain names, I spoke on the phone to get his perspective. Dan told me what many people have learned the hard way: developing a network of websites, especially local websites like the ones Boulevards focuses on, is very difficult and expensive. Dan told me his company is using this as an opportunity to raise funds for his other core websites.

Although Dan did not share the asking price for these domain names, I think it is safe to say that each has a low seven figure price tag. Dan referred to his last publicly announced sale of Denver.com in 2012 as a guideline. As I later reported in 2015, that purchase paid off for Peter Niederman and his real estate firm. In addition, the parent company of the LA Times acquired LA.com last year for $1.2 million. Should SanFrancisco.com sell in this price range, the irony is that the cost would be almost equivalent to the price of a one bedroom apartment in San Francisco!

Commenting to me about the listings, BrandIT’s Tessa Holcomb had this to say:

“Geo domains have always been a strong niche for us originating with the sale of several country domains, then shifting to major European, Asian and US cities. Few US cities, however, are better known than San Francisco and Los Angeles. These metropolis regions are not only synonymous with the tech and entertainment industries, but they also are important hubs for tourism, recruiting, and real estate. Being from California myself, I am very excited to market the SanFrancisco.com and LosAngeles.com domain names and look forward to seeing how these valuable properties evolve.”

There are many ways a buyer could use each of these domain names. Of course, tourism, local news, and real estate would likely be the most obvious uses. Perhaps a buyer will successfully do all three of this.

Prospective buyers who are interested in these two domain names should get in touch with BrandIT.

260.com Was Sold

Elliot Silver
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2

I noticed a Whois change on 260.com, and it looks like the domain name was sold. Previously it was registered to a company in Grand Cayman, and the new registrant is based in China.

I emailed the former owner to confirm the sale, but I did not hear back from him. I realized the email was sent to his old @260.com email address, so I am sure he did not receive my email asking about a potential sale. When I followed up with him using another email address, he confirmed that he sold the domain name, but he said he could not comment at all about the sale or sale price.

Three number .com domain names (NNN.com) have been selling for serious money the last few years. Although the Chinese domain investment market seems to be down a bit from highs achieved a couple of years ago, domain names like these are still selling for a lot of money. The most recent public

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Afternic Outbound Email Sales Tactic

Elliot Silver
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5

I was chatting with Adam Strong, and he let me know he has had some success selling domain names through Afternic. He just started listing some of the domain names from his portfolio a couple of months ago, and he has sold five figures worth of names. On one of his sales, he was chatting with the buyer, and she mentioned that she learned about his Afternic listing after receiving an email from GoDaddy.

I had not heard about this outbound sales tactic, and I have not received an email like the one that was described. With Adam’s permission (and encouragement), I emailed Afternic’s Alan Shiflett to learn more about this email campaign. He confirmed that GoDaddy sends out occasional emails to prospective buyers, and he was kind enough to share two examples of the email for me to share with readers. I asked Alan to mock it up using one of my own domain names because I don’t have permission to use someone else’s domain name listed on Afternic, so these two emails are samples:

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