Stupid.com Goes on Sale via Sedo

Elliot Silver
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2

Sedo domain broker Albert Schimmel is brokering a pretty amusing domain name, Stupid.com, which he mentioned on Twitter yesterday:

From the looks of it, Stupid.com is a fully developed website that says it has been online since 1998. It looks like the website is an online gift shop that specializes in gag and humorous gifts. I think a buyer could use Stupid.com in many different ways, with our without a gift shop selling products. I am not sure if the website, customer database, and any products are included in the sale offering.

When I think of

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Top Public Uniregistry Market Domain Sales YTD

Elliot Silver
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44

Earlier this morning, I published a press release from Uniregistry with details about its year to date sales results. The company reported that it sold 3,617 domain names totaling more than $29,000,000. I asked Uniregistry VP of Sales Jeff Gabriel if he could share any more details about YTD sales at Uniregistry Market, and he sent me a list of over 2,700 sales worth more than $17.2 million. Jeff mentioned that many of the sales were removed, so the list I received is abridged.

Several of these sales were previously reported. For instance, I wrote about the the sales of Squeeze.com and Coya.com. I presume there are other domain name sales that have been written about by me or by others. I also presume this list of sales will be reported to DNJournal and NameBio for archiving. Once Ron Jackson has this data, there will be some major changes at the top of the DNJournal Year to Date sales report.

For the sake of convenience I am sharing all of the sales I received that are worth $20,000 or more. There are 156 domain name sales worth $20,000+, and the vast majority of those are .com sales. In this list of 156 sales, there are a handful of .net and .org sales, and there are some one-off sales in other extensions such as .ca, .link, .co.uk, .co, and others.

At a quick glance, there are some really, really solid sales here. If I owned some of these names, I almost certainly would have undersold them. There also seem to be a few solid deals for the buyer. Sometimes people are happy to move inventory and the buyer gets a good deal.

Have a look at the list and let me know your thoughts.

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Thoughts About Uniregistry Market Sales Report

Elliot Silver
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1

Earlier this morning, Uniregistry published a press release (published below) with its aftermarket domain name sales report from Uniregistry Market for the first 8 months of 2017. While the report doesn’t offer specific details about domain name sales, it offers a general overview of sales on its platform year to date. From what I understand, this aggregated sales data includes domain name sales from Frank Schilling’s Name Administration company as well as the third party sales of Uniregistry Market clients.

You should read the entire press release for more color commentary, but here are the most interesting data points the company shared:

  • “it has sold 3617 domains totaling more than 29,000,000 USD in the first 8 months of 2017.”
  • “The number of transactions increased by more than 24% over the same time period in 2016”
  • “total sales have increased by 13.85% from the 25,000,000 USD sold in the same period prior.”
  • “Average sale prices since 2011 have seen steady gains year over year, with 2017 showing some signs of moderation as the average prices dropped marginally for the first time ever to $8,017 USD per domain down from $9,110 USD.”

It was a bit surprising to see that the average sale price on sold domain names declined for the first time since 2011. The average sale price seems to have dropped from $9,110 to $8,017. Despite this 12% shrinkage, I think the average sale price of $8,017 is still higher at Uniregistry Market than on other domain name sale platforms. This is likely attributed to the high quality of domain names listed for sale on Uniregistry Market. That said, there was still a drop in the average sale price, and here’s how the company explained that:

“Dollar volumes moderated during this period, due to continued expansion into exploratory, nontraditional markets such as Generic Top Level Domains (GTLDs) and Country Code Top Level Domain (CCTLD) sales.”

My interpretation of this is that the company sold more ccTLD and new gTLD domain names this year, and those domain names have lower sale prices. As a result, the higher volume of lower sale prices caused the average sale price to drop. In explaining this, it would have been helpful if Uniregistry shared the increased volume of ccTLD and new gTLD sales. For instance, if the volume of these sales increased by 50% over last year, the lower sale price would have been more obvious. If the sales volume increased marginally, the lower average sale price would be more concerning to me.

I am hopeful that the company will release additional data. I believe Uniregistry Market released more sales data to DNJournal last year, and I hope the company does the same thing this year.

Here’s the company’s press release, which offers more insight about its sales and gives a glimpse of its expectations for the future:

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☯.com Acquired by Gregg Ostrick for $11,201

Elliot Silver
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20

Most low 5 figure domain name sales aren’t really all that notable, but I think this one is a bit different. Veteran domain investor Gregg Ostrick of GNO, Inc. reported that his company acquired the Yin-Yang symbol Emoji domain name, ☯.com, for $11,201. Greg’s company acquired the domain name privately from the former owner.

According to a tweet from @punycode_com, this is the second largest publicly reported Emoji domain name sale of all time:

According to NameBio, the largest public Emoji domain name sale I could find was ☁.com (the cloud Emoji), which sold for $13,600 in December of 2016.

Gregg shared the following information about Emoji domain names and his portfolio of Emoji domains:

“I wanted the Yin-Yang to add to my collection of 5 other .com emoji domains, which include the airplane, wrist watch, the snowman, the snowflake and the computer keyboard (image display below).

There are only 33 .com domains in existence that are emojis.

Currently emojis can’t be registered under .com, and these were available to register some years ago while IDNs and punycode were being implemented. I registered my 5 originals, in 2001, as special characters, called dingbats, but since then, those domains have been designated as emojis.”

Here are the six Emoji domain names that GNO now owns:

  • ✈️.com
  • ⌚.com
  • ☃️.com
  • ❄️.com
  • ⌨️.com
  • ☯️.com

Gregg also reported this acquisition to DNJournal, but I am not sure it is going to make the top sale list of the week with its low 5 figure price.

Draft.com Sold for “high six-figures”

Elliot Silver
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5

This morning, I tweeted that the Draft.com domain name was likely sold. Prior to a registrant change I detected this morning, Draft.com had been owned by Digimedia. I reached out to Digimedia’s Jay Chapman and Scott Day to see if they could share any details or confirm the sale of Draft.com, and they told me they did not have a comment (which is generally their response when I ask about a sale).

Forbes just published an article about the acquisition of Draft.com, and it details how much the domain name cost and how the domain name will be used. The article title tells us that the domain name was expensive: Why A Daily Fantasy Sports Company Paid High Six-Figures For Draft.com.

Here’s an excerpt from the article with some detail about the acquisition:

“Mere hours prior to the start of the 2017 NFL regular season, a fantasy sports operator is announcing the acquisition of probably the most valuable URL in the space. The operator aptly named DRAFT, which was purchased by Ireland-based Paddy Power Betfair in May, has acquired the URL draft.com for a high six-figures amount of money.”

After seeing the domain transfer, I

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Purple.com is “Sort of” For Sale

Elliot Silver
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23

Purple.com is a high value domain name, and it is probably one of just a few domain names to have its own Wikipedia page. For the longest time, the domain name had a message that stated “Purple.com is not for sale,” although the owner of the domain name has been willing to consider licensing or lease deals. Recently, the owner became more willing to sell Purple.com for the right price.

If you visit Purple.com right now and click the “Sale” link on the homepage, you can see the owner’s new FAQ about the potential sale of Purple.com:

“Q: Is purple.com for sale?
A: Sort of. We’ve gotten a couple reasonable offers recently. It seems prudent to explore them. If you’re interested, the price is $1.5m (USD). See the availability FAQ for comments about why this may or may not be a reasonable price. (Surprisingly, perhaps, it has recently become a reasonable price.)”

I reached out to Jeff Abrahamson, the owner of Purple.com since 1994, and he offered some additional insight into why he has decided to offer Purple.com for sale:

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