Connect with a Branding Agency

Elliot Silver
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Last week, Alan Dunn shared a link to an article about a company that decided to rebrand as Alongside. The company was able to acquire the exact match Alongside.com domain name, although the article didn’t really discuss how the domain name was acquired. It did, however, give me an idea that might help me sell domain names.

There are two excerpts from  the article that grabbed my attention:

“We enlisted Pauly Ting to help us make sense of it all and come up with a name that fits us perfectly.”

“We enlisted Rob Meyerson from Heirloom, who had an impressive naming background for some of the biggest brands in the world”

Many companies use

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Flu.com is for Sale on NameJet

Elliot Silver
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I was looking through the upcoming auction list on NameJet, and I saw an interesting domain name for sale: Flu.com. I saw that this auction has a reserve price, so I knew that it was a private listing rather than an expiring domain name auction.

Interestingly, Whois records show that Flu.com is owned by a company called Medimmune, which is described as the “global biologics research and development arm” of pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca. It looks like AZ has a flu vaccine, but it doesn’t appear that this is going so well, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal this Summer.

If you visit Flu.com right now, you can see that it is a parked page with PPC advertising. There is also a “Buy this domain” link at the top of the page taking visitors to a Parking Crew inquiry form:

flu-com-landing-page

Archive.org shows that Flu.com was once used as a

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Sales Reports May Not Tell the Whole Story

Elliot Silver
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I was chatting with a friend at The Domain Conference, and I congratulated him on a deal that I recently read about. Coyly, he told me that I shouldn’t believe all that I read. After chatting with him for a couple of minutes about it, I think I understood what he meant, although he wouldn’t share any details with me!

The vast majority of domain name sales are all cash. In some instances, in addition to a cash component, a company may give the domain seller additional compensation. Some types of compensation that I can think of off the top of my head include shares in the company, an earn out opportunity (% of sales for example), or some type of stock options. I am sure there are other types of compensation I am not thinking about.

Domain sales platforms and brokers that report transacted sales tend to only

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DomainName.com Listed for Sale via Sedo

Elliot Silver
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Earlier this morning, Dave Evanson tweeted that Sedo has the exclusive sale listing on DomainName.com, and he is the broker charged with selling the domain name:

In a comment to me about the listing, Dave said “It’s the perfect domain name for a serious player in domain name industry or for someone coming into the industry with a huge splash.”  Dave told me the asking price is $2.5 million.

According to DNJournal, DomainName.com was acquired at the BoxCar / Domain Consultant  auction for $1 million back in 2011. Ocean.com also sold in that auction for $100,000. Interestingly, I recently reported that Ocean.com may have recently been sold, although Richard Lau did not provide a confirmation.

In light of these two recent sales as well as Richard’s sale of the NamesCon domain conference, I asked Richard if he could comment on the DomainName.com sale listing. I also asked him if he was getting out of the domain business. Here’s what Richard shared with me this afternoon:

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ETF.com Sold for $12.6 Million

Elliot Silver
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etf-com-logoAccording to a Securities & Exchange Commission quarterly report filing (10-Q), the ETF.com domain name and website were sold earlier this year for $12.6 million. The deal was originally announced in a press release in March, although the price was not revealed until this recent filing. As you probably know, ETF is an acronym for “exchange traded fund,” and ETF.com has been an active website.

The buyer of the domain name and website is Bats Global Markets, a publicly traded company. According to the about us page on ETF.com, Bats Global Markets is “a leading global operator of exchanges and services for financial markets and the world’s No. 1 market for ETF trading.”

Here’s what the SEC filing had to say about the ETF.com domain name and website:

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Jessica Alba Talks About Buying Honest.com

Elliot Silver
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Jessica Alba’s company is called The Honest Company, and as you might expect from a company with a billion dollar valuation, they own the exceptional Honest.com domain name. In a Late Show with Stephen Colbert video shared today, Jessica Alba and Steven Colbert discuss the Honest.com domain name and how Alba’s company acquired the domain name.

I did a bit of research using DomainTools Historical Whois Tool to see who owned the domain name prior to the acquisition. In 2011, Honest.com was owned by Anything.com, a company that owns and has owned some of the most valuable domain names.

I have communicated with people associated with Anything.com, and the company does not share sales information. I am quite sure this was a very high value deal (my guess is high 6 or 7 figures), and I am also quite sure we won’t ever learn the price of the domain name unless Jessica Alba or someone else from The Honest Company reveals that information.

Here’s the video (skip to 3:30 to see the part about Honest.com)

 

Thanks to Matt Worth for sharing this video.

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