GoDaddy recently launched its high-end DomainNames.com marketplace. The platform launched with listings that included high value inventory like Harmony.com, HongKong.com, FL.com, Bankroll.com, Switch.ai, Ladder.ai, and a plethora of other great domain names.
According to a post from GoDaddy’s James Iles, DomainNames.com already closed its first sale:
Last week, I wrote about my first domain name sale at Spaceship. The only hiccup was the $57 fee that was charged by PayPal when my payment was disbursed to me. This was partially my fault for not investigating further when Spaceship warned me about the potential for fees:
“Additionally, please note that you may incur fees when receiving funds. These fees are determined by the payout method and are beyond our control.”
I sold my first domain name via Spaceship today, and I thought I would share how it came about.
I recently listed nearly 2,000 domain names for sale on Spaceship with BIN prices and the make offer option enabled. The domain names were all priced below $5,000. None of the domain names were parked at Spaceship. I figured I would give Spaceship/Namecheap the opportunity to sell these domain names within their network, and if a domain name is purchased, I would pay the 5% commission.
Keeping my nameservers at Afternic allowed me to avoid paying a higher commission if one of these domain names was sold via GoDaddy. Since the time I listed domain names on Spaceship, I closed somewhere around 20 BIN + LTO deals at GoDaddy. Given how many domain names I have sold at GoDaddy in the time I’ve had many listed on Spaceship, I might have paid more in a commission penalty than I would saved, although it’s impossible to know if these buyers would have bought at Spaceship with their nameservers.
The valuable Icy.com domain name has reportedly been acquired for a 7 figure sum. Manik Kundra, who founded a company called Icy Studios, announced the acquisition on LinkedIn last night. His company has used IcyStudios.com since its founding, and Icy.com now forwards to the company’s website.
Prior to the acquisition, Icy.com was owned by Brandforce. The archived landing page for Icy.com shows the minimum offer to inquire about Icy.com was $2 million USD. I asked Louis Pickthall, Co-Founder and Vice President of BrandForce, if he could share the sale price for this domain name, but he was unable to do so. He did confirm that he brokered the sale of this domain name.
I received a strong offer on one of my one word .com domain names last week. I declined, but in the process of doing so, I went back through prior offers to reconnect with those prospects to see if they might be still interested in doing a deal. I don’t do a great job of rekindling old negotiations, but perhaps my domain name dropped off their radar and a quick touchbase will restart a discussion.
One of the previous prospects made an offer in 2021 and we last exchanged emails in 2023. That prospect maxed out at $15,000, but I figured I would reach back to them to see if the brand matching .com might be able to help them grow. This business operated on a non .com domain name, so I figured they would have had a few years to grow into the budget required to secure my domain name.
For many years, I kept my portfolio at around 500 domain names. It was easy to manage those domain names on the sales platforms I used. During the past several years, I made a conscious effort to grow my portfolio, which gives me more consistent sales. The downside is that it is a bit more work to manage my 2,500-strong portfolio of domain names.
Because many of the inventory-quality domain names I buy are essentially lottery tickets, I have been letting more of these domain names expire. If I have owned a domain name for many years without any inquiries and the metrics don’t look nearly as good as when I bought it, there’s a good chance I will let it expire. Those domain names will be replaced by better domain names.
