Domain Sales

Jenni Makes $20k Defensive Domain Name Purchase

Jenni AI is an artificial intelligence based writing tool helmed by CEO David Park. The company operates on the Jenni.AI domain name. Late last week on Twitter, David shared that his company reportedly acquired the typo Jenny.AI domain name for $20,000:

This Looks Super Sketchy

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Within the last few years, I sold a .com domain name for five figures via Afternic. I do not report my sales, and I did not make an exception for this sale. As far as I can tell, this sale went completely under the radar. I am thankful for this because I think it would look super sketchy if I had announced the sale.

The buyer of the domain name used Whois privacy, so I don’t have any idea who acquired it. A short time after the domain name sold, I saw it was listed for sale on Afternic when I did a Whois search of the name. The price was not very much higher than my sale price, so it caught my attention. Why would someone buy a domain name and almost immediately list it for sale just a bit higher than what was paid?

Bear Grylls Acquires Outdoors.com

Bear Grylls, a popular outdoor adventurer, writer, and television personality announced that he and partners have acquired Outdoors.com and relaunched the website with Grylls-related branding:

This wasn’t simply a great domain name purchase. In looking at Archive.org, it looks like Outdoors.com was already an established outdoors-focused brand. With Grylls’ background, it is a perfect opportunity for him to grow the brand and expand his own personal reach. It looks like articles from the original Outdoors.com website have been ported over to the new website, and the design has been modernized and updated with Grylls’ personal branding.

Using the Whois History tool at DomainTools, it appears that the domain name changed hands in September when it transferred from Namecheap to GoDaddy under Whois privacy. Outdoors.com utilized Whois privacy for quite a long time – since 2015, so the exact date the domain name sold is unclear.

Terms of the deal do not appear to have been announced. Because it looks like the entire business was acquired, this wouldn’t be considered a domain name-only transaction.

Friction with LTO + Make Offer

I use Dan.com landing pages for a great deal of my portfolio. Many of these domain names, particularly at price points above a few thousand dollars, use the Buy It Now (BIN) + Make Offer + Lease to Own (LTO). I have been running in to a bit of friction with this setup.

The way it is suppose to work is that someone can either buy the domain name immediately for the list price in one payment, buy the domain name in monthly installments of their choosing, or submit an offer to buy the domain name. If a prospect submits an offer and the owner accepts it, the buyer is sent to a payment page to submit payment for the agreed upon amount.

Gambling.com Acquires Casinos.com from Caesars

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According to a Seeking Alpha article covering the most recent Gambling.com earnings call, the publicly traded Gambling.com has acquired the Casinos.com domain name from Caesars. Terms of the deal were not shared on the earnings call, but the company seemed elated with the acquisition.

Here’s what Charles Gillespie, CEO of Gambling.com, stated about the acquisition of Casinos.com on the earnings call:

What Was the Better Deal, Clever.com or Duo.com?

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Last week, Ankur Nagpal shared how much he paid to buy the Ocho.com ($45,000) and Teachable.com ($25,000) domain names. I thought he got a great deal on each of these acquisitions. In his tweet, Ankur asked others what they paid for “a dope domain“:

Quite a few entrepreneurs and founders replied to share the acquisition prices for their domain names. The Twitter thread is worth a read.

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