It is now confirmed that Amazon acquired the Podcast.com domain name, and the company is now forwarding Podcast.com to a page within its Audible-brand website. Jamie Zoch tweeted and emailed me about the sale of Podcast.com in 2019 when the domain name transferred under privacy to MarkMonitor using their DNStinations, Inc. privacy proxy service:
Yesterday afternoon, the Donuts’ Premium.Domains Twitter account tweeted about the $41,000 sale of World.Travel. This seems like a pretty solid sale considering the global downturn in travel due to the Covid-19 pandemic:
Confirmed: aftermarket sale of https://t.co/XEeKfCr4FB for $41,000 by seller https://t.co/gY3rdCPUOC.
More indications that businesses are preparing to capture the opportunity as the travel industry bounces back.
Excited to see the business built on this great domain.
— Premium.Domains (@premdotdomains) October 5, 2020
When a blind offer to buy a domain name is received, assumptions are made about who the buyer could be or how the domain name will be used if sold. This is often the case when a domain broker submits an offer on behalf of a prospective buyer, or an offer is made via Afternic or Sedo.
More often than not, the prospective buyer is the most obvious buyer. Perhaps the owner of the matching .IO or .CO domain name is interested in buying the brand match .com domain name, or maybe a startup using an off-brand domain name wants its brand match domain name.
This morning, I saw a retweet of a tweet from Kefah Makhamre announcing the $21,000 sale of Elmt.com via Afternic:
Outbound domain name marketing tends to result in lower offers and sales prices than inbound lead generation. It makes sense because outbound marketing is essentially cold calling people who may or may not have an interest in the domain name, and they may or may not have the budget to buy the domain name. With inbound lead generation, someone has taken at least the first step to buying a domain name and are willing to discuss the purchase price.
Although I have done less outbound marketing of my domain names during the prior few years (especially this year), I want to share when I think it might be beneficial to do outbound marketing.
When I get to the checkout screen on a website and see an empty field for a promo or discount code, I tend to take a moment to search Google for a valid code to use. I know other people do this because years ago I made thousands of dollars via affiliate link on a website I operated because my site ranked very high for a discount code offered by a company that was doing affiliate advertising.
People expect to be able to find and use a promo code when they see a promo code field, and similarly, domain name buyers expect to be able to have their offer considered when the “Make Offer” field shows up on a landing page. I want to share a paraphrased discussion I had with a prospective buyer this week.
The biggest auction of the day today was the PirateBay.org auction on DropCatch.com. PirateBay.org expired and went into deleted status, where it was caught by DropCatch. The domain name sold at auction for $50,000 today. I was not following the auction closely, so I do not know how many bidders participated in the auction.
