GoDaddy to Offer Lease to Own via Afternic

One of the most helpful offerings from Dan.com is the easy to use Lease to Own (LTO) purchase option. Domain name buyers who do not want to spend the money to acquire a domain name at the time of the sale can opt to pay for it over a period of time when offered by the seller.

Dan.com was acquired by GoDaddy last year, and the LTO option is now coming to Afternic. This means domain name buyers shopping on GoDaddy will be given the ability to purchase a domain name over a period of time, if leasing is offered by the seller of the domain name.

Afternic posted a tweet about the new offering along with an article that covers how sellers will be able to add the LTO option to their domain names listed for sale via Afternic:

How and Why Julian Hearn Acquired Huel.com for Huel

Julian Hearn is the Founder and CEO of Huel, a meal replacement and nutrition company with a valuation of more than half a billion USD, as of last year. The company began by operating on Huel.me, but it upgraded to Huel.com sometime in 2015.

In an interview on Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal, Hearn discussed why his company decided it was necessary to acquire Huel.com instead of continuing with Huel.me. In addition, he shared some commentary about his negotiation with the seller of Huel.com. The company acquired Huel.com for either $10,000 or 10000 GBP – it is unclear what currency was used for the transaction.

Chat.com Profitably Resold for 8 Figures

In March of this year, I reported on the sale of Chat.com. The domain name was acquired by HubSpot Co-Founder Dharmesh Shah for more than $10 million USD. The exact acquisition price wasn’t revealed by either party. That deal had been brokered by Hilco Digital’s Andrew Miller and Larry Fischer.

This morning, Dharmesh revealed that he resold the domain name for a profit, and he is donating $250,000 to Khan Academy:

YourRide.com Sold for $300k via Evergreen.com

I made an unexpected guest appearance this week on DomainSherpa. It’s the first time in many years I’ve been seen on the DS show with some of my favorite people in the domain industry – Jen Sale, Adam Strong, Ammar Kubba, and Jonathan Tenenbaum.

In this week’s episode, Jen Sale, who is CEO of Evergreen.com, announced her company brokered the sale of YourRide.com for $300,000. The domain name had been owned by Adam Strong’s company for nearly 20 years. Adam owns a large portfolio of tens of thousands of domain names and was also a cofounder of Evergreen.

Once the domain name sale is archived by NameBio and DNJournal, it will rank in the top 10 domain name sales of the year (to date). YourRide.com is a very nice domain name, and selling it for $300k is impressive.

I can’t embed the Domain Sherpa show, so you’ll have to visit the website to watch.

Chat.com Acquired for More than $10 Million

Last week, Hilco Digital’s Andrew Miller shared that he and Larry Fischer brokered the sale of the Chat.com domain name. Andrew mentioned that it was “the most significant domain asset transaction in our combined 50+ years investing in and advising on premium domain names.”

Given their involvement in the 2021 sale of Home.com coupled with the extraordinary value of Chat.com, my assumption has been that Chat.com sold for 8 figures ($10 million or more).

AI.com Now Forwarding to ChatGPT Website

1

Early this morning, Andy Booth tweeted about AI.com, asking if the domain name was acquired by ChatGPT. Andy presumably asked because the AI.com domain name is now forwarding to the ChatGPT website, a popular AI chatbot.

AI.com had long been owned by Future Media Architects (FMA). In September of 2021, I reported on the sale of AI.com. The deal was brokered by Saw.com, which has long represented FMA on its domain name sales. In my article about the sale, I shared what I understood to be the asking price of AI.com along with a comment from Saw.com Founder and CEO Jeff Gabriel: