Kevin O’Leary is an investor who is best known for being a “Shark” on ABC’s Shark Tank television show. One of his investments is in a company called Immutable Holdings, Inc., a holding company with various blockchain-based investments. One of the company’s investments is NFT.com, a domain name that is currently under development.

In a press release announcing that Immutable Holdings was listed on the NEO Stock Exchange, Kevin O’Leary commented on the NFT.com domain name:

This morning in my Domain Monitor alert email from DomainTools, I noticed that AI.com had transferred from Uniregistry to Google (domain registrar). AI.com had been owned by Future Media Architects (FMA), and the domain name now has Whois privacy enabled, obscuring the registrant name from public view. Like all FMA domain names, AI.com had been listed for sale via Saw.com.

When I saw AI.com had transferred to a different domain registrar, I reached out to Saw.com’s Jeff Gabriel and Amanda Waltz to see if the domain name had sold.

The other day, I was negotiating the sale of a domain name with a prospective buyer. After sharing the price of the domain name with the buyer, I was sent what was considered to be a comparable domain name at a much lower price. In reality, the domain name that was sent and priced less was a non .com domain name that matched my .com domain name.

The prospect asked why my domain name was so much more expensive than the comparable non .com listed for sale on several marketplaces. Although I think it should be pretty obvious to most people why the .com domain name is worth many times more than the non .com domain names, I used a real estate analogy to keep things simple.

I’ve always been under the assumption that many prospective domain name buyers type the domain name into their browser to see what exists on the domain name. Having a “for sale” landing page or inquiry page can help facilitate a sale when a prospective buyer visits the domain name to see what exists on it. According to a Squadhelp, my assumption may not be the full picture.

Squadhelp CEO Darpan Munjal shared that a recent study from his company showed a prospective buyer is 4x as likely to search Google for a domain name than type it into their browser:

I just learned about the third largest publicly reported domain name sale of 2021. According to an email I received from BrandForce Co-Founder & Vice President Louis Pickthall, BrandForce sold the Floor.com domain name for $3,144,000. Louis and Senior Broker Stephen Byrne brokered this house-owned domain name, and the closed deal was transacted via Escrow.com. Once confirmed and charted by DNJournal, it will become the 11th seven figure (publicly reported) domain name sale of the year to date.

The buyer of Floor.com is not publicly known at this point. The domain name is registered under Whois privacy, and the buyer’s generic Shopify-powered website has been launched. This website does not give away any details about the buyer’s identity, but I will keep an eye out for any type of public launch announcement in the future.