One of the largest domain name sales of the year occurred this past week when Pro Football Focus acquired PFF.com for $270,000. The domain name was sold by Telepathy (Nat Cohen’s company), and the sale was reported in DNJournal’s weekly sales report.
The sale was brought to my attention when Jamie Zoch tweeted about the deal earlier this morning:
I think a dream scenario for a domain investor is selling a domain name to a startup, getting some equity in that startup as part of the deal, having that company turn into a billion dollar unicorn, and selling the stock for many millions of dollars. This doesn’t happen very often. For the vast majority of startups that buy domain names, giving up equity at an early stage is too big of an ask. I want to share an idea I have when a startup will not give up any equity in a deal to buy a domain name.
A couple of months ago, I needed something from Target. I can’t remember what it was, but I needed it more quickly than when I would get it if I bought it online. I went to the Target store and noticed the price in-store was higher than the online price. Although ordering online may be more convenient than going to a store, actually getting the product right away is more convenient and there are additional costs associated with keeping the inventory in the store.
This got me thinking about domain name pricing, and I think some people might have a similar philosophy when it comes to domain names.
Microsoft has many excellent domain names in its portfolio, and the company rarely sells its domain name assets. Yesterday, Jamie Zoch noticed that Rapt.com appears to have been sold by Microsoft.
Microsoft appears to have sold the #domain name Rapt(.)com according to whois records. Domain transferred to GoDaddy and redirects to FLXBio(.)com currently, which has $139M in funding according to Crunchbase.
— Jamie Zoch (@DotWeekly) May 20, 2019
This morning, I wrote about Univision’s acquisition of the TUDN.com domain name. One thing I noticed just now is that Univision had filed for a trademark on TUDN in October of 2018. I think it is a good idea to look at trademark filings before negotiating the sale of a domain name. There are probably more than just a couple of reasons to look for a trademark before negotiating the sale of a domain name, but I will share two:
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