DomainNames.com has been owned by Network Solutions, and the company put this domain name up for sale in the NamesCon auction earlier this week. One of the highlights of the live was the sale of DomainNames.com for $370,000. The winning bidder in the auction was Uniregistry founder Frank Schilling.
Jordi Gasull, founder of NameAgency.com, shared a video of the auction. With his permission, I am sharing the auction video with you:
Uniregistry is gearing up to launch the “greatest product” the company has ever built, according to a tweet from Uniregistry Founder and CEO Frank Schilling:
The greatest product we have ever built is launching November 27 on https://t.co/F67ALa4xUb #revolution pic.twitter.com/bFpjSIRCCg
— Frank Schilling (@Frank_Schilling) October 12, 2018
The company is set to launch this product on November 27, which is about three weeks away. Frank did not offer any clues about what the product is or who will benefit from the product.
It’s interesting to see Frank make such a big statement about a launch. I thought the Uniregistry market and its Domain Name Sales platform was pretty helpful. I have been using it less because I manage my own leads now, but when I was using it I thought it was quite good.
If you have any guesses about what type of product will be launching or the market it will serve, be my guest. My two (obvious) guesses would be that the product is either related to selling domain names or something to do with the new gTLD domain names.
We shall see in a few weeks.
The Bronx, New York based Universal Hip Hop Museum announced a new domain name that it is promoting on social media: Museum.HipHop.
Hey we have a new domain name. New name, same destination. The official museum of Hip Hop. Try it out! pic.twitter.com/A7pIIOCQMN
— UHHM (@uhhmuseum) March 21, 2018
If you visit Museum.HipHop, you will be taken to its website on the long standing UHHM.org domain name. If you visit the Museum’s social media pages, you can see the Museum is promoting the Museum.HipHop domain name. From my perspective, Museum.HipHop is more marketable than UHHM.org.
The .HipHop extension is operated by Uniregistry. I asked Uniregistry founder Frank Schilling if his company reached out to the Museum to encourage them to use the .HipHop domain name, and he told me they did not. “Uniregistry had nothing to do with this rebranding,” Frank told me. “This is a perfect example of the passage of time and serendipitous discovery proving new TLD’s to be vibrant, valuable, and relevant. In 20 years .com will still be the New York of extensions, but New York is going to have some company. You just can’t fight the tide, nature, and what feels right,” he said.
There are a little less than 1,400 registered .HipHop domain names, according to nTLDStats.com. It is obviously a very niche domain name extension, and it looks like the perfect tenant found the extension.
I have always thought it would be neat to see various offices and buildings used by domain industry companies. Attorney John Berryhill shared this video of the Uniregistry offices in the Cayman Islands.
Uniregistry founder Frank Schilling made a guest appearance in the short video.
One of the concerns I have heard people mention regarding Uniregistry is that the company could keep expiring domain names dropped by its customers. There are domain name registrars that either keep the higher value drops or did this in the past, and I have heard people express their concerns that it could happen at Uniregistry since the company is owned by one of the most successful domain investors, Frank Schilling.
Turns out, this does not appear to be the case (at least right now).
This morning while going through a list of pending delete domain names that are coming up for auction, I saw that TrafficAccident.com and TrafficAccidents.com were listed as pending delete. Estibot values these domain names at $15,000 and $13,000 respectively, and I think most people would agree these two domain names have value, especially to a law firm or auto body shop. When I looked at the Whois registration details to see
Earlier this morning, Uniregistry published a press release (published below) with its aftermarket domain name sales report from Uniregistry Market for the first 8 months of 2017. While the report doesn’t offer specific details about domain name sales, it offers a general overview of sales on its platform year to date. From what I understand, this aggregated sales data includes domain name sales from Frank Schilling’s Name Administration company as well as the third party sales of Uniregistry Market clients.
You should read the entire press release for more color commentary, but here are the most interesting data points the company shared:
It was a bit surprising to see that the average sale price on sold domain names declined for the first time since 2011. The average sale price seems to have dropped from $9,110 to $8,017. Despite this 12% shrinkage, I think the average sale price of $8,017 is still higher at Uniregistry Market than on other domain name sale platforms. This is likely attributed to the high quality of domain names listed for sale on Uniregistry Market. That said, there was still a drop in the average sale price, and here’s how the company explained that:
“Dollar volumes moderated during this period, due to continued expansion into exploratory, nontraditional markets such as Generic Top Level Domains (GTLDs) and Country Code Top Level Domain (CCTLD) sales.”
My interpretation of this is that the company sold more ccTLD and new gTLD domain names this year, and those domain names have lower sale prices. As a result, the higher volume of lower sale prices caused the average sale price to drop. In explaining this, it would have been helpful if Uniregistry shared the increased volume of ccTLD and new gTLD sales. For instance, if the volume of these sales increased by 50% over last year, the lower sale price would have been more obvious. If the sales volume increased marginally, the lower average sale price would be more concerning to me.
I am hopeful that the company will release additional data. I believe Uniregistry Market released more sales data to DNJournal last year, and I hope the company does the same thing this year.
Here’s the company’s press release, which offers more insight about its sales and gives a glimpse of its expectations for the future:
