I received a suspicious looking email yesterday, and I want to share some details. The email subject was “Atom x Embrace.com,” and it came from an email address using a .CO domain name that does not appear to be associated with the Atom.com platform.

Within the email, it had the following messaging:

“I’m Will from Atom. We run a marketplace and naming platform with 400,000+ brandable domains, plus appraisal, brokerage, and naming services.”

I’ve been a proponent of offering buyers the option to lease-to-own (LTO) my domain names. The primary benefit of an LTO deal is that it enables a fledgling business to secure a domain name today while paying for it as the business grows. It’s a win win if the seller gets the desired price.

Despite a reasonably good track record with LTO deals, I’ve been opting against offering an LTO option for my highest value domain names.

I look at Atom as a platform people use to find brand names with matching domain names. Because of this, I lean towards listing brandable types of domain names on Atom. I figure someone looking for a creative brand name will use Atom and my inventory should be shown on related terms.

When I am assessing domain names to buy, one of the things I think about is where I would list it for sale along with the value to an end user buyer. I think of Atom for the brandable types of domain names I think would be a good fit with the platform, especially with a custom logo.

In a recent DomainIQ domain monitor alert I received, I saw a well-known AI company’s domain name had a status change. After looking into it and seeing nothing of importance, I became curious about what domain registrars some of the most well-known AI companies use for their primary domain name.

I asked ChatGPT and Claude to give me a list of prominent AI companies. I then used the two lists along with my own observations to create a curated list of notable AI companies. This is not a definitive ranking of top AI companies, but a representative group of top AI companies I could use to look into where their primary domain names are registered.

“No good deed goes unpunished!” This is a famous phrase that expresses how an attempted good deed can sometimes backfire on the person who had good intentions. I’ve thought of this idiom numerous times when trying to help an organization secure a domain name I think they should own.

There have been countless times I’ve noticed an expiry auction or deleted domain name that matches a non-profit organization or someone else I wanted to help. After seeing the domain name, I figured it would be easy enough to let them know about the auction or available domain name. Because of the number of times this has caused confusion and/or consternation in the past, I’ve only done this a handful of times more recently.

Nearly all of the domain names my company owns are listed for sale on landing pages that clearly indicate they are available to purchase. Even those that aren’t – like this one – have a contact form to allow someone to get in touch very easily. In my experience, the vast majority of inquiries that are done via Whois record are spam.

In my recent memory, I can only think of two domain names that I sold after receiving an inquiry via Whois, and both were a fair amount of time ago. In fact, one was sold on a three year payment plan at Dan.com, and that deal closed two years ago. A second deal ended up being a BIN deal but I don’t recall exactly when it sold.