General Domain Information

One of the features of Dan.com is that buyers can utilize a lease to own (LTO) payment plan to buy a domain name over a set period of time. Each month, the buyer makes a payment for the domain name until the domain name is paid-off in full. Payment plans can be as short as a few months or as long as five years. The Dan.com TOS covers some of the prohibitions

I’ve been under the impression that a LTO buyer can not actively sell a domain name before the purchase is paid in full. Outbound marketing of a domain name can be risky. For instance, attempting to sell a 3 letter .com domain name to a company that uses the 3 letters as its acronym or brand can lead to the company filing a UDRP or ACPA lawsuit. The company could cite the outbound email pitch as proof of bad faith registration.

Jamie Zoch has uncovered more domain name sales and transactions than just about anyone I know. He has access to the same tools I use, yet he finds far more interesting domain name registrant changes and domain name moves than me. I’ve used Jamie’s tweets as a source for many articles, and I appreciate the work he puts into discovering interesting bits of information and data about domain names.

Jamie doesn’t update his blog any longer, and most of his findings are shared on his Twitter page. As a result, it is not easy for him to monetize the data and information he shares. People have asked about sending him gifts as a means of showing appreciation, and Jamie tweeted about how people can do this:

This past weekend, George Kirikos shared that he had discovered a seven figure domain name sale that had not ben disclosed before. According to a SEC filing, Better.com was acquired for $1,820,000. George wrote about the domain name sale on his FreeSpeech.com blog. I also added the sale to the Embrace.com list of recent one word .com domain name sales.

On Twitter, George suggested that it would be interesting to see where domain names that were (publicly) sold for one million or more are currently registered.

[1/2] A potential blog post for those with time on their hands (or automated tools). According to @NameBio, there are 136 public transactions of $1 million or more (137 once Better(.)com is added).

Story Idea: Find the current registrar of each “million dollar domain” (cont’d)

— George Kirikos (@GeorgeKirikos) August 7, 2021

I also thought that would be neat to see, and it would be fairly easy to do.

I started by searching NameBio for all public million dollar plus domain name sales and downloaded them into a CSV file. This was easy because I have a paid NameBio account, allowing me to search sales data and download reports like this. I then used the bulk Whois search tool at DomainIQ using my paid account. Among other attributes of the Whois records, I am able to see where each domain name is registered.

Here is the registrar information for the publicly reported million dollar domain name sales found on NameBio:

According to a tweet from Hiren Patel, a domain investor has spent more than $500,000 to purchase a Bored Ape Yacht Club Ape. The golden ape is part of the BAYC NFT series that has become quite popular during the past few months. Several domain investors I know have purchased BAYC apes. Hiren shared the news in a tweet:

Boom Purchased by my very good friend. Super happy for you @Robistraveling .. We been discussing about it since last night. Super happy for you. https://t.co/xYkHp0hoZ8

— XBOT (Hiren Patel) 🍌 🦍 👽🐱 (@QualityNames_) August 5, 2021

Earlier this year, it was announced that Verisign will be increasing the wholesale cost for .com domain name registrations and renewals (this includes domain name transfers). The price increase will be implemented in less than a month on September 1, 2021. Verisign has the contract to operate and manage the registry for .com domain names.

The wholesale cost, paid to Verisign by domain registrars like GoDaddy and Namecheap, will be raised to $8.39/year. The current cost is $7.85/year. The wholesale price does not include the domain registrar’s mark-up, nor does it include the additional $.18 fee charged by ICANN.