Domain Investors Aren’t Well-Liked

Domain investors aren’t well liked. Beyond typical social situations, the only time someone may meet a domain investor is when they want to purchase a domain name that is owned by an investor. The vitriol aimed towards domain investors can be quite alarming. Case in point, this “domain hoarder” comment I received a while ago.

Over the weekend, Mike Carson wrote about his Friendster.com acquisition in a blog post that was widely shared on Hacker News. At one point, it was the top post of the day garnering hundreds of comments. The comment that rose to the top had little to do with Friendster and a great deal to do with Mike’s background in the domain investment space:

Domain Name Registrations Reveal Amazon Acquisition

This morning, I noticed that Amazon registered a bunch of domain names with NLX in them. The company bought a large swath of domain names via corporate registrar Com Laude on April 21st. I noticed these domain name registrations with the help of the Registrant Monitor tool at DomainTools, and I shared what I found on X.

Some of the domain names Amazon registered included:

Atom.com – What’s Your Portfolio Value?

I have sold more than a dozen domain names on Atom.com. I also have a few domain names that are currently on LTO deals. I’ve enjoyed working with the platform and have a little less than 10% of my portfolio listed on Atom.

Atom has a section on the user dashboard called “Portfolio Value.” I am pretty sure this is the appraised valuation of all domain names listed on the platform using the automated Atom domain appraisal tool. Based on this comment on X, I think the value is derived by adding the BIN price of all domain names in the portfolio. Not surprisingly, the portfolio value fluctuates frequently.

Tandem Asks: Tandem.Space or TandemSpace.com?

Tandem is a venture backed office marketplace that was in the Spring 2024 batch of YCombinator startups. The company is currently using Tandem.Space for its website, and it also owns TandemSpace.com. That domain name forwards to its website.

In a LinkedIn post over the weekend, Sean Miller, Co-Founder and CTO of Tandem, discussed the pros and cons of both of these domain names. He mentioned that the company has used Tandem.Space for a while, but they are considering a change to TandemSpace.com.

Track the Growth of “Prosumer” Domain Names


Earlier this morning, Nikita Bier, Head of Product at X, declared it would be the year of the “prosumer” for people working at the “frontier of AI:”

Honestly, I had to do a quick search to learn the meaning of prosumer (Wikipedia states it is “an individual who both consumes and produces.”) It’s a mashup of the words producer and consumer.

Claw.com Owned by Hasbro

Claw.com is a domain name that has been long-owned by Hasbro. The domain name was originally created in 1996. Claw.com doesn’t resolve to any website at the moment. In looking back at Archive.org, Claw.com was used independently more than 20 years ago. At some points in time, it appears to have forwarded to the toy maker’s Hasbro.com website.

OpenClaw is an open-source, autonomous AI agent platform that people have been using to create and operate their own agents. OpenClaw was very recently acquired by OpenAI. Many developers have been using OpenClaw and building various products and services that integrate with OpenClaw or operate using OpenClaw. Some of these use OpenClaw or Claw within their branding.