General Domain Information

A colleague emailed to ask me why I am not working with a specific landing page service he has been using. I neither have enough domain names to really give a company a fair shot, nor do I have the desire to set up many accounts at different platforms, giving access to private data to many companies.

The first issue is the primary issue. If I set up an account at a new landing page or parking service and only test 50 domain names, there’s a pretty good chance there will be very minimal impact – either positive or negative. Is that the fault of the service provider? No, of course not. I can’t pass judgment on the performance of a company with a limited number of domain names for a limited amount of time. If the service sucks or is bonkers, I won’t know if it’s the service, the names, seasonality, or a multitude of other factors beyond their control. It would be silly to test out a whole bunch of services when I can’t really determine why a test went well or went poorly.

I came across a job posting on LinkedIn that might be of interest to someone in the domain space. Tucows is looking to hire a Compliance Officer for its domain name business. This is a mission critical role at the Toronto-based company. This job is billed as a remote position, meaning the new hire will not need to work out of the company’s office.

Here’s a summary of the position, extracted from the job listing:

This weekend, in preparation for a scavenger hunt hike with our kids, I got a bit sidetracked and began looking up associated domain names. One domain name I came across stood out to me because of the landing page that was shown:

This was surprising to me because I know the longtime domain registrant, and I can see the domain name utilizes Bodis nameservers. Not only are there no PPC links like other domain names, the “for sale” inquiry banner and link are also missing from the landing page.

I have always appreciated how Atom.com CEO Darpan Munjal has been willing to share data freely. It’s helpful to see what types of domain names are selling across his platform and to understand how people are finding domain names to buy.

Darpan has also been willing to engage with domain investors on X. Yesterday morning, Darpan opened up an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session on X. He invited people to pose questions to him, and he has been answering them. Darpan said he will continue answering questions through the weekend, so if there’s anything you would like to know about his platform or domain name sales / marketing in general, now would be a good time to ask:

The other day, I consolidated some .com domain names at GoDaddy prior to the most recent Verisign price increase. When I tried to approve the transfers at NameBright, I encountered an error message that prevented me from transferring the domain names to GoDaddy.

I reached out to NameBright support, and I was directed to try and approve the transfers on the legacy website. NameBright recently launched a new platform, but it still operates the older platform at Legacy.NameBright.com. I logged in to my account on the legacy platform, navigated to the transfer authorization screen, and the transfers were immediately released after I approved.

You are likely aware by now, but the price of .com domain names is increasing again on Sunday, September 1, 2024. Verisign is raising the wholesale cost by 7%, as permitted in its registry agreement. Retail domain registrars will likely pass along the price increase to customers, but it could be more than 7%.

If you want to take advantage of current pricing, you should renew the .com domain names before the price increase. You may also consider transferring domain names for the same savings. Domain registrars sometimes bill customers for transfers upon completion, so it may be too late depending on where the domain names are registered.

This past week, I transferred more than 50 .com domain names to GoDaddy that I held at various registrars following expiry auction wins. My preference is to keep nearly all of my domain names in one account to ensure they don’t get “lost.” The Verisign price increase is an impetus for bringing more of my domain names into a single account at one registrar.

Thanks to Brian Wick for the article suggestion.