General Domain Information

On September 1, 2023 – two weeks from now – the wholesale price of .com domain names is going to increase to $9.59/year. Verisign operates the .com registry, and the annual price is going to increase by 7%, according to a report about Verisign by Zacks Investment Research appearing on Yahoo Finance:

“The company plans to increase the annual registry-level wholesale fee for each new and renewal .com domain name registration from $8.97 to $9.59, with effect from Sep 1, 2023.”

If this sounds familiar, it is because Verisign increased the wholesale price of .com domain names a year ago.

When someone inquires about buying a domain name listed for sale via Embrace.com, they will read my response and the accompanying email signature. You’ll notice a few things I think are important for an informative signature to include.

In addition to including a link to the website’s homepage, I include a link to my LinkedIn profile. This serves two purposes. For one thing, the prospective buyer can see that I am a real person with experience related to domain names. This might make them more comfortable doing business with my company. In addition, if they click through to my profile, I may be able to see more information about them, making me more comfortable.

Much has been said about Meta’s launch of its Threads app on the Threads.net domain name. For many years, much has also been said about the impact of not using a brand match .com domain name when launching a product or a service. SimilarWeb, a web analytics company, illustrates the .com effect using Threads as an example.

James Iles highlighted this report today:

In June, it was announced that Google will be exiting the domain registrar business. The company is selling Google Domains to Squarespace. After the deal closes, customers whose domain names are registered at Google Domains will have their domain names and account data transferred to Squarespace.

WordPress, which is also a domain registrar, published a blog post with a free domain name transfer offer to Google Domains customers. Here’s an excerpt from the blog post, in which WordPress offered free domain name transfers to Google Domains customers:

In 2017, Elon Musk acquired X.com from PayPal in a private transaction. The acquisition price for X.com, as far as I know, was never reported publicly by PayPal or Musk. For quite some time, X.com has been underutilized, with just a small text “x” appearing in the upper left corner of the landing age.

Earlier this year, Elon Musk acquired Twitter. He has been tweeting about creating a company called X with financial services and Twitter amongst its properties. Musk recently put Twitter under the X umbrella. The copyright on the bottom of the website says, “© 2023 X Corp.“