Getting a small ownership stake in a company that wants (or needs) a domain name I own is a nice bonus. That is how I look at getting equity as part of a domain name deal. Over the years, I have been asked a few times about this, and I have also discussed this option with several prospective buyers over the years. I want to share some thoughts based on my limited experience.

Taking equity in a company when selling a domain name can be advantageous, as evidenced by Rick Schwartz reportedly earning nearly $650,000 from the sale of his equity stake in Teem. This is on top of the cash payment he received after selling the startup the Teem.com domain name. We also recently learned that Dropbox offered some shares to the owner of the DropBox.com domain name. The owner took cash instead, and may have lost out on the potential to earn “hundreds of millions,” according to the founder of Dropbox, Drew Houston, as relayed by Andrew Allemann.

The idea of getting equity in a startup that becomes a unicorn is the stuff of dreams. I have found that it complicates deals and is more of a crapshoot than a surefire way to increase the value of a deal.

Based on my experiences, taking equity can

I looked through Archive.org to see how the design of this website has changed over the past ten+ years. Because I rebranded as DomainInvesting.com from Elliot’s Blog back in 2013, I had to look at the results for ElliotsBlog.com as well. When I did this, I realized how much the design, fonts, colors, and even the content has changed. There is one thing that has stayed the same for over ten years now: the advertising support of Domain Capital.

My blog was started in mid-2007, and I began writing daily articles about the domain industry and my businesses in early 2008. For more than ten years, Domain Capital has been advertising on my website. The banner designs and location may have changed, but Domain Capital has been advertising since the very beginning, and I am grateful.

I am fortunate to have quite a few companies that have continued to renew their banner advertising for a few years or longer. Escrow.com is coming up on ten years of advertising next year, and several companies have been advertising for five years or longer. Without this advertising support, I would not be able to continue to operate this website.

Thank you to the guys at Domain Capital for continuing to advertise here. I sincerely appreciate it.

According to a report this morning on TechCrunch, CloudFlare is expanding its footprint in the domain name registrar business. The article states that CloudFlare aims to offer low-cost domain registrations. It already offers registrar and domain name management services to enterprise clients.

Here’s an excerpt from the article describing the offering, with a quote from CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince:

“After announcing the Bandwidth Alliance yesterday, the company today announced the Cloudflare Registrar. This new domain registration service promises to only charge the wholesale price that the top-level domain registry (think Verisign) charges. Typically, registrars charge their own fees on top of that and try to upsell you to a hosting plan or other services that you likely don’t need.

As Cloudflare CEO and co-founder Matthew Prince told me, this new service isn’t meant to be a loss-leader. “We took a look at this and said: every single Cloudflare customer needs to register their domains,” he told me. “And I’ve never heard somebody say: I love my domain registrar. We hope to create the first domain registrar people love.””

From my perspective as an investor, the registration cost of domain names is