Buyer of Vacation.Rentals Does AMA

Elliot Silver
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19

Donuts reported that it sold the Vacation.Rentals domain name for $500,300 in an all-cash deal. This sale was reportedly the largest new gTLD domain name sale to date. It was the second reported $500,000+ sale of a new gTLD domain name reported by Donuts this year.

Earlier today, I was alerted via Twitter and email that the buyer of Vacation.Rentals, Mike Kugler, did an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on the AMAFeed.com platform. In the AMA, there were quite a few questions posed about the domain name and the acquisition of the domain name.

Here are some of the more relevant domain name related questions that were posed:

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Some Interesting Coinbase Domain Registrations

Elliot Silver
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3

In my daily DomainTools email, I noticed some interesting Coinbase-related domain name registrations. These domain names were registered via the DNStination privacy proxy service operated by MarkMonitor. Coinbase, Inc. uses Mark Monitor for its Coinbase.com domain name registration, so it seems highly likely that the company registered these domain names as opposed to a third party.

Some of the more interesting domain name registrations I noticed:

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Domain Names Are Relatively Cheap

Elliot Silver
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5

I read an Inc. article about a company called Swag, which uses the exact match Swag.com for its domain name. What grabbed my attention beyond the killer domain name was how they reportedly got the domain name:

“They also observed that no one owned the domain name swag.com, so they quickly grabbed it.”

This stood out to me, and a couple of quick searches proved this to be incorrect (I imagine it is misunderstanding). The Swag.com domain name is registered privately, but Whois records show that it was created in 1995 and owned by someone else for quite some time. A search of my Gmail shows that this domain name had been brokered before – Swag.com was listed for sale for $275,000 in September of 2015 in the Media Options newsletter. In fact, in an interview 4.cn did with Andrew Rosener, he confirmed that his company brokered the sale of Swag.com.

That really is neither here nor there, but seeing Swag.com marketed for sale at $275,000 really emphasizes how relatively inexpensive domain names are.

Just about every business has substantial startup costs. Want to start a local restaurant? A survey on

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Escrow Could Change Because of GDPR

Elliot Silver
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20

Yesterday morning, I asked if readers are concerned with the Whois changes that are likely coming because of Europe’s GDPR regulations. Nearly 40% of those who responded are not concerned about changes, which is a bit surprising to me given the nature of what could change.

I was chatting about the Whois changes with a friend, and one big change that might come as a result of not having public Whois records is the domain name sale escrow process. When domain owners sell domain names without the involvement of a marketplace like Sedo or Afternic, most use a third party escrow service (or they should) like Payoneer Escrow or Escrow.com. The verification process currently in place is going to have to change if public Whois records are not available.

The way the process works now is that

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Municipalities Shouldn’t Let Old Domain Names Expire

Elliot Silver
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1

Saving money is important for municipalities. Taxpayers tend to ask their elected officials to spend less money, and elected officials probably want to save money however they can. I urge municipalities to not let previously used domain names expire!

This afternoon, I noticed a domain name formerly owned by a local municipality coming up for auction. This .org domain name is a pending delete domain name, so I do not believe the former registrant can renew it at this point in time. The domain name appears to have been used as a website, but the website is now resolving on a different domain name affiliated with the municipality. The Twitter account for this town agency still has the old domain name listed in its profile (the domain name that is coming up for auction), and I presume there are probably quite a few backlinks that reference the domain name.

Once the domain name goes to auction, it is almost certain that a third party will own the domain name unless someone from the town (or a benefactor) decides to re-purchase it. My guess is that the backlinks give this otherwise

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Here Are Some of Amazon’s Ring Domain Names

Elliot Silver
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4

Geekwire announced that Amazon was set to acquire Ring, in a deal valued at $1 billion. Ring is an innovative company, and of course, it operates on the high value Ring.com domain name. If you don’t know about how Ring acquired Ring.com, you will want to read more about it on NamePros, including a 2015 interview with the company’s founder, Jamie Siminoff.

Following the release of the news, Amazon purchased/registered quite a few Ring related domain names. Not only was it smart to register these domain names, but it was even smarter to do it on the day the news broke to avoid tipping off others about the pending acquisition.

One thing of note is that the AmazonRing.com domain name was purchased quite a long time ago. In fact, AmazonRing.com was first registered in 2005, many years before DoorBot (the original brand name of Ring) was founded in 2012. It looks like Amazon has owned that domain name since at least 2007, and the company may have been the first registrant.

Here is an assortment of the domain names Amazon registered since news of the Ring acquisition broke (did not include many variations of ccTLD or alternative extensions):

  • amazon-ring.com
  • amazonring.audio
  • amazonring.ca
  • amazonring.cloud
  • amazonring.camera
  • amazonring.net
  • amazonring.solutions
  • amazonring.support
  • amazonringapp.com
  • amazonringcam.com
  • amazonringcams.com
  • amazonringcloud.cam
  • amazonringsecurity.com
  • ring-amazon.com
  • ring.cam
  • ring.house
  • ring.moi
  • ring.webcam
  • ringamazon.com
  • ringcloudcam.com

One thing to note is that Ring already owns its own portfolio of Ring-related domain names, such as RingDoorBell.com, Ring.net, and Ring.CO. I imagine Amazon decided to defensively purchase many of the available Ring-related domain names in alternative extensions. This is smart because it is obviously far less expensive to hand register these domain names rather than try to chase down potential cybersquatters in the future.

On a similar but separate note, I was

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