What is the Most Valuable Professional Sports Team Domain Name?

Elliot Silver
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18

The majority of professional sports teams own their exact match team .com domain names. In fact, of the 123 professional sports teams in the four major US sports leagues (NBA, MLB, NFL, and NHL), 76 of them own their nickname .com domain name (61.7%).

I thought it would be fun to have a look at exact match team .com domain names to see which I think is the most valuable domain name. When it comes to “value,” I am strictly thinking about the generic nature of the domain name rather than the relation to the specific team or its branding strength. For instance, I think a domain name like Wild.com (owned by the NHL and Minnesota Wild) is a more valuable domain name than RedSox.com (owned by the Boston Red Sox).

Using the information from the article about sports team domain names I published yesterdat morning, I narrowed it down to my top 5 domain names. The list is not scientific by any stretch, and it is reflective of my personal opinion about valuation. Your list would likely be different than mine. Interestingly, if someone tried to use an automated tool like Estibot to figure out the values, that tool takes into account many aspects related to the actual team (such as Google references), and that would throw off the intrinsic value.

In my opinion, here are the top 5 most valuable domain names (in no particular order) owned by a sports team:

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10 Year Anniversary of the Cowboys.com Auction

Elliot Silver
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2

One thing you will notice on yesterday’s report about professional sports team domain names is that the Dallas Cowboys, one of the most valuable sports franchises in the world, does not own Cowboys.com. For those who may be new to the domain name industry, there is a pretty wild story about why the franchise doesn’t own Cowboys.com today.

10 years ago this month, the Dallas Cowboys thought they purchased Cowboys.com at a Moniker live domain name auction for $275. After the auction, it was reported that the Dallas Cowboys “misunderstood what the pricing system was” because their bid was actually for $275,000. As a result of this confusion, the Dallas Cowboys retracted their bid and did not purchase the domain name.

Making the story all the more interesting, the domain name ended up selling for $370,000 in the silent auction that followed the live auction. Cowboys.com was purchased by a group of investors. As I recall, some people in that initial investment group were privately (and profitably) selling ownership shares to other investors who wanted to participate, although that is based on my own recollection. YouTube has a couple of videos of interviews Darren Cleveland did with Eric Rice and Rick Schwartz shortly after the group won the auction:

Since that time, Cowboys.com has had a bit of an interesting history. For some period of time a few years ago, Cowboys.com was used as a dating website. That got quite a bit

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US Professional Sports Team Domain Names (Updated)

Elliot Silver
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13

In mid-2009, I wrote about the exact match team .com domain names owned by the teams or leagues in the 4 major US sports leagues (MLB, NFL, NBA, and NHL). At that time, NBA teams owned 76.7% of the EMD team domain names, MLB teams owned 73.3% of the EMD team domain names, NFL teams owned 53.1% of the EMD team domain names, and NHL teams owned 26.7% of the EMD team domain names.

This morning, I had another look at the team and league domain names to see how much this percentage changed over the past 8 years, and here is what I found:

Percentage of teams that own their .com team name:
NBA: 76.7%
MLB: 90%
NFL: 56.3%
NHL: 25.8%

The league that had the greatest increase in exact match team nickname .com domain names was

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Are You Spending More Time on Cryptocurrency?

Elliot Silver
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21

I was chatting with a veteran domain investor on Tuesday who has become active in the cryptocurrency space. He posted something crypto-related on social media, and I messaged him to ask what it meant. Long story short, he essentially told me that domain investing was much more boring than cryptocurrency and the returns are better.

I follow the cryptocurrency space, although I am not all that knowledgable about it. I happen to agree with this person on both accounts right now. I have never found domain names all that exciting, although negotiating deals is fun and the money is great. If you look at any of the cryptocurrency charts, he is also right about the returns.

Great domain names still get high prices on the aftermarket, but I think there has been a bit of a lull for the middle of the market. I am not sure how long this has lasted because my portfolio isn’t a good barometer for the industry as a whole, but my guess is that it has been about

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Mike Mann’s Domain Investing Pitch

Elliot Silver
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7

Mike Mann shared a well thought out Facebook post this morning that would seem to make a good case for .com domain name investing. The post reads like a pitch to a finance firm, and I thought it was worth a share.

From Mike’s Facebook page and Twitter account:

“The bid:ask spread is huuuge in the super premium .Com domain trading space, which helps make the investment very risky, expensive and time consuming; however it also leaves enormous margins to arbitrage for potentially enormous future profits. It’s too hard for others to compete, and there is still considerable room for innovation in tech and marketing and helping the public discover the true long term value of this special asset class. Super premium .Com domains are incredibly profitable long term investments if handled properly; they have little relationship to the hundreds of millions of crappy domains for sale in the world, at totally random not professionally appraised prices, in poorly organized marketplaces.”

People regularly ask me about investing in domain names, and my answer is not usually as well refined as what Mike wrote. My only criticism is that Mike’s comments focus quite a bit on the

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Ray Dalio May Think He’s a “Dumb Shit” But He Got Principles.com

Elliot Silver
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1

Ray Dalio is the founder of Bridgewater Associates, a company that reportedly manages about $150 billion in global investments. Mr. Dalio recently authored a book called Principles, which was published this past week. Although the first sentence of the book says, “… I want to establish that I’m a ‘dumb shit’…,” Mr. Dalio is quite smart about domain names.

If you want to learn about Mr. Dalio or purchase his book, you can simply visit the exact match domain name, Principles.com.

It appears that an entity affiliated with Bridgewater likely acquired the Principles.com domain name some time last Summer, according to DomainTools. The Whois record had privacy enabled from 2012 through the middle of 2016, so it is possible that the domain name was acquired prior to last Summer and kept under privacy. Prior to this time period,

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