When people ask what I do and I tell them about my involvement in the domain business, many people ask me if it is similar to what GoDaddy does. I find the question interesting because it shows just how much name recognition the  GoDaddy brand  has. I also find it interesting because people seem to genuinely want to know what investing in domain names entails.

I thought I would share how I explain what I do to make it more simple for people to understand domain name investing. My explanation typically goes something like this:

Apple owns quite a few valuable keyword .com domain names that I have seen in many Whois look ups. The company owns great domain names like Apple.com (obviously), Me.com, Mac.com, Newton.com, Carbon.com, Next.com, and many others.

Based on a recent changed I detected with the help of DomainTools, it seems like Grail.com has changed hands. Up until August 23,  Grail.com was owned by Apple and registered at CSC. Within the last couple of days, the domain name  registration information went private, and it is now registered at Google Domains. Based on a biography page on RFX.com, it looks like Apple may have acquired Grail.com  in 2002 when “Apple Computer acquired the technologies belonging to Silicon Grail.” Grail.com has a creation date of October 20, 1991.

When I visited Grail.com, I was

I was buying something on Amazon this morning, when I decided to search for “domain name.” I was initially curious to know if I would find any domain name listings on Amazon, but I was very surprised to see how many books about domain names are listed on Amazon.

Have a look at this screenshot of a portion of my search results:

Yesterday, I wrote about the landing page on TrumpPence.com and how I thought the registrar generated PPC (pay per click) links could  be risky for the domain owner, even though the owner doesn’t have control over the links nor benefits from them. Smartly, it looks like that temporary landing page has been updated to reflect that the domain is for sale.

Now that Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has officially announced that Indiana Governor Mike Pence will be his Vice Presidential running mate, the TrumpPence.com domain name  has value. I would think  potential suitors include the Trump campaign, super PACs or other groups that support Mr.  Trump, or even super PACs and groups that oppose Mr. Trump’s candidacy. Perhaps an opponent of Mr. Trump would want to own this domain name.

The registrar  landing page is gone, and in its place is a landing page announcing that the TrumpPence.com domain name is for sale: