There were two high value domain names reportedly coming up for auction in the last several weeks. Democracy.com was listed for sale via Heritage Auctions, and the domain name was reportedly sold privately before it went to auction. Fashion.com was also reportedly up for auction in October. Fashion.com and Democracy.com are generic domain names that can be turned into powerful brands.
Jamie Zoch shared a link on Twitter to Y Combinator’s 2019 Top Companies List. He mentioned that most of the companies own their brand match .com domain names, which is no surprise to me:
Y Combinator’s 2019 top companies list, hats off to you! Each valued at $150M+. The overwhelming majority of all the companies in the list own the exact match .com #domain to what they brand as. #startup #domainnames #brand #ItMatters https://t.co/9xNHU9Dx0t
— Jamie Zoch (@DotWeekly) October 3, 2019
A Boston-area company announced via press release that it was rebranding its business with a descriptive domain name. Datasafe Information Security, which was founded in 1990 and will be celebrating its 30th anniversary next year, is rebranding as Destruction.com.
Since the company was founded, it’s primary focus of shredding documents has grown beyond paper shredding. The company now offers a variety of destruction services, including electronics, counterfeit or defective products, expired foods, and more. With its expanded focus, I think the Destruction.com branding is stronger and better describes its services.
MicroStrategy (MSTR on NASDAQ) held its earnings conference call on July 30, 2019. As you likely know, MicroStrategy sold Voice.com for $30 million in the second quarter of 2019. This was the largest all-cash domain name sale of all time, and it had an impact on the company’s earnings.
During the conference call yesterday, MicroStrategy CEO Michael J. Saylor made some comments about the sale of Voice.com. He also offered some insight about the valuation of domain names.
You can read the entire transcript on Yahoo Finance, but below is an excerpt with Mr. Saylor’s comments about Voice.com and the value of great domain names:
TechCrunch reported on a startup called Boundless that raised a $7.8 million Series A round of funding. Boundless is an “online green card application support services,” and the company uses its brand match .com domain name, Boundless.com.
I did a bit of research on the history of the Boundless.com domain name to see when the startup was able to acquire it. Because the domain name has been registered under Whois privacy for several years at Namecheap, I can’t see when the company acquired the domain name. To try and peg down when the company acquired the domain name, I used Archive.org to see what was on the domain name and when. Here’s what I found:
A company called ContractHireAndLeasing.com recently rebranded as Leasing.com. The announcement was made in a LinkedIn post and video shared by the company and its founder late last week:
