According to an article in the New York Times a little over a week ago, a new professional US women’s soccer team has been established. The NWSL expansion team will begin playing during the 2022 season, and it will call Los Angeles its home. A number of famous women make up the ownership group, including Mia Hamm, Natalie Portman, Eva Longoria, Serena Williams, and many others. The franchise will be known as Angel City.
The NFL football team formerly known as the Washington Redskins has acquired the WashingtonFootball.com domain name. Redskins.com is now forwarding to WashingtonFootball.com, and the NFL team’s Twitter profile now includes a link to WashingtonFootball.com. Details about the domain name sale was reported by the former registrant, Cal Spears, CEO at Better Collective Tennessee.
According to a tweet from Spears, the NFL team privately acquired the domain name from him using a broker from GoDaddy. He had owned WashingtonFootball.com for 8 years:
I was pretty surprised when I came across a NamePros thread last week about a GoDaddy program I was neither aware of nor had I heard about. Apparently, there was a rewards program that gave GoDaddy account credit for buying GoDaddy products and services. What stood out to me was that this apparently included purchasing domain names in auction at GoDaddy Auctions.
Here’s what the NamePros member shared about the GoDaddy Pro program:
This afternoon, I received an email from GoDaddy with the subject: “Action required: Authorize your domain listings.” This is a fairly standard type of email that I get on a somewhat regular basis. The domain name included in the email is one that I own and have registered in my GoDaddy account. A quick check in my Afternic account revealed that the domain name was not yet listed for sale there.
I believe this means someone else added this domain name to their Afternic account, and GoDaddy sent the authorization email to confirm the registrant authorizes the domain name to be listed for sale via Afternic.
There have been a number of times where I received a direct inquiry or offer on a domain name, and instead of doing a deal directly with my company, the buyer will purchase the domain name via GoDaddy, where I also have it listed for sale. Sometimes the deal is done at a higher (or substantially higher) price than I would have offered had the deal been closed directly with me. Some buyers simply trust the GoDaddy brand name and are willing to pay a premium price to close a deal via GoDaddy.
Pierluigi Buccioli kicked off a discussion on Twitter yesterday, and I commented in response to him:
A friend of mine reached out this afternoon to ask if I know who is managing the portfolio of Mrs Jello, the domain investment company founded by the late Igal Lichtman. I gave him the name of someone I thought might be helpful and asked what’s up. He mentioned that Mica.com expired and Mrs Jello should renew the domain name before it is auctioned or deleted.
I took a look at the Whois record, and I noticed the domain name is registered at Uniregistry, and it has an expiration date of March 2021. The domain name was not in expired status because if the registrar had renewed it for a year in preparation for an auction, the domain name would have already run through its full expiration cycle by now. What my friend noticed and I confirmed is the name servers are set to Uniregistry’s default name servers (NS1.EXPIRED.UNIREGISTRY-DNS.COM NS2.EXPIRED.UNIREGISTRY-DNS.COM), and as a result, the landing page indicates the domain name is in expired status:
