In 2018, Afilias published a sponsored article on CircleID announcing that the company was looking to buy domain extensions at NamesCon. That was a couple of years ago, and the company is advertising on Domain Incite with a prominent banner that makes it clear the company is still seeking to acquire TLDs. That got me thinking about whether there are more companies looking to buy domain extensions or more companies looking to buy domain name portfolios.
MarkMonitor is one of the leading brand protection and domain name management companies. The company has many Fortune 500 customers, and it also works with a variety of businesses of all sizes – from startups to major corporations. In its position, it has a very good view of the domain name landscape and can offer a unique perspective.
This afternoon, the company tweeted about its New gTLD Quarterly Report for the first quarter of 2020:
What’s your #gTLD and #TLD strategy? We review what’s new and what’s changed in the .Brand landscape by industry. Download the report here: https://t.co/SQMBwVtEUY#gTLDs #Domain #DomainNames
— Clarivate MarkMonitor (@markmonitor) May 27, 2020
Musician Future sent fans on a music hunt across 149 different domain names to find music “leaked” from Future’s new album. The viral tweet announcing this Internet scavenger hunt of sorts was shared this afternoon on Future’s Twitter feed:
— FUTURE/FREEBANDZ (@1future) May 14, 2020
In April, I reported the sale of My.Life, a domain name that was owned by Donuts and sold to Meredith Corporation. It was a large cash sale with a two part payment plan. At the time of the sale, I did not know why Meredith acquired the domain name, but it looks like the company may have acquired it for a rebrand of an app it recently acquired.
On the homepage of My.Life, I can see links to an App store app called Stop, Breathe & Think, which has thousands of reviews. News of Meredith’s acquisition was announced in October of 2019.
I noticed the launch of My.Life after Bob Hawkes just tweeted about it this afternoon:
I have a couple of friends who love Family Guy and regularly cite lines from the popular cartoon television show. Bill Doshier from the .Buzz registry shared a video on LinkedIn from a recent Family Guy episode. During the show, one of the cartoons mentions that his website is FlyOnTheWall.Buzz.
Interestingly, that domain name does not appear to have been registered by anyone associated with the television show. In fact, FlyOnTheWall.Buzz was registered four days ago and has what appears to be an unrelated website operating on it.
The video is embedded within Bill’s LinkedIn update below:
The $200,000 sale of Shop.app via Sedo is one of the ten largest publicly reported domain name sales of the year listed on DNJournal. Andrew Allemann reported that the buyer of Shop.app was Shopify, although the reason for spending $200k for the domain name was not known at the time of the acquisition. Because of GDPR, I am unable to see what entity owned the Shop.app domain name prior to the sale, but Google operates the .app extension.
A tweet from Efty’s Doron Vermaat revealed why Shopify spent this much money to buy the Shop.app domain name:
