New gTLD

According to a tweet from Identity Digital (formerly Donuts), the Bet.bet domain name reportedly sold for $600,000. I have not verified or researched the veracity of the sale report, but it was indexed in NameBio today.

I currently own fewer than 30 .XYZ domain names. I acquired most of them via Afternic, Dan, or in auctions on Namecheap. With the exception of Embrace.xyz, I am pretty sure I paid less than $500/each for the domain names I bought.

One important aspect to my acquisition strategy was to acquire domain names that did not have a premium renewal fee. Not only do I not want to pay hundreds of dollars a year (or more) to renew a domain name, I did not want to have to explain the premium renewal fee to prospective buyers. I’ve always felt this was a deterrent.

I saw something amusing that Twitter highlighted for me today that I want to share because of its domain name relevance. This has probably gone around before, but I don’t remember hearing anything about it.

If you visit Endless.Horse, which may be the only .horse domain name I have ever visited, you will see a nearly endless horse. If you can scroll to the bottom of the page, you’ll find a surprise.

Here’s a video of someone scrolling to the end of Endless.horse for those without the patience.

pic.twitter.com/1AeuGGhUjf

— NO CONTEXT HUMANS 👤 (@HumansNoContext) October 30, 2023

Lease to Own deals have become quite popular at Dan.com. The buyer can pay for a domain name monthly over a set period of time while Dan.com holds the domain name. If the buyer opts out of the LTO deal, the seller will receive the domain name back and can keep all of the funds paid, minus the monthly commission fee.

Domain Gang and DNW recently reported on the $129k LTO sale of Mega.xyz. As Theo reported, the five year lease to own plan had a total value of $167,000 had all payments been made. When the LTO deal was struck, the seller, domain industry veteran Kellie Peterson, posted on LinkedIn about this LTO deal and prior experience with .XYZ domain names.

Yesterday afternoon, I saw a tweet from Domainler.com asking if the sale had been cancelled because Mega.xyz was now resolving to a Dan.com “for sale” landing page:

Mr. Beast is one of the most popular YouTube personalities. In fact, I’m probably not in his target audience, but I find myself watching his viral videos from time to time. My kids and their friends also love watching Mr. Beast.

Mr. Beast’s newest video on YouTube caught my attention because of an in-video advertorial related to domain names. Mr. Beast switched the domain name extension for his merchandise shop from a .com domain name to a .store domain name. Mr. Beast’s store moved from ShopMrBeast.com to MrBeast.Store.

In looking at the historical Whois records at DomainTools, I can see the same company that owns ShopMrBeast.com has owned MrBeast.Store since at least 2019. The domain name was created in 2017, but it was registered under Whois privacy until 2019.

In the description section of the video, it is clear this is a promotion. It says, “Go buy my merch at https://mrbeast.store and if you’re looking to set up an online store, it should be on a .Store domain. Thanks for sponsoring this video!” I assume this is a paid promotion from Radix, the operator of the .Store domain registry. Not only does it seem like a solid ad buy from the registry, but I am sure Mr. Beast’s domain extension change will bring quite a bit of exposure to .Store domain names.

The video is embedded below, starting at the point he discusses the domain name change: