NameJet

The big news of the day is the death of Cuba’s Fidel Castro, who was 90 years old. Coincidentally, the Fidel.com domain name sold in an expired  domain auction at NameJet for $16,000 a little over 8 days ago.

It’s always a bit of a mystery to see a valuable domain name deleted. Estibot pegs Fidel.com’s value at $50,000, although the market was a bit less enthusiastic than Estibot’s valuation. There were 185 bids from 156 bidders in this auction. I was a bidder in the auction.

Archive.org shows quite a few entries for Fidel.com, but I see a mixture of Sedo landing pages and either generic domain registrar or web hosting landing pages. I am not sure if the domain name was ever developed before. Prior to its expiration, Fidel.com was owned by a registrant in France. I checked NameBio, and they do not have any archived sales for this domain name.

I wonder if Fidel.com is worth more now that Fidel Castro is dead.

It looks like JackNicholson.com is going to auction if the domain name is not renewed in a very short period  of time. JackNicholson.com was created in October of 1998, and as you can see on the landing page, the domain name expired a little over a month ago:

Prior to the expiration of JackNicholson.com, the registrant of the domain name was listed as John J. Nicholson. A Wikipedia page for the award winning actor lists his name as John Joseph “Jack” Nicholson. The last listed registrant email address appears to have been an email address affiliated with a

I am a regular bidder on NameJet, and I find myself bidding on auctions that have reserve prices. Oftentimes, these auctions do not meet their reserve prices, and the domain names don’t sell. I think NameJet should try to work with sellers and bidders to close deals on domain names that did not meet reserve prices.

In my opinion, if NameJet were to privately broker deals on unsold domain names, it would be a win for all three parties. Sellers might be able to sell more inventory, buyers would get to buy less expensively (and privately), and NameJet would earn a commission on any sales it helped to close.

Sellers  won’t have to deal with collecting a payment, and they also don’t need to worry about handling the transfer. Buyers can easily submit their payment in the same manner as it would have been submitted had it been an auction, and the domain name would be  transferred immediately upon payment. There is far less friction with this type of transaction than a private transaction between two parties that haven’t done business before.

The reason