It looks like NameJet made a typo on an email and Twitter marketing promotion this morning. The company announced that “INVESTOR·COM” is for sale in a tweet as well as in an email to customers signed up for its mailing list. Here’s the tweet today:
NameJet News – Premium Domain Names – 🚦 MYTRAFFIC·COM – INVESTOR·COM – COUNTRYSIDE·COM – And More! – https://t.co/DJb0ULzMYF pic.twitter.com/mDF8jbophv
— NameJet (@namejet) March 5, 2019
The 2019 NamesCon live auction was held on January 28, and the extended auction ran for a few weeks after the live auction concluded. This morning, I received the full 2019 NamesCon auction sale list, which I shared below. These sales include domain names that were sold in both the live and extended auctions. In total, 124 domain names were sold for just under $2.5 million.
The live domain auction held last Monday during NamesCon had several large sales. The total sales volume during the live auction was approximately $2.3 million. The NamesCon auction continues for two weeks (ending February 13) in the form of its extended auction hosted on NameJet.
The NamesCon live domain name auction will take place this afternoon at 4pm (Pacific) in the conference keynote hall. The live auction will be conducted by auctioneer Wayne Wheat, and online bidding will be done simultaneously. There are 132 domain name lots in the live auction.
Brent Oxley was the founder of HostGator, one of the world’s largest web hosting companies. Since selling HostGator, Brent has become an investor in high value domain names. From what I can tell, Brent primarily invests in exceptional one word .com domain names.
When NameJet revealed the list of domain names that will be up for auction in the NamesCon auction next month, I saw that Brent listed a large group of valuable domain names. I reached out to Brent to ask him what motivated him to list his domain names for sale via auction, and here’s what he told me:
“There’s a big difference between auctioning a domain with a reserve price and one without. All of the domains I listed have a minimum reserve price which means I can’t lose.
The auction will drum up a ton of exposure and could potentially bring in buyers that I haven’t been able to reach on my own.”
This is the first auction in which Brent has listed his domain names for sale. As he told me, in the best case scenario, he will sell inventory to net him millions of dollars, and in a worse case scenario, it’s an experiment that only costs him some time.
Here’s a list of Brent’s domain names that are up for sale in the auction:
NameJet will be hosting the NamesCon live and extended domain name auction at the end of January in conjunction with Right of the Dot (Monte Cahn). This afternoon, NameJet distributed a press release to announce some of the better domain names that will be included in this year’s auction. One domain name really stood out to me amongst the others.
DomainNames.com is listed for sale in the NamesCon auction with a reserve price range of between $300,000 – $400,000. From what I understand, DomainNames.com is a domain name that is owned by Network Solutions. If you visit DomainNames.com, you will be forwarded directly to Network Solutions’ website.
I find it interesting that Network Solutions has decided to sell this domain name. For one thing, the company is in the domain name business. Secondly, the company would effectively give a competitor the opportunity to buy the domain name and compete with it. Sure, one might see that DomainNames.com is being underutilized as a forwarder, but I don’t understand why it would be listed for sale publicly in auction where the buyer could be any company that bids highest above the reserve price.
Notably, Network Solutions’ parent company is Web.com, which also owns NameJet after acquiring Tucows’ ownership stake in the auction platform earlier this month.
Beyond DomainNames.com, some of the other exceptional domain names included in the auction are:
